Cyrus Smith

Cyrus Smith (the engineer ) In Veme, J. The Mysterious Island, 1874. New translation by Jordan Stump, Random House New York, 2001, p. 327. 

Xenophon is mostly remembered today as the author of the Anabasis, where he records the story of the 10 000 Greek soldiers from Cyrus s army that he led back home after the unsuccessful war with Artaxerxes. However, he has other calls on onr attention, the most relevant to this book being that he wrote the Oeconomicus, probably the world s first textbook of economics. It contains ideas that formed the basis, more than 2000 years later, of the first serious attempt to analyze economic phenomena, which was made by Adam Smith in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Xenophon noted that there is a relation between the number of blacksmiths in a region and the prices that they can charge if there are too many, the price of their work falls, causing some to go out of business and helping to restore the value of the work of those that remain. This is effectively the first expression of what we now call the law of supply and demand. 

On these features of royal protocol in connection with Deutero-Isaiah see Rudolph Kittel, Cyrus und Deuterojesaja, zaw 18 (1898) 149-62 Morton Smith, ii Isaiah and the Persians, /40S 83 (1963) 415-21. In the light of these parallels, the holding by the right hand would apply more directly to Cyrus than to either Abraham, Jacob, or diaspora Judeans. 

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