Persian king who founded the Achaemenid Empire — conquering Media, Lydia, and Babylon — and who was celebrated in the Hebrew Bible as the anointed of God for releasing the Jews from Babylonian captivity and permitting the rebuilding of the Temple.
Created the model of the tolerant imperial ruler — Cyrus's Cylinder (the first human rights declaration in some accounts) documents his policy of allowing conquered peoples to maintain their religions and return home — representing the Achaemenid imperial ideology of ruling through respect rather than terror.
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