The Book of Cyrus
In the winter of 1938, among the uncatalogued Persian manuscripts of the Biblioteca Nacional, I found a history of Cyrus the Great which differed from every history I knew. The book had no title. This is not entirely accurate. There had once been a title, but someone—perhaps the author, perhaps a later reader—had scraped it from the leather binding with such determination that only three letters remained. They might have belonged to the Persian word for king . They might equally have meant servant . This ambiguity, which at first seemed accidental, proved to contain the book. The manuscript consisted of two histories. One was written in black ink. The other, much later, in red. The black history was conventional. It described Cyrus, son of Cambyses, king of Anshan, conqueror of Media, Lydia, and Babylon. It named generals, battles, roads, cities. It recorded alliances and betrayals with the confidence peculiar to historians who know that the dead cannot contradict them. The ...