It would be a mistake to attribute modern attitudes to Cyrus. The last Shah of Iran claimed that the Cyrus Cylinder was the first charter of human rights, which it certainly was not. More reasonable would be a comparison with Magna Carta: both documents imply that the king, no less than his subjects, is subject to the law. More recently the Islamic Republic engaged in an unseemly dispute with the British Museum about the ownership of the Cylinder, even though the museum loaned it to an exhibition in Tehran. Meanwhile the Iranian regime only stopped the Tomb of Cyrus at Pasagardae being flooded by one of its hydroelectric projects after international pressure. Though robbed of all its treasures and adornments, the tomb is astonishingly intact, but the mullahs have little interest in preserving Iran's pre-Islamic heritage. 

Still less does the present Iranian regime resemble Cyrus's eirenic and ecumenical empire, which was extended to Egypt under his successor Cambyses and consolidated by Darius I. The two centuries of Persian domination of the Near East after Cyrus's death were a golden age for the Jews, far better than the subsequent Graeco-Roman era. Even the Greeks, whose greatest city, Athens, was burnt by Xerxes during the decades-long Persian Wars, wrote paeans of praise to Cyrus, such as Xenophon's Cyropaedia. 

Compare the legacy of Cyrus with that of today's Islamic Republic: its best-known exports are fatwa and jihad, terrorism and anti-Semitism. The example of Cyrus the Great shows just how alien this regime is to the long history of Persia and its people.