Neo-Babylonian Empire

Son of a nobody

Drafted from Beaulieu, Blackwell History of the Ancient World (2018)formation

In November 626 BC a man named Nabopolassar was made king in Babylon. Nothing certain is known about where he came from. He is usually taken for a Chaldean — one of the tribal groups that had been settled in the southern marshes for three centuries and had produced Assyria's most persistent Babylonian enemies — but he never says so, and in one of his own inscriptions he calls himself mār lā mammāna, the son of a nobody.

That phrase is worth pausing on, because it is not an insult recorded by an enemy. It is a formula the king chose for his own building inscription. He had no dynasty behind him and no claim of descent to make, and rather than invent one he made the absence part of the argument: Marduk had raised up a man who was nothing. Founders of dynasties almost always claim descent from somebody; this one advertised having none, and made the god's choice do all the work.

Fourteen years

Babylon in 626 was an Assyrian province that had been in revolt, on and off, for a hundred and fifty years. Sennacherib had destroyed the city outright in 689, and what followed over the next fourteen years is what that act cost Assyria, seen from the Babylonian side.

Nabopolassar spent them fighting for Babylonia and nothing else. He took Uruk and Nippur slowly, was pushed back repeatedly, and did not cross into Assyria proper until 616. Assyria at this point had been through a civil war between two of Esarhaddon's grandsons, had lost Egypt, and was fighting on three fronts, but it was not obviously dying. A war that took fourteen years to reach the enemy's own territory is not the war of a state that was pushing over a corpse.

The alliance

What changed it was Cyaxares. Something out of western Iran — and what exactly is genuinely not known — joined the Babylonians, and between them they took Ashur in 614 and Nineveh in 612. Nabopolassar's chronicle says the two kings met at the ruins of Ashur and made a treaty of friendship. The Assyrian remnant under Ashur-uballit II held out at Harran with Egyptian help until 609, and then there was no Assyria.

The division of the spoils is the part that matters for what follows. The Medes took the northern and eastern uplands; Babylon took the whole of the Assyrian west — Syria, the Levant, the routes to Egypt. In seven years a provincial insurgency had become the successor to the largest empire the world had held.

Nabopolassar was about seventy. He gave the western command to his son.

Carchemish

Drafted from Beaulieu, Blackwell History of the Ancient World (2018)expansion

Egypt had spent the last years of Assyria propping it up. Necho II marched north in 609 to help Ashur-uballit hold Harran — the campaign on which, according to the biblical account, he killed Josiah of Judah at Megiddo on the way — and when Assyria failed he simply stayed, holding the Levant as far as the Euphrates for four years. The question of who had inherited Assyria's western provinces was therefore open, and it was settled in one afternoon.

In the summer of 605 the Babylonian crown prince Nebuchadnezzar attacked the Egyptian army in its position at Carchemish on the upper Euphrates, broke it inside the city, and pursued the survivors to Hamath, where he destroyed what was left. The Babylonian Chronicle's language is unusually direct: not a single man returned to his own country.

Three weeks

What happened next is the reason this is a turning point on the record rather than a battle in a chapter. Nebuchadnezzar was still campaigning in Syria when word reached him that his father had died in Babylon on the eighth of Ab. He handed the army and the prisoners to his officers, took a small escort, and crossed the desert direct — the Chronicle gives twenty-three days from Nabopolassar's death to his own accession.

That is a detail about roads and horses, and it is also the whole of the succession problem in the ancient Near East compressed into three weeks. A victorious crown prince eight hundred kilometres from the capital is, in most periods, the beginning of a civil war. Here it was an administrative event. He was in Babylon before anyone could organise an alternative, and he reigned forty-three years.

What it settled

Egypt did not hold territory in Asia again. Necho tried once more in 601 and fought Nebuchadnezzar to a bloody draw on the Egyptian frontier — the Chronicle admits heavy Babylonian losses, which is not the kind of thing it usually admits — and after that the border was the border. Judah, Tyre, Sidon, Damascus and the Philistine cities changed from Egyptian clients to Babylonian ones.

