The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston is one of five venues to host the U.S. tour of the famed Cyrus Cylinder, a 6th-century artifact discovered in 1879 among the ruins of Babylon in ancient Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq). Made of clay, now broken into several fragments, the Cyrus Cylinder was impressed with a declaration in Akkadian cuneiform script in the name of Persian king Cyrus the Great (reigned c. 559–530 BC).

By the time of his death, the Achaemenid Persian Empire was the largest the world had ever seen, stretching from Asia Minor in the west to northwestern India in the east.

In her illustrated talk, Sarah Kielt Costello looks at one of the world's earliest civilizations, the structure and decoding of the world's first known written language, and the significance of the Cyrus Cylinder.