On 29 October 539 BCE, Cyrus the Great entered Babylon in triumph. The date, recorded in the Babylonian Chronicle, has acquired a modern afterlife: Some Iranians now mark it as Cyrus Day, celebrating an emperor remembered for permitting exiled peoples, including Jews, to return home. This year, the anniversary arrives amid confrontation between Iran, Israel, and the United States. The observance carries no official status, yet its popularity reflects contemporary Iranian anxieties. In the ancient Persian worldview, imperial conquest and pragmatic tolerance easily coexisted.
Cyrus did not imagine himself as custodian of a bounded “Persian civilization,” nor did Alexander march east as an ambassador of “the West.”
In Athens recently, Secretary of State Marco Rubio invoked ancient Greece as the wellspring of Western civilization, recalling the Persian sack of the Acropolis in 480 BCE. His rhetoric placed today’s confrontation with Tehran within a civilizational narrative. Iranian officials and their opponents draw from their own historical repertoire. To support their respective narratives, the belligerents routinely invoke six recurring episodes: the Greek-Persian wars; Cyrus and the Jewish restoration; Esther and Purim; Fereydun against Zahhak; Shapur I’s capture of Emperor Valerian; and the Battle of Karbala, repeatedly invoked by Iran’s late Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei.
These are not equivalent histories: some are documented events, others sacred or national myths. Yet all can turn geopolitical conflict into a drama of timeless identity.
Samuel Huntington’s 1993 paradigm made civilization a prominent organizing category in international relations. But “civilization” is a modern construct, not an ancient self-description. Cyrus did not imagine himself as custodian of a bounded “Persian civilization,” nor did Alexander march east as an ambassador of “the West.” Such binaries would have been alien to them.
The Greco-Persian wars provide a flawed template for an eternal civilizational struggle. They were disputes between specific states and coalitions, followed by centuries of exchange. Cyrus’s entry into Babylon is celebrated in biblical tradition and recorded on the Cyrus Cylinder for permitting the return of exiles. Conversely, the Book of Esther depicts court intrigue: Haman’s plot against the Jews, thwarted by Esther and Mordechai, celebrated during Purim. Neither narrative licenses sweeping moral verdicts on modern Iranians or Jews.
A similar caution applies to myth and late antiquity. In Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, the tyrant Zahhak is overthrown by Fereydun—a story now deployed by opponents of the Islamic Republic as an allegory of liberation. Nor should Shapur I’s victory over Valerian in 260 CE—immortalized at Naqsh-e Rostam—be reduced to an unchanging Persian-Roman antagonism. Shapur’s reliefs celebrated imperial supremacy while revealing rival empires observing and borrowing from one another. Karbala remains central to Shiite religious memory and Khamenei’s paradigm of resistance. Its moral resonance, however, does not make every state policy an extension of Imam Hussein’s cause.
A more illuminating history begins beyond caricatures. Alexander married Roxana, daughter of a Bactrian nobleman, binding conquered elites to his empire, while his lover Bagoas, a handsome Persian noble, personified court integration. The Greco-Bactrian kingdom was later founded in Balkh in today’s northern Afghanistan when Diodotus broke from the Seleucid realm around 250 BCE. Its rulers and subjects inhabited a world shaped equally by Hellenic and Iranian traditions—a hybrid order born of conquest and sustained through adaptation. Alexander adopted Achaemenid court rituals and encouraged intermarriage between his officers and local aristocrats. His successors governed through continuous negotiation.
This cross-cultural synthesis persisted. Persian administrators laid the institutional foundations of the Abbasid Caliphate. Later Persianate-Turkic dynasties patronized literature and architecture from Central Asia to India. Avicenna integrated Greek philosophy with Islamic theology, while Goethe found in Hafez a literary peer, composing his West-östlicher Divan. Influence moved fluidly across boundaries monarchs drew.
History offers no facile narrative of civilizational harmony, but rather a demanding lesson in complexity and statecraft beyond rigid binaries. Leaders who invoke the past must engage its full trajectory rather than selecting convenient fragments.
History offers no facile narrative of civilizational harmony, but rather a demanding lesson in complexity and statecraft beyond rigid binaries.
That obligation falls heavily on Tehran. A government that has institutionalized gender discrimination, persecuted minority communities, aligned with the Taliban, neglected pre-Islamic heritage, and defined its ideology around anti-Western revolution cannot credibly claim custodianship of Persian civilization. If compassion towards refugees and protecting women’s rights are celebrated as pillars of Western civilization, the Trump administration’s approach to refugees, its disastrous peace deal with the Taliban, and continued funding of the Taliban regime similarly question its credibility to own and represent Western civilization.
For the Israeli political class, where constant persecution and displacement have been integral to their national tragedy, treatment of Gaza’s civilian population is morally problematic.
The critical issue on Cyrus Day is not which political actor owns antiquity. It is whether self-claimed “civilizational states” find the confidence to practice what they preach as their civilization’s founding ethos.
