“I am Ciro , King of the world, great King, mighty King, King of Babylon, King of the Land of Sumer and Akkad , King of the four corners of the earth, son of Cambyses , great King, King of Anshan , grandson of Ciro , great King of Anshan , descendant of an infinite royal line ...
When I was willing, I entered Babylon , I founded my sovereign residence in the royal palace amidst jubilation and happiness ... My numerous troops marched peacefully in the midst of Babylon. I did not allow anyone to frighten the land of Sumer and Akkad .. I relieved them from a yoke not appropriate for them.
I restored their dilapidated abodes. I put an end to their misfortunes…. From .. to the cities of Ashur , His , Eshnuna , the cities of Zamabn , Meurnu , Der , up to the distant region of Gutium , the sacred cities beyond the Tigris, whose sanctuaries remained in ruins for a long time, the gods whose residence is among them I brought back to their places and lodged in eternal sanctuaries. I gathered all their inhabitants together and restored them to their homes … .. ”
In 1879, during the excavations of the temple of Marduk, in Mesopotamia, a cylinder of fired clay, measuring 22 cm, was discovered. Its 45-line cuneiform inscription, once deciphered, turned out to be a declaration that guaranteed the liberation of the conquered peoples, issued by Cyrus II, known as Cyrus the Great (590 BC - 529 BC), founder of the Achaemenid dynasty, after his conquest of Babylon.
Ciro implemented in his vast empire characterized by different languages, faiths and cultures, a tolerant and liberal policy for those times and allowed among other things the Jews deported to Babylon , after the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC , by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar , to return to Palestine and to rebuild their temple.
For this reason Cyrus was considered by the prophet Isaiah as a messiah, consecrated by the Lord for a mission to liberate their people and mentioned in the Old Testament.
The Cylinder of Cyrus (539 BC) it is now considered the first human rights charter in the history of humanity.
From Babylon , the idea of human rights quickly spread to India, Greece and finally to Rome. Only over a thousand years later, the Magna Carta, document signed in 1 215 by King John of England , sanctioned new individual rights.
The clauses of the Cilindro di Ciro , the original of which is kept at the British Museum in London , and a copy of which is exhibited at the United Nations Building in New York , although they have been the subject of some controversy over their translation and interpretation, they are taken up in the first four articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights .