On 6 November 2025, at its forty third Basic Convention in Samarkand, UNESCO adopted a decision recognising the textual content inscribed on the Cyrus Cylinder – a sixth-century BCE artefact – as a constitution of human rights and welcoming the Director-Basic to include its rules into UNESCO’s academic and cultural programmes. The adoption of such a decision could also be seen as a progressive step in direction of transferring away from the Eurocentrism of the standard strategy to the historiography of worldwide regulation to be able to improve “common respect for justice, the rule of regulation and human rights and basic freedoms”. Nonetheless, this submit argues that counting on that strategy and its methodology within the Decision’s adoption suffers from three critical flaws in UNESCO’s strategy to heritage:
1. the anachronistic software of contemporary human rights ideas to historic artefacts;
2. the instrumentalisation of antiquity by exclusivist and totalising discourses;
3. the additional erosion of the safeguards that UNESCO itself has developed inside the area of cultural heritage.
The Cyrus Cylinder in Its Historic Context
The Cyrus Cylinder is a barrel-shaped clay object inscribed in Akkadian cuneiform. It was produced in October 539 BCE, instantly after Cyrus the Nice, founding father of the Achaemenid Empire, conquered Babylon and overthrew its final king, Nabonidus. In keeping with the textual content, Nabonidus had perverted the cults of Babylon’s gods – together with the city-god Marduk – and imposed pressured labour on town’s free inhabitants. Within the part written within the first individual, Cyrus presents himself because the “king of the world” chosen by Marduk, claiming to have introduced peace to Babylon, abolished pressured labour of its inhabitants, restored temples and cults, and repatriated beforehand deported gods and peoples.
In keeping with historians, the Cyrus Cylinder was issued in conformity with a long-established and commonplace observe amongst Mesopotamian kings (e.g right here,, right here); its contents intently resemble earlier proclamations and introduce no genuinely new or distinctive coverage (right here). Following this custom, the Cylinder is thought to be an Achaemenid Persian propagandistic and persuasive doc geared toward legitimising the brand new Persian ruler’s authority in Babylon (right here, right here and right here and “matches into the framework of the ideological battle between the brand new and the previous king”. For that reason, it supplies no dependable perception into Cyrus’ private character or convictions.
The Fashionable Reinterpretation of the Cyrus Cylinder as a Human Rights Constitution
The portrayal of Cyrus as a prophet of humanism and of his Cylinder as a human rights doc is a contemporary phenomenon rooted in Persian nationalist historiography from the Pahlavi period to the current day. From the late Nineteen Sixties onward, the Pahlavi regime actively promoted the Cylinder as “the primary and oldest constitution of human rights in world historical past” on a number of high-profile events, together with the United Nations Worldwide Convention on Human Rights in Tehran (1968), the 1971 celebrations of the two,five hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Persian Empire, and the ceremonial presentation of a duplicate of the Cylinder to UN Secretary-Basic U Thant in the identical yr, amongst many others. This narrative has additionally continued underneath the Islamic Republic, significantly gaining momentum lately. Total, this discourse has, over the course of a number of many years, generated an enormous and ever-expanding physique of literature geared toward selling and consolidating this particular illustration of the Cyrus Cylinder.
The affect of this discourse started to present itself in UN literature as early because the Seventies, when U Thant linked the Cylinder to Basic Meeting efforts on “the questions of Respect for Human Rights in Armed Battle”. Subsequently, the UN additionally described it as “an historic declaration of human rights”, “a declaration regarding the preservation of human rights in occupied cities”, and acknowledged that it “suggests respecting human dignity and acknowledges human rights. Lastly, on 6 November 2025, UNESCO – performing on a draft decision submitted by Iran and Tajikistan – adopted a Decision recognising the Cyrus Cylinder as “An Early Constitution of Human Rights and Cultural Range”.
The Anachronism and Eurocentric Logic of UNESCO’s Studying of the Cylinder
UNESCO’s strategy have to be examined inside the broader framework of the historiography of worldwide regulation and the politics of worldwide authorized historical past. Till just a few many years in the past, the dominant narrative on this area was based mostly on a state-centric and Eurocentric worldview that, counting on functionalist presentism, framed the historical past of worldwide regulation as a narrative of ethical and institutional progress. With the difficult of the orientations and methodological flaws of this narrative and the enlargement of the scope of analysis and methodological growth within the historiography of worldwide regulation in latest many years, this narrative, regardless of dropping its dominance, continues to persist (right here). A manifestation of such persistence could be noticed in UNESCO’s strategy. In adopting the decision, UNESCO, by anachronistically using historical past to strengthen universality and consequently the legitimacy and authority of the values, rules, and norms of worldwide regulation inside a state-centric and progressive strategy that disregards context and goal realities, whereas failing to flee the Eurocentrism of the primary narrative, has additionally contributed to its copy on the state degree.
The Cylinder accommodates neither the idea of human rights nor its philosophical foundations that discover expression within the notion of the “inherent dignity” of the human individual (right here and right here). Certainly, “there may be nothing within the textual content that means this idea [human rights]” (right here). Its provisions– temple restoration, repatriation of exiles, and abolishing pressured labour– concern solely particular communities and by no means communicate of humanity within the summary. Borrowing from the British Museum, the truth is the idea of human rights “would have been fairly alien to Cyrus’s contemporaries”. The broader historic report in assist of the assumption and dedication of Cyrus to those ideas can be very scattered and contradictory. The identical ruler praised for tolerance in Babylon is depicted elsewhere as using excessive violence in his campaigns, together with the conquest of Media (e.g. right here). Even setting apart critical scholarly doubts concerning the accuracy of the Cylinder’s claims, Cyrus’s Babylonian coverage was, at greatest, “a matter of technique and expediency, not a matter of precept”. In brief, whereas the textual content could also be learn as expressing a coverage of spiritual tolerance, it has nothing to do with the core of contemporary human rights – the inherent, inalienable, and common rights of all human beings.
