REFLEXIA VOJENSKÝCH VÝPRAV KÝRA II. V SÚDOBEJ LIETRATÚRE

• Authors: Michal Habaj

Title variants

EN

Reflections on the military expeditions of Cyrus II. in contemporary literature

• Languages of publication: SK

Abstracts

EN

The author examined the military history of Persia in the 6th – 5th century BC, in particular the issue of military expeditions of Cyrus II. against the surrounding countries (Media, Babylon and other). Based on available sources – Greek on the one hand (Herodotus), and sources of “domestic” production on the other hand – Assyrian chronicles, inscriptions, religious texts, confronted with scientific literature, he makes an effort to reconstruct the story of several events, which have not been clearly identified or reconstructed yet, even according to the sources. Rather than reconstructing the historical story as a whole, the study concentrates on the bottlenecks of the aforementioned sources, with the effort to arrive as close to the original tradition as possible. In case of war on Media, the author dealt with the question of historicity of the Persian thraldom, dating the conflict in cuneiform documents, and division of the conflict into several stages, as found in ancient sources. In the conflict with Lydia, the author focused on the damaged spot in the Chronicle of Nabodinus, which enables to interpret the conflict not only as a war on Lydia but on Urartu or Suhu as well. The study analyses also the issue of the death of Kroisos, based on the ancient sources along with various interpretations of the Chronicle of Nabodinus. Doing that, the author examines various testimonies, by Herodotus, Ctesias, Justin, Bakchylides or the representation on the so-called Myron’s vase. The author included also the chronology of events in Justin’s work, since the Roman historian did change it compared to the other sources. The author tries to answer the question what was the Roman’s motivation. As regards the conquest of Babylonia, the author analysed the Chronicle of Nabodinus, Cyrus’ Edict, Herodotus, and Berossus. By analysing them, he arrived at surprising correlations in the Persian attack scenario, which suggest that the events have remained well preserved in tradition.

Keywords

EN

MILITARY HISTORY; PERSIA; MILITARY EXPEDITION; CYRUS II.; CHRONICLE OF NABODINUS

• Publisher: Vojenský historický ústav Bratislava
• Journal: Vojenská história
• Year: 2016
• Volume: 20
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 6 - 17

Contributors

author

Michal Habaj

• Univerzita sv. Cyrila a Metoda v Trnave, J. Herdu 2, 917 01 Trnava, Slovak Republic