THE REAL CYRUS CYLINDER ONLINE: Jona Lendering, the editor of the Livius website on ancient history, has e-mailed the following to Jack Sasson's Agade list:

Until now, there was no edition of the Cyrus Cylinder available on the internet; the only thing that was available, was a falsified translation -possibly created by followers of the late Shah- in which Cyrus is presented as saying that he will respect foreign customs and decreeing religious freedom.

This falsification is not recognized as such, and several well-meaning scholars who sought to explain that -whatever his virtues- Cyrus was not the author of the first charter of human rights, have received highly offensive messages.

Propaganda needs to be countered by quoting the full texts of original documents, so here it is:

http://www.livius.org/ct-cz/cyrus_I/cyrus_cylinder.html
http://www.livius.org/ct-cz/cyrus_I/cyrus_cylinder2.html

I like to thank dr. H. Schaudig for allowing me to use his edition, and prof.dr. R.J. van der Spek for translating and proofreading the text.

I invite webmasters, if they think this is important, to link to these pages, to make sure that they will be picked up by google and will be read by people who would otherwise find the falsified translation.

I was not aware of the fake version of the Cyrus Cylinder, but I have countered the over use of the real one as a human rights precedent here and here. No one has bothered to send me any highly offensive messages in response, which makes me feel a bit neglected.

UPDATE (13 January): Over at samarkeolog, Sam Hardy corrects one of my above-cited earlier posts on one point: the abolition of slavery was raised as a possibility by some in antiquity.