THE SHEPHERD KING

Cyrus and the Making of the First World Empire

von Marcus Russell O'Brien

116 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

In October 539 BC, the gates of the largest, wealthiest, most fortified city on earth swung open - and the army waiting outside walked in without lighting a single fire.This should not have happened. For a thousand years, conquerors had razed rebellious cities, scattered their people across distant provinces, and dragged off captive gods as trophies. Cyrus of Persia had every capability to do the same to Babylon. He chose not to - and that choice built the largest empire the ancient world had ever seen.The Shepherd King traces the real Cyrus behind the legend: not the shepherd's grandson of Herodotus's famous fairy tale, but the vassal king's son who broke free of Median rule, out-thought Croesus of Lydia at the gates of golden Sardis, and inherited an empire spanning from the Aegean to the edges of India - governed not through terror, but through a genuinely radical idea: let conquered peoples keep their own gods, their own laws, and their own lives.This book follows Cyrus from a minor throne in Anshan to the ruins of Ecbatana, through the fall of Babylon and the famous Cylinder that recorded his own reign in his own words, into the return of the Jewish exiles to Jerusalem, and finally to a nomadic queen's battlefield vengeance and a tomb at Pasargadae that Alexander the Great himself would one day order restored.Honest about where legend ends and history begins, this is the story of the man who invented a new way to rule the world - and the empire that outlived him by two centuries.

• Reihe: Independently published
• ISBN: 9798176225280
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 21.09.2026
• Größe: 229 x 152 mm
• Verlag: Independently published