The Memory of Cyrus the Great.

The article focuses on the memory and historiographical treatment of Cyrus the Great and the Achaemenid Empire from antiquity through the Sasanian and post-Sasanian periods. It highlights that while Cyrus was revered by various groups—including Persians, Jews, and Christians—for his empire and policies of tolerance, the Sasanians largely omitted him from their official national history, instead emphasizing a mythical and Avestan-inspired past centered on figures like Darius (Dārā). The text explores how different traditions—Zoroastrian, Jewish, Armenian, and Greco-Roman—preserved varying memories of Cyrus and the Achaemenids, with the Sasanians constructing a new ideological framework that downplayed Achaemenid legacy in favor of legitimizing their own rule. Despite this, knowledge of Cyrus persisted in later medieval Persian and Judeo-Persian literature, suggesting a complex and evolving remembrance rather than complete forgetting.