A king twice named in Isaiah's prophecies as anointed, and predestined to achieve great conquests over kings and fortified places; who, when his power was established, set the Jews free from the Babylonian captivity (Isa. xliv. 28; xlv. 1-14).  Ezra relates how the prophecy was fulfilled.  Cyrus, whom he calls "king of Persia," in the very first year of his reign issued a proclamation permitting the Jews to return to their own land, and urging rather than simply allowing them to rebuild the Temple, for the use of which he returned the sacred vessels taken by Nebuchadnezzar (Ezra i. 1-11; v. 13, 14; vi. 3).  Many of the Jews gladly availed themselves of the permission, and returned to Jerusalem.  Enemies attempted, with some success, to render the edict of Cyrus abortive, but it was never formerly revoked (iv. 1-5).  Herodotus, Xenophon, and Ctesias were none of them contemporaries of the great king, or sufficiently near his age to be able to disentangle the real incidents of his life from the myths with which they had become closely intertwined.  According to Herodotus and Xenophon he was the son of Cambyses, the Prince of Persia, and Mandane, the daughter of Astyages, king of Media.  His infancy and early youth, of course, were romantic.  Arrived at manhood, he in 560 B.C. defeated and captured his father-in-law, reigning in his room.  In B.C. 546 he conquered Lydia, taking Sardis or Sardes, its capital, and making a prisoner of its king, Croesus, celebrated for his enormous riches.  In B.C. 538 he captured Babylon.  According to Herodotos (i. 190, 191), he did this by turning the waters of the Euphrates temporarily into a lake excavated for the purpose, and then entering from the nearly dry bed of the river by the gates which had been left open on the night of a festival while the inhabitants were engaged in revelry.  There is a curious duality about the classical accounts given of Cyrus.  For instance, he died in two different ways and at two different places remote from each other.  By one account he was killed in battle, apparently in Tartary, by Tomyris, king of the Massagetae; by the other he died peacefully in his bed, and was buried at Pasargadae, in Persia, where his sepulchre is still shown.  Hence the late Mr. Bosanquet was convinced that two Cyruses had been confounded together, one the father and one the son of Cambyses.  Now, however, a new source of information has arisen—cuneiform inscriptions, one of them from Cyrus himself, who calls himself at first "king of Elam," though after a time he conquered Persia.  The other tablets tell of the conquest of Ekbatana, the Median capital, by Cyrus, the soldiers of Istuvegu (Astyages), its king, coming over to the young Elamite monarch.  When Cyrus planned the capture of Babylon he entered Babylonia from the north, but found his way barred by an army led by Belshazzar, the king's son, who prevented him from even approaching the city.  Thus foiled of his purpose for the time, he intrigued with the disaffected elements of the population, and revolts occurred.  Then in June, 539, Cyrus defeated the Babylonian army, led by the king Nabonidos, the father of Belshazzar, at Rutuin.  On the 14th of the month, Gobryas, Cyrus's general, arriving at Babylon from the south-east, was admitted into the city without fighting.  On the 3rd of October Cyrus entered it in triumph.  Herodotus's narrative about the turning off the Euphrates is all a myth.  If there was any truth in the tale, it should have been placed in the reign of Darius Hystaspes, and not in that of Cyrus.  "As for the sons of Babylon," the conqueror says in his tablet, "all their ruins I repaired, and I delivered their prisoners."  These prisoners probably meant the Jews.  Most of the Persian kings were of the Zoroastrian faith, but the inscriptions unexpectedly reveal that Cyrus was, or at least from policy pretended to be, a devout worshipper of Bel, Nebo, Merodach, and the rest of the Babylonian gods.  He died in B.C. 529, and was succeeded by his son Cambyses. (The Sunday School Teacher's Bible Manual, Hunter, 1894)