Who is Cyrus the Great? Why he matters! Part 1 (3)

This is Cyrus the Great.

My students and I would never have known about this unique
leader if it hadn’t been for my ESL student Navid.

Navid is from Iran; she has been in our class since last year.
 She is passionately interested in education and wants to teach
us about her native land as much as she wants to learn about
the  United States.

It all started when she e-mailed me to remind about International Women’s Day.

One of the activities that we did in class the next day came from that reminder.
It was a discussion about why women have been oppressed since Eve.

The class agreed that real oppression of women was over except in radically
religious countries like Iran… so did Navid. 
But, she asked, did we know that the ancient Persian (Iranian) leader
Cyrus the Great was the first leader to advocate for human rights?
All rights of all humans.

Cyrus the Great? Who’s he? 
No one had ever heard of Cyrus.
 I had recently seen a silent movie in which there was a scene
where the Persians led by Cyrus invaded Babylon. 
But it wasn’t about the rights of humans, it was about conquest.

Once again, Navid made it her business to educate me and the rest of the class.

She went to the Internet for help and the next day she brought in pictures of
 a plaque with words written in English that were taken from a clay cunieform
cylinder which had been discovered in 1869.

The words spelled out Cyrus’ declaration of human rights from 538 B.C.
 Yes, you read that correctly… B.C… Before Christ… 2500 years ago. 
Here were Cyrus’ beliefs, for all of us “advanced” modern Westerners to consider.

In the next part of this three part blog you will read those four messages
from the long hidden past of Persian culture.
 A culture that has been censored for decades from the eyes and ears
of the Iranian people themselves.
Every day I marvel at the synchronicity of life. 
A liberated Iranian woman in the U.S. reminds us
how precious and fragile our rights are…