Inventing Legitimacy: The Islamic Republic’s False UNESCO Claim and the Geopolitics of Cyrus the Great

Inventing Legitimacy: The Islamic Republic’s False UNESCO Claim and the Geopolitics of Cyrus the Great

Shapour Suren-Pahlav

08 November 2025

Recent reports by the Islamic Republic’s state media, echoed by certain Persian-language outlets such as BBC Persian, have misleadingly claimed that Iran has registered the Cyrus the Great Cylinder with UNESCO as an early charter of human rights and cultural diversity. While part of this claim is grounded in fact, the Cylinder has indeed been discussed within UNESCO’s framework, the assertion that it has been officially registered is demonstrably false. As of 8 November 2025, no such record appears in UNESCO’s public archives or database.

 

The dissemination and falsification of such information by a regime historically antagonistic towards the civilisation and culture of ancient Iran reveals a calculated attempt to weaponise that heritage for political survival and legitimacy. For more than four decades, the Islamic Republic has systematically marginalised the emblems of pre-Islamic Iran, its history, cultural achievements, and national identity, portraying them as incompatible with its revolutionary-Islamic ideology. Yet in moments of political vulnerability, particularly following the recent twelve-day conflict with Israel, it reclaims national symbols to project unity and distract from domestic discontent.

 

This instrumentalisation of Iranian nationalism, designed to evoke collective pride and cohesion, underscores the regime’s strategic dependence on the very cultural foundations it once sought to efface, while simultaneously exposing its ideological fragility. The recent fabrication concerning the registration of the Cyrus the Great Cylinder at UNESCO epitomises this deliberate deceit, a cynical exploitation of historical heritage for political validation and popular manipulation.

 

The irony is stark. For over forty-six years, the regime has systematically sought to erase Iran’s pre-Islamic heritage [1], particularly the legacy of Cyrus the Great, whom many Iranians revere as ‘the father of the nation’. While denouncing him as a tyrant and excising his image from public discourse, it has simultaneously attempted to suppress his memory through state-controlled media and sanctioned publications. Public commemorations, including the annual gathering on 29 October at Pasargadae, have been banned, and participants arrested or prosecuted [2], [3].

 

Yet today, the same authoritarian order that invokes Cyrus the Great and the rhetoric of human rights remains among the world’s most persistent violators of those very principles. The disparity between its discourse and its record forms a bitter paradox: a state responsible for political imprisonment, torture, sexual violence, execution, and censorship now seeks legitimacy through a charter founded upon liberty and human dignity.

 

The regime is also seeking to rival the legacy claims of the imperial government, which succeeded in enshrining Cyrus the Great on the international stage decades prior. A replica of the Cyrus Cylinder was installed at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, placed prominently in the corridor between the Security Council and the Economic and Social Council chambers. In 1971, the text of the Cylinder was translated into all six official UN languages, a diplomatic act that effectively elevated Cyrus the Great to the status of a humanitarian statesman. The Islamic Republic’s recent gestures, by contrast, appear belated and reactive, an effort to reclaim symbolic ground already secured by the imperial government, whose legitimacy among the Iranian nation it has long sought to erase.

 

Perhaps two further and more strategic rationales underlie this volte-face, rationales that reach beyond domestic optics and expose a contested symbolic battleground, both within the regime’s internal political discourse and the wider geopolitical arena, over the legacy of Cyrus the Great.

 

First, the regime’s abrupt invocation of Cyrus the Great, after decades of systematic erasure, appears driven by further layers of domestic expediency. The regime is seeking to rival the legacy claims of the imperial government, which succeeded in enshrining Cyrus the Great on the international stage decades prior. A replica of the Cyrus Cylinder was installed at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, placed prominently in the corridor between the Security Council and the Economic and Social Council chambers. In 1971, the text of the Cylinder was translated into all six official UN languages, a diplomatic act that effectively elevated Cyrus the Great to the status of a humanitarian statesman. The Islamic Republic’s recent gestures, by contrast, appear belated and reactive, an effort to reclaim symbolic ground already secured by the imperial government, whose legitimacy among the Iranian nation it has long sought to erase.

 

Second, a more calculated purpose emerges when viewed against the backdrop of the so-called Cyrus Accord [4], a foreign-imposed initiative conceived in Israeli and American policy circles. This initiative seeks to establish a false equivalence between Iran and Israel as two ancient civilisations, bound by a shared heritage supposedly embodied in Cyrus the Great’s liberation of the Israelites. It is a fabrication intended to legitimise Israel’s modern geopolitical project by anchoring it in Iranian antiquity. In this context, the Islamic Republic’s move to reclaim Cyrus the Great’s symbolism is not only an internal propaganda effort but also a counteroffensive. By appropriating Cyrus themselves, the regime aims to preclude Israel from monopolising his legacy as a legitimising bridge to antiquity. Thus, a profound irony reveals itself: two irreconcilable antagonists, the Islamic Republic and the Israeli state, are simultaneously weaponising the same historical figure, not in defence of heritage but in pursuit of political capital. Their contest is not over truth, but over narrative dominance.

 

UNESCO’s Procedural Framework and the Politics of Fabricated Registration

Within UNESCO’s procedural framework, ‘adoption’ and ‘registration’ signify distinct phases. Adoption refers to the formal ratification of a draft resolution, either by consensus or by vote, during a session of the General Conference or the Executive Board. This act grants the resolution official status as an outcome of that session. Registration, sometimes termed final inscription, is the subsequent administrative procedure through which the resolution is entered into UNESCO’s permanent archives and published in the Resolutions (C/Resolutions) or Decisions (C/Decisions) series. The Cyrus the Great Cylinder has, at this stage, been adopted under document reference C/52 and was subjected to a vote [5]. This status has been independently confirmed by the Embassy of Tajikistan in London [6]. The resolution calls upon the Director-General of UNESCO and the member states to undertake further deliberation. Contrary to the regime’s propaganda, and to claims disseminated by certain Persian-language media abroad, the Cyrus the Great Cylinder has not yet been registered.

 

This is not the first occurrence of state-sponsored disinformation concerning the registration of Iranian cultural heritage with UNESCO. In 2017, the regime falsely asserted that the traditional sport of Polo (Chogān) had been registered under Iran’s name. Comparable fabrications were previously circulated regarding the Tar (a Persian string instrument) and the windcatchers of Yazd.

 

Written in Akkadian cuneiform, the Cyrus the Great Cylinder dates to about 539 BCE. It was discovered in 1879 during excavations at Babylon (in present-day Iraq) and is now kept in the British Museum. Although the text follows the Mesopotamian tradition of royal inscriptions that proclaimed divine favour and benevolent rule, its emphasis on tolerance and the restoration of displaced peoples rendered it distinctive even within that tradition. Such an approach was unconventional for its time, as rulers typically sought to project power and severity rather than to promote tolerance. While some historians regard the Cylinder as the earliest form of the Bill of Human Rights, others, particularly within Eurocentric schools of interpretation [7], [8], reject this view, claiming that human rights are a modern Western notion. Yet, in contrast to the Cyrus the Great Cylinder’s universal ethos, the modern Western conception of human rights remains selectively European, shaped by political and cultural partiality that at times aligns with racial bigotry.

 

 

Footnotes and References

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