Within the absence of any such connection, the retroactive software of fashionable ideas comparable to “human rights” to explain a proclamation composed two and a half millennia in the past within the context of imperial coverage and for the aim of legitimising that coverage, as historians have lengthy maintained, is a misunderstanding that falls into the entice of anachronism. Consequently, UNESCO’s endeavour to advertise mutual understanding and intercultural dialogue, and to strengthen the universality of human rights by tracing their historic roots throughout numerous cultures and civilizations, within the absence of any real historic connection, falls into the entice of anachronism. This strategy distorts historical past and generates confusion.
Though UNESCO skillfully averted explicitly referring to the cylinder as a “Constitution of Human Rights” within the textual content of the decision – by changing the draft’s phrasing “one of many earliest expressions of the idea of human rights” with the way more cautious “one of many earliest accounts embodying rules later related to human rights” – it however continued to attribute human rights weight to it. Specifically, the title of the adopted decision explicitly introduced the Cylinder as a human rights doc. This stands in direct contradiction to UNESCO’s personal research on heritage interpretation, which insist that “interpretation must be moral and true to the values of the location and its authenticity. … It is usually necessary to keep away from anachronistic introduction of present-day concepts and views into depictions of the previous (“presentism”) and to current the previous occasions of their context”.
Furthermore, UNESCO has tried to maneuver away from the Eurocentricity of the dominant narrative by pursuing the evolution story of worldwide human rights past the West. Nonetheless, by overlooking non-Western types of imperialism and modern reverse Orientalism, and advancing this course of inside a state-centric framework, it has led to the copy of this logic at different ranges. By lending credibility to explicit and exclusivist nationalist narratives of historical past, UNESCO has supplied the very floor for historic engineering by states as a device for denial, repression and domination.
Within the current case, the Achaemenid Empire, Cyrus, and the Cylinder as its tangible embodiment have been central components within the building of a specific nationalist narrative of the area’s historical past that ties fashionable Iranian identification to a steady, humane and sacralised historic previous. This means of classicization of the nation, geared toward legitimising that fashionable identification, has systematically erased and marginalised the area’s non-Persian nations comparable to Kurds – as descendants of the Medes (e.g. right here) – and has functioned as an ideology justifying centre-periphery relations inside the fashionable Iranian state (e.g. right here).
By adopting a decision grounded within the studying of this discourse, UNESCO has granted worldwide institutional legitimacy to a specific political-ideological narrative of a deeply contested previous. In doing so, it has facilitated a post-colonial state’s presentist venture of ideologically reconstructing the area’s historical past to sacralise an historic previous pursued by way of the very worldwide establishments whose claimed common legitimacy that state in any other case persistently challenges. Whereas UNESCO’s paperwork and research, Emphasizing the modern threats of homogenization, aggressive nationalism and the suppression of minority cultures, (right here) name for respect of cultural range and stress the need of recognising and deciphering heritage with respect for the sensitivities of different nations and communities and of understanding and sharing the a number of, doubtlessly conflicting values and narratives connected to any website (e.g. right here & right here).
UNESCO’s Operational Tips for the Implementation of the 1972 World Heritage Conference set up a structured, criteria-based course of designed to make sure scientific objectivity and to forestall politicisation within the recognition of world heritage. Though, given its shortcomings (e.g. right here), the method can’t be mentioned to have been solely profitable, such a process ought to – by overcoming these shortcomings – govern any attribution of up to date human rights significance to an historic artefact. This can be a requirement that, had it existed and been noticed, may have prevented the adoption of the November 2025 decision on this type.
Conclusion
UNESCO’s decision, which seeks to universalize worldwide human rights by anachronistically retrojecting fashionable ideas of human rights into the traditional previous of varied cultures and civilizations, exemplifies a deeply contested type of presentism within the historiography of worldwide regulation. Merely presenting an historic Japanese doc as affirmation or interpretation of human rights based mostly on liberal individualism not solely fails to result in a transition from the Eurocentrism of this discourse, however reproduces this logic of domination and the facility asymmetry, which in flip undermines the universality of worldwide human rights. Attaining this objective requires deeper efforts to deliver numerous views nearer collectively all over the world on this area.
In any case, UNESCO’s engagement with the human rights dimensions of cultural heritage and the pursuit of its universality, to be able to keep away from the aforementioned and different related historiographical challenges, requires better methodological consciousness and the avoidance of instrumentalizing the historical past of worldwide regulation and the appropriation of it by exclusivist and totalising discourses. One sensible step on this path could be the institution of unbiased skilled panels tasked with reviewing draft resolutions regarding historic heritage earlier than they’re put to a vote; such a mechanism may considerably mitigate the dangers outlined above.
The creator of this submit is an Iranian scholar publishing underneath a pseudonym. That is consistent with the weblog’s coverage on the difficulty, because the Editors have motive to imagine that the creator could be focused by Iranian authorities for exercising their educational freedom.
