Old Persian names

Old Persian was the language of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, spoken and inscribed roughly between the sixth and fourth centuries BCE. It belonged to the Iranian branch of the Indo-European family, and it was written in its own cuneiform script, a wedge-shaped writing system pressed into stone and clay. Its most famous record is the Behistun Inscription, carved for King Darius around 522 BCE. Old Persian is the ancient ancestor of the later stages of the language. It grew into Middle Persian and then into the Modern Persian spoken today, so it sits as the oldest documented layer beneath a language that is still very much alive. For names drawn from that living language, the sibling Persian page collects modern Persian names.

Cyrus is the Greek and English form of the Old Persian name Kurush, borne by Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Achaemenid Empire around 550 BCE. The meaning of Kurush is genuinely uncertain, and scholars do not agree on it. Proposed readings include "sun" or "like the sun", "young", and a connection to a royal or honorific title, while some researchers argue for an Elamite rather than a Persian source. No single explanation has settled the matter, and careful references present the etymology as unknown. What is clear is the historical figure behind the name and the empire he built, rather than any fixed original sense.

The name reaches modern parents through two long streams. Cyrus the Great appears in the Hebrew Bible as Koresh, remembered for ending the Babylonian captivity and allowing the Jewish people to return and rebuild the Temple, and he appears again across Greek and later classical writing as a model ruler. Those biblical and classical accounts carried the name into European use, where it has seen steady, modest use among English-speaking families ever since. In Iran the related form Kourosh remains in regular use as a given name.