GRUDGE ME NOT THIS MONUMENT

Cyrus the Great is the tenth life in the Ancient Civilisations series. The conqueror the ancient world remembered for what he chose to leave standing.

He was born the son of a minor tributary king in the Zagros Mountains, grandson of the Median emperor who, according to legend, ordered his death in infancy because of a dream. He grew up to overthrow that empire, conquer Lydia's fabulously wealthy King Croesus, take Babylon in a single night by diverting the Euphrates beneath its walls, and build, from a mountain kingdom no one outside it had heard of, the largest empire the world had yet seen.

What made Cyrus the Great different from every conqueror before him was not the scale of what he took. It was what he did next. The Cyrus Cylinder, one of the most extraordinary documents to survive from the ancient world, records his proclamation after taking Babylon: temples restored, displaced peoples returned to their homes, forced labour ended. He presented every conquest as a liberation, sanctioned by the conquered people's own gods, and made the claim credible by actually keeping his promises. His decree allowing the exiled Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their Temple earned him a title given to no other non-Jewish figure in the Hebrew Bible: the Lord's anointed.

This novel follows Cyrus from the mountains of Anshan to the gates of Babylon, from his celebrated mercy toward the defeated Croesus to his final campaign against Tomyris, the warrior queen of the Massagetae, whose steppe horsemen would end his life in 530 BC. It asks the question his own empire never fully answered: was his famous mercy a genuine ethical conviction, or the most intelligent political strategy any ancient ruler ever devised? The most likely answer is that for Cyrus, they were exactly the same thing.

A vivid, politically intelligent reconstruction of the conqueror the ancient world remembered not for what he destroyed, but for what he chose to leave standing.

Grudge Me Not This Monument is the tenth novel in the Ancient Civilisations series.