The Tomb of Cyrus through History

The tomb of Cyrus the Great at Pasargadae is a small stone house on six stepped tiers, about 11 metres high, built around 530 BCE for the founder of the Persian Empire. It has survived 2,500 years largely because its identity was forgotten: robbed in Alexander’s time and restored on his orders, it was later venerated as the shrine of the mother of Solomon, مشهد مادر سلیمان (Mashhad-e Mâdar-e Soleymân), and only identified again as Cyrus’s tomb in the nineteenth century.

An unusual building

The tomb is unlike anything else in Iran. Its six steps are made of huge blocks of pale limestone. The three lower tiers are just over a metre high each, the three upper ones about half that, so the building seems to rise in two stages. On top sits a rectangular chamber with a pitched stone roof, entered through a low, narrow doorway on the north-west side. Inside the gable is a hollow space, perhaps to lighten the weight of the roof.

The stones are fitted without mortar. Joints were finished with smooth contact bands, a technique called anathyrosis, and the blocks were tied together with dovetail-shaped metal clamps. Both techniques came from Ionia and Lydia, which Cyrus had conquered around 547 BCE (see Cyrus conquers Lydia). Antigoni Zournatzi, writing in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, compares the chamber closely with the tomb of the Lydian king Alyattes at Sardis. The stepped base may recall Mesopotamian temple platforms, and the gabled house shape has been compared with buildings of the Zagros and Anatolia. The result is a combination of borrowed ideas into a new monument for a new empire.

The tomb was not set in an empty plain. Arrian says it stood in a royal park, with groves of trees, water channels and grass. Pasargadae as a whole, with its palaces and gardens, is described on Pasargadae: Cyrus’s capital and tomb.

What Alexander’s officers saw

Alexander came to Pasargadae early in 330 BCE, during his stay at Persepolis. One of his officers, Aristobulus, entered the tomb and later described it in a memoir that is lost but was used by Arrian (Anabasis 6.29) and Strabo (15.3.7). Inside, he said, were a golden coffin, a couch with feet of gold, rich textiles and tunics, swords, earrings and necklaces. Beside the tomb lived a family of Magi who guarded it, passing the duty from father to son. They received a sheep a day, an allowance of flour and wine, and a horse every month to sacrifice to Cyrus.

The same writers report an inscription. In Strabo’s version it ran roughly: “O man, I am Cyrus, who founded the empire of the Persians and was king of Asia. Do not begrudge me my monument.” No such epitaph has been found on the stones, and Zournatzi suggests Aristobulus, writing from memory, may have confused it with the short “I am Cyrus” inscriptions on the palaces. Another of Alexander’s men, Onesicritus, described the tomb as a tower of ten storeys, a sign of how unreliable these memories could be.

Robbed and restored

When Alexander returned from India in 324 BCE he found the tomb broken into. The robbers had taken almost everything, tried to cut open the coffin, and thrown out the body. Arrian says Alexander was deeply upset and ordered Aristobulus to restore the tomb: to put back what remained of the body, replace the lid, repair the damage, and wall up the doorway with stone and mud, sealing it with the royal seal. The Magi were tortured to find the culprits but confessed nothing. Plutarch says a Macedonian from Pella named Polymachus was executed for the crime. Curtius claims the Persian satrap Orxines was put to death on a false charge of the robbery, because he had offended Alexander’s favourite Bagoas.

The episode shows Alexander presenting himself as the respectful heir of Cyrus, whose reputation was high among Greeks thanks to Xenophon’s Cyropaedia. It also shows that within six years of the fall of the dynasty the guards of the founder’s tomb could no longer protect it.

The mother of Solomon

After the Arab conquest the memory of Cyrus faded from the local landscape. Muslim and Persian tradition linked many ancient ruins to the prophet-king Solomon, who was believed to command the jinn, and the tomb became the burial place of his mother. The twelfth-century geographer Ibn al-Balkhi is reported to have written that anyone who entered it would be struck blind.

In the early thirteenth century the Salghurid atabeg of Fars, Sa’d ibn Zangi, turned the site into a mosque. A mihrab, the niche showing the direction of Mecca, was carved into the south-west wall of the chamber, with an Arabic inscription, and a courtyard mosque was built around the tomb using columns taken from the Achaemenid palaces. European visitors from the fifteenth century onwards describe a small shrine with Arabic writing, visited above all by women. The British diplomat James Morier, who travelled in Persia in 1808 and 1809, was told that only women were allowed inside, and he was among the first Europeans to suggest that this was the tomb of Cyrus described by Arrian.

Excavation and restoration

Ernst Herzfeld began the first excavations at Pasargadae in 1928. Iranian archaeologists under Ali Sami worked there between 1949 and 1955, and David Stronach of the British Institute of Persian Studies excavated in 1961 to 1963. Before the celebration of 2,500 years of Iranian monarchy in 1971 the remains of the medieval mosque around the tomb were cleared away and the columns returned near their original places; the mihrab inside the chamber was kept. The tomb was the setting for the opening ceremony of those celebrations, at which Mohammad Reza Shah addressed Cyrus directly (see the 2,500-year celebration).

The stones have weathered badly, and many metal clamps were torn out for their value in past centuries. A long conservation programme ran from about 2002 to 2009, and further work began in 2024.

A modern place of gathering

Since the late twentieth century the tomb has become a place of pilgrimage of a new kind. Iranians come at Nowruz, and on 29 October (7 Aban), an unofficial “Cyrus Day” linked to his entry into Babylon. In October 2016 a large crowd gathered there; in several later years the authorities closed the roads to the site around that date. For practical information, see Visiting Pasargadae and the site’s article on Pasargad.