Cyrus the Great

Cyrus II of Persia (c. 600-530 BCE), founder of the Achaemenid empire, defeated Astyages of Media (550 BCE), Croesus of Lydia (546 BCE) and Nabonidus of Babylon (539 BCE), building the largest empire the world had yet seen. The Kuruš of Darius’ inscriptions is the Kuru of the Aitareya Brahmana and the Mahabharata; the Aitareya locates Kuru as a northern-Himalayan ancestral homeland, a memory of the Indo-Iranian common past from which both Persians and Vedic Aryans descend. Indian emissaries attended the court of Cyrus from the 540s BCE according to Herodotus; the Persian satrapy of Gandhara was established in his lifetime. His simple limestone tomb at Pasargadae is unchanged.