UNESCO’s 2025 Cyrus Cylinder Resolution: Perpetuating the Shortcomings of the Traditional Paradigm of International Legal Historiography

On 6 November 2025, at its 43rd General Conference in Samarkand, UNESCO adopted a resolution recognising the text inscribed on the Cyrus Cylinder – a sixth-century BCE artefact – as a charter of human rights and inviting the Director-General to incorporate its principles into UNESCO’s educational and cultural programmes. The adoption of such a resolution may be seen as a progressive step towards moving away from the Eurocentrism of the traditional approach to the historiography of international law in order to enhance “universal respect for justice, the rule of law and human rights and fundamental freedoms”. However, this post argues that relying on that approach and its methodology in the Resolution’s adoption suffers from three serious flaws in UNESCO’s approach to heritage:

1. the anachronistic application of modern human rights concepts to ancient artefacts; 

2. the instrumentalisation of antiquity by exclusivist and totalising discourses; 

3. the further erosion of the safeguards that UNESCO itself has developed within the field of cultural heritage.

The Cyrus Cylinder in Its Historical Context 

The Cyrus Cylinder is a barrel-shaped clay object inscribed in Akkadian cuneiform. It was produced in October 539 BCE, immediately after Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenid Empire, conquered Babylon and overthrew its last king, Nabonidus. According to the text, Nabonidus had perverted the cults of Babylon’s gods – including the city-god Marduk – and imposed forced labour on the city’s free population. In the section written in the first person, Cyrus presents himself as the “king of the world” chosen by Marduk, claiming to have brought peace to Babylon, abolished forced labour of its population, restored temples and cults, and repatriated previously deported gods and peoples.

According to historians, the Cyrus Cylinder was issued in conformity with a long-established and commonplace practice among Mesopotamian kings (e.g here,, here); its contents closely resemble earlier proclamations and introduce no genuinely new or distinctive policy (here). Following this tradition, the Cylinder is regarded as an Achaemenid Persian propagandistic and persuasive document aimed at legitimising the new Persian ruler’s authority in Babylon  (here, here and here  and “fits into the framework of the ideological conflict between the new and the old king”. For this reason, it provides no reliable insight into Cyrus’ personal character or convictions.

The Modern Reinterpretation of the Cyrus Cylinder as a Human Rights Charter

The portrayal of Cyrus as a prophet of humanism and of his Cylinder as a human rights document is a modern phenomenon rooted in Persian nationalist historiography from the Pahlavi era to the present day. From the late 1960s onward, the Pahlavi regime actively promoted the Cylinder as “the first and oldest charter of human rights in world history” on multiple high-profile occasions, including the United Nations International Conference on Human Rights in Tehran (1968), the 1971 celebrations of the 2,500th anniversary of the founding of the Persian Empire, and the ceremonial presentation of a replica of the Cylinder to UN Secretary-General U Thant in the same year, among many others. This narrative has also persisted under the Islamic Republic, particularly gaining momentum in recent years. Overall, this discourse has, over the course of several decades, generated a vast and ever-expanding body of literature aimed at promoting and consolidating this specific representation of the Cyrus Cylinder.

The influence of this discourse began to manifest itself in UN literature as early as the 1970s, when U Thant linked the Cylinder to General Assembly efforts on “the questions of Respect for Human Rights in Armed Conflict”. Subsequently, the UN also described it as “an ancient declaration of human rights”, “a declaration concerning the preservation of human rights in occupied cities”, and acknowledged that it “suggests respecting human dignity and recognizes human rights. Finally, on 6 November 2025, UNESCO – acting on a draft resolution submitted by Iran and Tajikistan – adopted a Resolution recognising the Cyrus Cylinder as “An Early Charter of Human Rights and Cultural Diversity”. 

The Anachronism and Eurocentric Logic of UNESCO’s Reading of the Cylinder

UNESCO’s approach must be examined within the broader framework of the historiography of international law and the politics of international legal history. Until a few decades ago, the dominant narrative in this field was based on a state-centric and Eurocentric worldview that, relying on functionalist presentism, framed the history of international law as a story of moral and institutional progress. With the challenging of the orientations and methodological flaws of this narrative and the expansion of the scope of research and methodological development in the historiography of international law in recent decades, this narrative, despite losing its dominance, continues to persist (here). A manifestation of such persistence can be observed in UNESCO’s approach. In adopting the resolution, UNESCO, by anachronistically utilizing history to strengthen universality and consequently the legitimacy and authority of the values, principles, and norms of international law within a state-centric and progressive approach that disregards context and objective realities, while failing to escape the Eurocentrism of the main narrative, has also contributed to its reproduction at the state level.