The significance is worth stating plainly. The Levant that Assyria had spent two hundred years and the most elaborate deportation machinery of the ancient world acquiring was transferred entire, in one campaigning season, to a state that had existed for twenty-one years.

Jerusalem

Drafted from Beaulieu, Blackwell History of the Ancient World (2018)expansion

Judah revolted twice. The first time, in 597, Nebuchadnezzar took the city after a short siege, deposed the young king Jehoiachin, deported him and several thousand of the ruling and skilled classes to Babylonia, and installed his uncle Zedekiah. The second time, in 589, Zedekiah revolted in turn, and the answer was an eighteen-month siege ending in 587 with the walls breached, the temple burned, the palace burned, and the remainder of the governing class taken to Babylonia. Judah stopped being a kingdom.

The Babylonian side of this is thin and entirely ordinary. A vassal broke his oath, was besieged, and was destroyed; the Chronicle covers the first siege in four lines and the tablet for the years of the second does not survive. Ration lists excavated in Babylon record barley and oil issued to Ya'ukinu, king of the land of Yahudu and his five sons, which is Jehoiachin, alive and on the payroll, and that is roughly the extent of the imperial documentation.

Why it is a turning point anyway

Because the deportees wrote.

The same thing is usually said about Samaria in 722, and the two cases differ in a way worth being precise about. Samaria's deportees did not leave a literature; what happened is that the survivors in the south — Judah — wrote about Assyria, and the reputation of Sennacherib and Sargon reached the modern world through a neighbour's account of being terrorised.

Here it is the deportees themselves. A substantial part of the Hebrew Bible was written, edited or given its final shape in and after the Babylonian exile, by people who were in Babylonia because Nebuchadnezzar had put them there. The result is that this empire's afterlife is out of all proportion to its administrative footprint. It supplies the Tower of Babel, the whore of Babylon, the writing on the wall, the willows and the harps, and a king who goes mad and eats grass — and that last one is not even about the right king.

The wrong king

The book of Daniel puts Nebuchadnezzar through seven years of madness in the wilderness and then has a Belshazzar, called his son, lose the kingdom on the night of a feast. Neither is Nebuchadnezzar's. The king who absented himself for years in the desert was Nabonidus, forty years later, and Belshazzar was Nabonidus's son, not his. A fragmentary text from Qumran, the Prayer of Nabonidus, tells the madness story with the right king's name in it.

So the most widely known single anecdote about this empire is a real event, correctly remembered, attached to the wrong man; the real version belongs to Nabonidus, and is the subject of a later chapter. It is a good demonstration of what it means to say that the political history here is Mesopotamian and the reputation is Judaean. The two are working from different archives and they do not reconcile.

What a tablet can tell you

Drafted from Jursa, Alter Orient und Altes Testament 377 (2010)peak

Almost every ancient state has to be reconstructed from a narrative. Assyria is known from royal inscriptions read against the archaeology of provincial administration; Egypt from its material remains; Mitanni has one coded field out of four because there is no archive at all.

This one is coded from accounts. Jursa's study rests on more than twenty-one thousand dated tablets from Babylon, Borsippa, Nippur, Sippar and Uruk — temple books, private business archives, loan contracts, rent agreements, wage receipts, price notations — running continuously through the seventh, sixth and fifth centuries. It is not a better class of chronicle. It is a different kind of evidence, and it means that for this eighty-seven-year state things can be said that cannot be said about anywhere else for another five hundred years.

Bow-land

The army was raised from service land and supplemented with hired professionals, and neither of those is an inference from how armies usually worked. Land in Babylonia was held from the crown or from a temple in return for producing an equipped man, and the parcels are named in the documents for the equipment they owed: bow-land, horse-land, chariot-land. A holder who could not go himself paid a substitute, and the substitution shows up in the accounts as a cash line. Jursa can follow individual parcels through changes of tenant across decades.

The second value has an odd corroboration. Greek and Carian professionals served in the Babylonian army, and one of them was Antimenidas, the brother of the poet Alcaeus of Mytilene, who came home with a decorated sword and had a poem written about him. A lyric fragment from Lesbos and a ration tablet from Babylon are describing the same institution from opposite ends of the Mediterranean world.

