Cyrus Cylinder, The by Finkel Irving L

Author:Finkel, Irving L. [Finkel, Irving]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857733498
Publisher: I.B. Tauris

22 Old gallery photograph of the Cyrus Cylinder with its gold-edged display label.

23 Another view of the Cyrus Cylinder on its original mount.

24 A nineteenth-century view of the Cyrus Cylinder.

Following the success of the exhibitions and the wave of interest in Iran, the new ‘Persian Room’ was opened at the British Museum later that same year. This was the first dedicated permanent display on ancient Iran in the upper galleries and replaced the earlier ground floor displays which had been simply based on sculptures and plaster casts of Persepolitan reliefs. This was a small gallery located next to the North-East Staircase which had been previously used to display antiquities from Coptic Egypt and which corresponds to the present display of Early Anatolia in Room 54 (British Museum 1932: 18, 32). This gallery, then numbered Room 20, was rearranged by Sidney Smith to display those ‘antiquities from Persia’ which had been temporarily shown in the Persian Art exhibition and/or previously exhibited in the Babylonian and Assyrian galleries, and included the Oxus Treasure and assorted Achaemenid and Sasanian silverwares which were specially transferred from the Franks Room display of the British and Medieval Department. The report on what was described as the Museum’s first ‘exhibition of antiquities from Persia and Armenia’ specifically described how the ‘gold objects of the Oxus Treasure have been remounted on a new fitting and exhibition arranged’ (Reports to the Trustees, 6 August 1932; 5 January 1933). Meanwhile, the Cyrus Cylinder was displayed in the centre of a wall-case crammed with inscribed alabaster vase fragments, bricks, tablets, weights and part of a reconstructed miniature plaster column (figures 25–26).1 It was therefore primarily used as an example of a royal inscription within the context of the Persian Empire. This display was dismantled in 1936 in preparation for World War II when all of the Museum’s galleries were either emptied or sandbagged (Caygill 1981: 53–5).

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