The Cylinder contains neither the concept of human rights nor its philosophical foundations that find expression in the notion of the “inherent dignity” of the human person (here and here). Indeed, “there is nothing in the text that suggests this concept [human rights]” (here). Its provisions– temple restoration, repatriation of exiles, and abolishing forced labour– concern only specific communities and never speak of humanity in the abstract. Borrowing from the British Museum, in fact  the concept of human rights “would have been quite alien to Cyrus’s contemporaries”. The broader historical record in support of the belief and commitment of Cyrus to these concepts is also very scattered and contradictory. The same ruler praised for tolerance in Babylon is depicted elsewhere as employing extreme violence in his campaigns, including the conquest of Media (e.g. here). Even setting aside serious scholarly doubts about the accuracy of the Cylinder’s claims, Cyrus’s Babylonian policy was, at best, “a matter of strategy and expediency, not a matter of principle”. In short, while the text may be read as expressing a policy of religious tolerance, it has nothing to do with the core of modern human rights – the inherent, inalienable, and universal rights of all human beings. 

In the absence of any such connection, the retroactive application of  modern concepts such as “human rights” to describe a proclamation composed two and a half millennia ago in the context of imperial policy and for the purpose of legitimising that policy, as historians have long maintained, is a misunderstanding that falls into the trap of anachronism. Consequently, UNESCO’s endeavour to promote mutual understanding and intercultural dialogue, and to strengthen the universality of human rights by tracing their ancient roots across diverse cultures and civilizations, in the absence of any genuine historical connection, falls into the trap of anachronism. This approach distorts history and generates confusion.

Although UNESCO skillfully avoided explicitly referring to the cylinder as a “Charter of Human Rights” in the text of the resolution – by replacing the draft’s phrasing “one of the earliest expressions of the concept of human rights” with the far more cautious “one of the earliest accounts embodying principles later associated with human rights” – it nevertheless continued to attribute human rights weight to it. In particular, the title of the adopted resolution explicitly presented the Cylinder as a human rights document. This stands in direct contradiction to UNESCO’s own studies on heritage interpretation, which insist that “interpretation needs to be ethical and true to the values of the site and its authenticity. … It is also important to avoid anachronistic introduction of present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions of the past (“presentism”) and to present the past events in their context”.

Moreover, UNESCO has attempted to move away from the Eurocentricity of the dominant narrative by pursuing the evolution story of international human rights beyond the West. However, by overlooking non-Western forms of imperialism and contemporary reverse Orientalism, and advancing this process within a state-centric framework, it has led to the reproduction of this logic at other levels. By lending credibility to particular and exclusivist nationalist narratives of history, UNESCO has provided the very ground for historical engineering by states as a tool for denial, repression and domination.

In the present case, the Achaemenid Empire, Cyrus, and the Cylinder as its tangible embodiment have been central elements in the construction of a particular nationalist narrative of the region’s history that ties modern Iranian identity to a continuous, humane and sacralised ancient past. This process of classicization of the nation, aimed at legitimising that modern identity, has systematically erased and marginalised the region’s non-Persian nations such as Kurds – as descendants of the Medes (e.g. here) – and has functioned as an ideology justifying centre-periphery relations within the modern Iranian state (e.g. here). 

By adopting a resolution grounded in the reading of this discourse, UNESCO has granted international institutional legitimacy to a particular political-ideological narrative of a deeply contested past. In doing so, it has facilitated a post-colonial state’s presentist project of ideologically reconstructing the region’s history to sacralise an ancient past pursued through the very international institutions whose claimed universal legitimacy that state otherwise persistently challenges. While UNESCO’s documents and studies, Emphasizing the contemporary threats of homogenization, aggressive nationalism and the suppression of minority cultures, (here) call for respect of cultural diversity and stress the necessity of recognising and interpreting heritage with respect for the sensitivities of other countries and communities and of understanding and sharing the multiple, potentially conflicting values and narratives attached to any site (e.g. here & here).

UNESCO’s Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the 1972 World Heritage Convention establish a structured, criteria-based process designed to ensure scientific objectivity and to prevent politicisation in the recognition of world heritage. Although, given its shortcomings (e.g. here), the process cannot be said to have been entirely successful, such a procedure should – by overcoming these shortcomings – govern any attribution of contemporary human rights significance to an ancient artefact. This is a requirement that, had it existed and been observed, could have prevented the adoption of the November 2025 resolution in this form.

Conclusion

UNESCO’s resolution, which seeks to universalize international human rights by anachronistically retrojecting modern concepts of human rights into the ancient past of various cultures and civilizations, exemplifies a deeply contested form of presentism in the historiography of international law. Simply presenting an ancient Eastern document as confirmation or interpretation of human rights based on liberal individualism not only fails to lead to a transition from the Eurocentrism of this discourse, but reproduces this logic of domination and the power asymmetry, which in turn undermines the universality of international human rights. Achieving this goal requires deeper efforts to bring diverse perspectives closer together around the world in this field.

In any case, UNESCO’s engagement with the human rights dimensions of cultural heritage and the pursuit of its universality, in order to avoid the aforementioned and other similar historiographical challenges, requires greater methodological awareness and the avoidance of instrumentalizing the history of international law and the appropriation of it by exclusivist and totalising discourses. One practical step in this direction would be the establishment of independent expert panels tasked with reviewing draft resolutions concerning ancient heritage before they are put to a vote; such a mechanism could significantly mitigate the risks outlined above.

The author of this post is an Iranian scholar publishing under a pseudonym. This is in line with the blog’s policy on the issue, as the Editors have reason to believe that the author would be targeted by Iranian authorities for exercising their academic freedom.