559 BC

Cyrus the Great

Probable accession of Cyrus II as king of Anshan

The famous 559 BCE accession is essentially a subtraction problem: a 530 BCE death date minus Herodotus's 29-year reign.

559 BCE is a calculation, not a record

Modern chronologies conventionally place Cyrus II's succession to his father Cambyses I at around 559 BCE, making Cyrus king of Anshan. No contemporary document supplies that date.

It is reconstructed mainly from Herodotus's 29-year reign and the Babylonian evidence putting Cyrus's death in 530 BCE. Cambyses I's death in 559 is not independently attested, and no surviving source records his last day, a coronation, or even where power changed hands.

What the evidence does establish

Cyrus's later cylinder inscription names Cambyses as his father and calls both him and earlier ancestors kings of Anshan, supporting a father-to-son royal succession without dating it. That clay document was written roughly twenty years after the supposed accession, following Cyrus's conquest of Babylon.

The first securely dated narrative evidence is later still. The Nabonidus Chronicle calls Cyrus "king of Anshan" in Nabonidus's sixth year, 550/549 BCE.

A dynasty not yet called Achaemenid

Cyrus's own genealogy runs four generations — Teispes, Cyrus I, Cambyses I, Cyrus II — and never mentions Achaemenes, the ancestor who later gave the empire its standard dynastic name. Modern scholarship therefore often distinguishes this Teispid house from the Achaemenid line promoted by Darius I.

The story that Cyrus was the son of Mandane, daughter of Astyages, and a Median vassal, comes from Greek literary traditions. Contemporary Babylonian sources neither state the kinship nor call him a vassal, and other ancient genealogical stories contradict it.

Whatever happened in 559, it was a regional succession. Cyrus's empire followed his defeat of Astyages around 550 BCE and the conquests after that.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 8 sources 2 audit passes Date disputed

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →

Date disputed. Sources disagree; the research places it at ~-0559.

What the sources leave uncertain

The year 559 BCE is a reconstructed accession date, not a date supplied by a contemporary record. It is calculated chiefly from Herodotus's 29-year reign and the Babylonian evidence placing Cyrus's death in 530 BCE.
Cambyses I's death in 559 BCE is not independently attested. The evidence establishes the genealogy and later kingship of Cyrus more securely than it establishes a death-and-accession event in that exact year.
Cyrus's own genealogy names Teispes but not Achaemenes. Modern scholarship therefore often distinguishes Cyrus's earlier Teispid house from the Achaemenid line promoted by Darius I.
The claim that Cyrus was the son of Mandane, daughter of Astyages, comes from Greek literary traditions and is contradicted by other ancient genealogical stories.