What was found. In 1879 Hormuzd Rassam, digging at Babylon, found a barrel-shaped clay cylinder inscribed in Babylonian cuneiform, the proclamation Cyrus the Great issued after he took Babylon in 539 BC. It is now in the British Museum.
What it says. Speaking through Babylon's own god Marduk (Merodach), Cyrus presents himself as a liberator who entered the city "without fighting and battle," restored its worship, and, the key line, reversed the deportations of the kings before him: "the gods inhabiting them were returned to their shrines, and all the people were collected and sent back to their dwellings." It is, as the ISBE puts it, "a kind of proclamation justifying his seizure of the crown."
The biblical connection, stated carefully. The Bible says Cyrus, in his first year, proclaimed that the exiled Jews could return and rebuild the temple in Jerusalem (2 Chronicles 36:22–23; Ezra 1:1–4), and Isaiah had named him as the Lord's "shepherd" and "anointed" (Isaiah 44:28; 45:1). The cylinder does not mention the Jews, Judah, or Jerusalem by name, so it is not a copy of the decree in Ezra. What it does do is show that the policy the Bible describes, sending captive peoples home and restoring their temples, was real, official, and exactly characteristic of Cyrus. The biblical decree fits the documented practice of the king; the cylinder corroborates the policy, not the specific text.
Sources (read live 2026-06-29 + ISBE 1915, public domain). Cylinder text and the "proclamation" characterization quoted from the ISBE entry "Cyrus" (T. G. Pinches); discovery (H. Rassam, Babylon, 1879) per the same entry. Object: the British Museum, London (BM 90920).
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