The Cyrus Cylinder
7x5" / Unframed Print
$32.49
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The Cyrus Cylinder
$32.49
Materials
Fine Art Prints
Premium archival matte fine art paper, 200–230 gsm. Smooth, bright white surface with an instant-dry coating that resists fingerprints and smudging. Printed with archival inks for accurate color and high-contrast reproduction. FSC-certified sustainable paper.
Framed Prints
Solid wood frame, roughly 0.875″ wide, available in light, black, or white. Protected by shatterproof optical-grade acrylic — lighter and safer than glass, and it ships without risk of breakage. Dry-mounted to foam core with a kraft paper dust cover and hanging wire installed, ready to hang out of the box.
Production
Every piece is made to order. Nothing sits in a warehouse — your print is produced after you order it, at the facility closest to your address. That means it reaches you faster, travels less distance, and arrives with a smaller carbon footprint than something shipped from a single central location.
The Cyrus Cylinder in a pen-and-ink style, left floating on bare white. The barrel of clay runs the full width of the sheet, forty-odd lines of Akkadian cuneiform wrapped around it in tight registers, with the long diagonal break and the lost fragment on the right rendered exactly as they are.
- The cylinder in profile, edge to edge, with no ground and no background
- Every wedge of cuneiform drawn individually across the surface
- The major crack and the missing section left in rather than repaired
- Stipple and cross-hatching for the clay, dense at the broken edges
- Pure black on white
It is smaller than people expect — about twenty-two centimetres, the size of a rugby ball. Cyrus had it buried in the foundations of a wall at Babylon around 539 BC, and it was dug up there in 1879; one further piece turned up in a Yale collection and was joined to it nearly a century later. The text is a Babylonian foundation inscription of an entirely standard kind, and in it Cyrus records sending deported peoples home and restoring their sanctuaries. Calling it the first charter of human rights is a twentieth-century idea, promoted from 1971, and the British Museum, which holds the cylinder, says plainly that it is not one. What it is instead is an early piece of statecraft for an empire of many peoples and many gods — which is the more interesting claim.
Perfect for
- Gallery walls of archaeological drawings
- Historians, lawyers and archaeologists
- A study or office in black and white
- Graduation and milestone gifts