What is not here

This state lived on land tax and tribute, and the interesting thing is what it did not live on.

Assyria before it had campaigned every year, brought back movable wealth and populations, and accounted for the proceeds as a standard section of the royal inscriptions. That is plunder as a fiscal institution rather than as a windfall.

This state stopped campaigning seriously after the mid-580s. The thirteen-year siege of Tyre is the last major western operation and it ended in a negotiated submission; after that the reign is building work. Jursa's accounts show an economy running on irrigated agriculture, temple estates, an increasingly monetised silver market and long-distance trade, with tribute from the Levant alongside. Nothing in them treats campaign proceeds as structural income at all.

So the empire and its successor differ in a way that reflects a real difference in how they were paid for, and one holds a third of the other's territory while being, by every measure the tablets support, richer.

The building

What the money went on is still partly standing. Nebuchadnezzar rebuilt Babylon on a scale that made it the largest city in the world: the double walls, the Processional Way, the Ishtar Gate with its moulded dragons and bulls in glazed brick, the ziggurat Etemenanki that the Tower of Babel story is about. His inscriptions are almost entirely building inscriptions. For a king remembered as a destroyer, the documentary record he left of himself is a construction ledger.

One famous thing is missing from it. No Babylonian text mentions a hanging garden. The gardens are entirely a Greek tradition, first appearing centuries later, and the most serious modern proposal relocates them to Nineveh and to Sennacherib. There is nothing contemporary to attach them to at all.

The king who went to Arabia

Drafted from Beaulieu, Yale Near Eastern Researches 10 (1989)contraction

Nebuchadnezzar died in 562 and the throne changed hands four times in six years. His son Amel-Marduk reigned two years and was killed by his brother-in-law Neriglissar, who reigned four and died in his bed; Neriglissar's son Labashi-Marduk reigned some weeks and was killed by a conspiracy of officials, who put forward one of their own. Nabonidus was an elderly courtier of Assyrian provincial background, probably from Harran, with no connection to Nabopolassar's family whatever.

There was a rule, and it had nothing to do with any of that. The king designated a son as crown prince, who held an establishment of his own and appears in the accounts as such. Three of the five transitions in eighty-seven years were coups anyway, and the last of them ended the dynasty.

Ten years at an oasis

In about 553 Nabonidus left Babylon. He campaigned into northern Arabia, took the oasis of Tayma, and stayed there for roughly a decade, leaving his son Belshazzar in Babylonia with the army and the administration. He returned in 543 or 542.

Beaulieu's monograph is the reason the departure and the return can be dated at all, and it is also the reason the episode is no longer told as religious mania. The older reading made Nabonidus a heretic who abandoned Marduk for the moon god Sin of Harran and was driven out by outraged priests. Beaulieu's case is that the moon-god devotion is real and documented and was not the cause: Tayma sat on the incense routes, the Babylonian economy had a serious interest in the Arabian trade, and the king was doing something with a strategic logic that a hostile source later made unintelligible.

Whether Tayma should be called a capital is disputable and no source calls it one. What can be said is that the king and the court were there and Babylonia was governed from somewhere else for ten years. The uncertainty is real rather than a formality: nothing in the sources actually names the place a capital, and calling it one anyway is an inference from what the king and his administration were doing there, not a citation of anyone saying so.

The prayer from Qumran

The stay left one more trace, centuries later and far from Babylonia: a fragmentary Aramaic text found at Qumran and known as the Prayer of Nabonidus, copied by a scribe in the first century BC from a story that had by then been circulating for four hundred years.

In it Nabonidus, not Nebuchadnezzar, speaks in his own name: "I, Nabonidus, was afflicted with an evil ulcer for seven years, and far from men I was driven," until a Jewish exorcist — one of the exiles from Judah, the very population this empire's own conquest of Jerusalem had carried to Babylonia — pardoned his sin and told him to write the experience down. Before that, the text has him praying uselessly to "gods of silver and gold, bronze and iron, wood, stone and lime."

