Hi Jason
I’d never really thought this through. As far as I know Cyrus and the Empire of Medes and Persians had the enlightened policy – in those days – of returning people who had been exiled by previous and less enlightened empires to their homelands and allowing a degree of autonomy to their colonies. I think that ‘King of kings, Lord of Lords’ was a title of the Persian King/Emperor. I seem to remember that Alexander the Great also borrowed some of the symbolism of Persian universalistic kingship and presided over sort of mixed race marriages as a Priest King in order to demonstrate the unity of his disparate peoples in his sacred kingship. But of course the idea of a universal king here on earth is but a shadowing of the real thing – so in the Hebrew Bible there is already a critique of Cyrus the anointed as well as gratitude for his enlightened policy of ‘return’. And it seems to me that this critique of earthly universal kingship must also have been felt somewhere deep down in Zoroastrianism –the emergence of the eschatological universal saviour figure just when the Empire was most powerful suggests this. Whenever I’ve looked at articles concerning cross fertilisation between
Zoroastrianism in this period with Hebraic Judaism I’m always left a bit befuddled – i think the evidence is fragmentary and scholarship is often partisan. But perhaps the Zoroastrians picked up a messianic discontent with earthly kingship from the Jews – perhaps the Jews really were a prophetic example to them despite their small numbers (the Biblical evidence suggest that Jews held important posts in the court of the earthly king of kings).
I don’t know whether you read it but I did once find out about Manichean eschatology for a thread here. I’ll copy my precis because you may find it interesting 
In Manichaeism the physical world is created by the Evil one as a trap for the light of spirit. At the end of time Jesus will come to separate the majority of humanity who are sunk in carnality from the spiritual elect. He will first separate the righteous elect from sinners, probably the fallen elect; then he will separate the followers of the Manichean church from the children of the world. The righteous must, like the sheep in the Gospel, stand on his right side; the condemned, like the goats, will be banished to his left. The redeemed elect will enter into the joy of the gods (i.e., into the New Paradise), and the condemned will be thrust into hell. All other men will live on this earth under the rule of Christ, in a golden age. Gods, angels, and redeemed men will be together there; evil will have vanished from the world, and men will, if they wish, leave their bodies and travel to heaven. A large quantity of holy light will be freed from this world .
After that the world will end;. Christ will abandon the world, flesh will waste away, and the earth will stand empty.
Then the spheres will plunge down to the earth, and the “great fire” will destroy the ruins of the world, finally deprived of its function. In the world conflagration the last redeemable parts of the light will be freed. As a Final Statue light will ascend to the New Paradise. The fire will, however, punish demons and sinners, and the gods and the righteous will witness their torment without being able to help them.
The special significance of this doctrine, however, rests on the conviction that the victory of light is ultimately an imperfect one, for a certain part of it, trapped in souls, imprisoned in the world, cannot be released because it has been irredeemably corrupted by wickedness. It will be enclosed in the Bôlos prison with the powers of darkness and so condemned to eternal damnation. The fate of these souls is also called the “second death,” an image borrowed from the Revelation of John). In itself the idea of the unredeemability of the damned is nothing unusual. In the Manichean view, however, it takes on unique and poignant/tragic weight because the light in the cosmos is the suffering part of the substance of God Himself. This Manichean rejection of universal redemption at the end of time had the scandalous implication that God Himself is and will remain imperfect; Augustine threw this implication in the teeth of the Manicheans (Contra Secundinum 20; cf. Böhlig, p. 27; Adam, p. 92: par. 7 of the great Latin abjuration formula).
Blessings
Dick
Oh well, when I get to the book presumably all the details will be there. 
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), so while I may come back tomorrow to announce my {telos} of the book 
don’t expect to hear anything further from me until Sunday at the very earliest.