How to govern and to secure Iran’s national sovereignty and territorial integrity? With the Anglo-Soviet invasion in August 1941, the forced abdication of Reza Shah Pahlavi (r. 1925-1941), and heightened political, ethnic, religious, linguistic, and ideological rivalries in the following years, these old questions became the most potent and contentious political riddles. At that historical moment of danger and an emerging international order, Iranian lawyers and diplomat aligned the 1907 constitutional equality before and equal protection of law articles (VIII and IX) with the 1941 “Atlantic Charter,” the 1942 “Declaration by United Nations,” and with the 1945 UN Charter. With the ratification of the 1948 “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” Articles VIII and IX were increasingly constituted as fundamental constitutional principles for legal, social and political conduct in the Post-World War II Iran. To give national precedence to “equality rights” in the following decades, Iranian lawyers fused the equal rights and equal protection articles of the Constitution to the “Cyrus Cylinder,” a clay cylinder crafted after the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus the Great in 539 BC and rediscovered in 1879. With intensified scholarly and political attention, the Cyrus Cylinder was rebranded as the “Cyrus Declaration” (Manshur-i Kurush) and as “the first declaration of Human Rights.” To establish civilizational continuity between pre-Islamic and Islamic Iran, Iranian lawyers and academics linked “the Cyrucian ethos of equality” to the Perso-Islamic mystical humanism. Thus constitutional “equality rights” was grounded in a longue durée multi-ethnic and multi-confessional conduct of conduct that fused the pre-Islamic and Islamic cultures into a civilizational whole. It was this civilizational narrative that enabled Iran to host the first international UN conference on Human rights in 1968.