Robert Byron, in The Road to Oxiana, considered by many to be the finest travel book ever written, described Cyrus’s tomb as “a sarcophagus of white marble on a high, stepped plinth, standing by itself among the ploughed fields. It looks its age: every stone has been separately kissed, and every joint stroked hollow, as though by the action of the sea. No ornament or cry for notice disturbs its lonely serenity.”
