Cyrus the Great meets his match in... The Legend of Tomiris (2019)
The Persian king -- a hero to modern Iranians and ancient Jewish prophets -- has only rarely been depicted in film, and now he's the bad guy in an epic from Kazakhstan.
Cyrus the Great is something of a hero in certain quarters: modern Iranians celebrate him as the founder of the Persian Empire and an early proponent of human rights, while the Hebrew Bible goes so far as to call him God’s “messiah”—or “anointed one”, the only non-Israelite so designated in the Bible—because he conquered Babylon and allowed the Jews to return home after decades in captivity (Isaiah 45:1).
Despite his prominent place in history, though, there aren’t all that many movies about him. In fact, until recently, I would have said that I knew of only two movies or TV shows that depicted him—both of which link him to the prophet Daniel:
In the film Slaves of Babylon (1953), Daniel helps Cyrus come to power, in the hope that Cyrus will set the Jews free once he’s on the throne.
In the miniseries The Bible (2013), Cyrus comes to power on his own, and he sets the Jews free after Daniel survives being thrown in the lion’s den.
As of a few days ago, I now know of a third film, which I discovered while scrolling through some movies on Kanopy—and imagine my surprise when I realized that this film comes from a non-biblical perspective and, in this one, Cyrus is the bad guy.
The movie in question is Tomiris, or The Legend of Tomiris, an ancient epic produced in Kazakhstan just three and a half years ago. The film is primarily about Tomyris, a queen who reigned over a nomadic tribe in Central Asia in the 6th century BC, and Cyrus himself does not appear in the film until its second half—but according to Herodotus, Tomyris and her soldiers killed Cyrus in battle and beheaded his corpse, so the second half of this film is all about the events leading up to that battle.
That alone was enough to intrigue me. But then I noticed that Cyrus is played in this film by Ghassan Massoud, a Syrian actor I first noticed when he played the sympathetic sultan Saladin in Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven. A usually-positively-portrayed ruler played by an actor best-known for playing a usually-positively-portrayed ruler, except this time the ruler was portrayed negatively? This I had to see.
So, what did I make of the film?
Well, it’s a pretty basic movie of its sort, in some ways. It has a lot of fight scenes, and it follows a fairly simple story arc in which the daughter of a murdered tribal chief grows up, gets her revenge, secures her place on her father’s former throne, and then defends her people against a foreign invader. It doesn’t break any new ground, but if you like this kind of movie, it’s reasonably diverting. (And if you’re a sucker for wide-open landscape shots, as I am, you might enjoy it for the visuals alone.)
The fact that the film has a female protagonist gives it a certain feminist edge, though the movie doesn’t make as much of that fact as you might expect. The film begins with Tomyris’s mother going into labour and a priest praying that she’ll have a son, so you might think there’d be some hurdles to overcome once the child turns out to be a girl—but no, once the girl is born, her father accepts her without any fuss, and he teaches her skills like archery and sword-fighting as she grows up.
When Tomyris is still a child, her father is assassinated, and she is taken away by her father’s guards before their enemies can harm her. Eventually she is adopted by a tribe that values warrior women, so she hones her training with the help of her sisters in arms, and there is never any question that Tomyris belongs on her father’s throne when she finally returns to her people. (Yeah, the priest is still there, and he says she’s weak because she’s a woman, but no one seems to care what he thinks.)
Along the way, Tomyris is a… slightly nicer soldier and ruler than everyone around her, though the fact that she’s a woman might not have anything to do with that. The tribes in this film take it as a given that they must raid each other every now and then—how else are they going to make a living?—and the warrior women who train Tomyris are just as involved in the looting and pillaging as anyone else. Tomyris does, however, propose ways to conduct the raids that will reduce the bloodshed, and when one young orphan puts up a good fight, she adopts him as her sidekick—and he accepts! Later, when some servants from her tribe are about to be executed and buried with their master—so that they can serve him in the afterlife—she intervenes and saves their lives. So there are limits to how much violence she’ll accept.
That being said, she still engages in a lot of violence herself. The warrior women come from a tribe that allows women to pick a husband after they’ve collected a certain number of enemy skulls—and Tomyris, like the other women, says she’s got enough skulls for multiple husbands now, but she’s clearly in no rush to claim her prize. Tomyris does eventually fall for a man—the son of a tribal chief—and when he finally proposes marriage to her, it’s in the middle of a battle, which made me laugh.
And then there’s Cyrus. Aside from the opening narration, we first hear of him when some Bactrian refugees come to the steppes, fleeing his armies. Eventually Cyrus sends emissaries to Tomyris and her husband, hoping to make them his allies—or, as they might see it, his subjects. Then Cyrus goes along with a plot to murder Tomyris’s husband, thinking it will be easier to negotiate with a widow than a couple. But of course, the death of her husband (and their son, who had been named after her dead father) just becomes one more tragedy that Tomyris seeks to avenge.
I wasn’t familiar with this story before I learned about this movie, and a quick skim of the Wikipedia entries on Tomyris, Cyrus, and the film itself indicates that there is a lot to unpack here. For starters, no one really knows how historical this story is—there are other accounts of Cyrus’s death besides the one in Herodotus—and apparently there has been some controversy around the ethnicity of the actors and the languages they speak, both of which appear to be historically inaccurate. (Wikipedia says Tomyris’s people were a “Scythian people speaking an Iranian language,” whereas they are played in the film by “modern Kazakh … speaking a Turkic language”.)
I’m also curious as to why the film is narrated by a character who is identified as Abu Nasyr ibn Muhammad Al-Farabi at-Turk, living in Damascus in 941 CE. That is nearly 1,500 years after the events depicted here, and it is nowhere near where the events took place; what’s more, Al-Farabi says he’s just telling us the story from Herodotus, so what does his narration add to the story? Why not just have Herodotus narrate it? If I had to guess, I’d say Al-Farabi was included in this film because Kazakhstan is a mostly Muslim country, and someone felt it was necessary to give this story a Muslim stamp of approval even though it’s set over a thousand years before Islam—but who knows?
Anyway. This is basically the Kazakhstani version of a Braveheart-style popcorn movie, with all the dubious historicity and pumped-up nationalism that goes with the genre (the film was produced by the daughter of Kazakhstan’s first president), and it’s always good to see how genre tropes get used outside of the Hollywood system.
This film also satisfies a curiosity of mine: For all the praise that Cyrus gets in some quarters, I have always remembered that he was, after all, an empire-building conqueror, and I have always assumed that someone must have seen him as something other than a liberator—though I assumed their voices were silenced by his conquests. Apparently not. This film brings that alternate perspective to vivid life.
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This is the North American trailer for the film:
The Legend of Tomiris can be viewed for free on Tubi and Kanopy. Note: this version of the film runs 155 minutes, but Wikipedia says its original runtime was 195 minutes.