MIC:

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump wished "all those around the world celebrating the wonderful ancient holiday of Nowruz" a happy holiday. The White House was a few days late delivering its greeting for Nowruz, which falls on the first day of spring and is also known as the Iranian New Year, though it is celebrated by people across the Middle East and Central Asia.

In his holiday message, Trump quoted the historical figure Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Achaemenid Empire, which stretched from the Balkans to South Asia at its height. Trump's statement said:

Cyrus the Great, a leader of the ancient Persian Empire, famously said that "freedom, dignity and wealth together constitute the greatest happiness of humanity. If you bequeath all three to your people, their love for you will never die."

But, according to experts and historians who study the Achaemenids, Cyrus didn’t actually say that.

"The historical Cyrus certainly never said such a motto," Pierre Briant, a senior fellow at New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World and author of From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire, said in an email. "The saying probably comes from the alleged (unhistorical) last words of Xenophon's Cyrus on his death bed" — a reference to the Ancient Greek author Xenophon's Cyropaedia, which was written at least a century after Cyrus lived and, according to the Columbia University site Encyclopædia Iranica, is a "partly fictional biography of Cyrus the Great."...

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