Seven years of affliction sitting almost exactly on top of ten years away from Babylon is not a coincidence worth dismissing, and neither is the detail that heals him: a Judean exile, the population this same king's predecessors had deported, restoring a Babylonian king to health in a story Babylonians themselves did not write down. What the text will not do is settle the historical question. It has no interest in trade routes, and Beaulieu's strategic reading has no room for a curse and an exorcist. The two accounts are not describing the same king from different angles so much as using the same absence for two entirely different purposes — one an administrative decision defended after the fact, the other a morality tale about a foreign king brought low and forgiven by somebody his own family had made a captive.

The festival that did not happen

The consequence that mattered was liturgical. The akitu festival each spring required the king to take the hands of Bel in Babylon, and while the king was in Arabia it could not be held. The chronicle records this year after year in the same flat formula — the king did not come to Babylon, Nabu did not come, Bel did not go out, the festival did not take place — which is one of the strangest documents in Mesopotamian literature: an official annual record of an absence.

This was a kingship that rested on the god's choice and on nothing else. For ten years the annual public act that constituted it was not performed.

The Verse Account

After the conquest, a Babylonian text was produced setting out Nabonidus's crimes: he built a temple to a god nobody wanted, he mocked the priests, he abandoned the city, he was mad. It is savage and it is well written and it was composed under Persian rule by people with an interest in the new arrangement looking like a rescue.

It is worth naming what that means for the last chapter. Almost everything hostile about Nabonidus comes from sources written after he lost, including the Cyrus Cylinder, which is a document produced by the conqueror explaining why Marduk had wanted him to win. This is not a reason to disbelieve them, and it is a reason to notice that the fall of Babylon is one of the very few events in antiquity for which the winner's propaganda survives in the loser's own language and script, addressed to the loser's own gods.

539

Drafted from Beaulieu, Blackwell History of the Ancient World (2018)end

In October 539 Cyrus defeated the Babylonian army at Opis on the Tigris. Sippar was taken without a battle two days later. On the sixteenth of Tashritu, the Chronicle says, Ugbaru the governor of Gutium and the army of Cyrus entered Babylon without a fight; Nabonidus was arrested when he returned to the city; Cyrus himself entered seventeen days after that. Belshazzar was probably killed at Opis.

The whole thing took about three weeks, which is quicker than the fall of Assyria that this empire had been built on — and the comparison needs making carefully, because the two are not the same kind of event at all.

What did not end

Assyria ended and the cities were not reoccupied, the language of the court stopped being written, and within two centuries Greeks passing the ruins were told they had been built by somebody else. None of that happened here. The temples went on functioning. The Esagila archive goes on. The private business houses go on — the Egibi firm of Babylon has documents on both sides of 539 and does not appear to have noticed the difference. Contracts continue to be drafted in Akkadian in the same formulae, in the same script, on the same clay, dated now by the regnal year of Cyrus king of lands.

Astronomical diaries were still being written in cuneiform in Babylon in the first century AD, five hundred years after the last Babylonian king. That is why Beaulieu's history of Babylon runs to AD 75 while the kingdom stops in 539. The state ended and the civilisation did not.

The claims

Two later rulers claimed the office outright, and both did it in writing, in Babylonian.

Cyrus had a clay cylinder deposited in the city wall, in Akkadian, in the traditional Babylonian royal form, in which Marduk searched the lands for a just king, chose Cyrus, and had him take Babylon without a battle because Nabonidus had wronged the city. It styles him king of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four quarters. Two hundred and seventy years later Antiochus I rebuilt the temple Ezida at Borsippa and recorded it on a cylinder of his own, in Akkadian, in the same form, calling himself king of Babylon. Neither man was Babylonian and both wanted the office.

The difference between the two is instructive. Cyrus took the city; Antiochus inherited a claim to it through three intervening dynasties and rebuilt a temple to press it. Neither was Babylonian, and both understood that the office was worth having in the form the Babylonians recognised — which is why a Macedonian king, nearly three centuries after the last Babylonian one, was still having cylinders written in Akkadian and buried in walls.

The chronicles

Drafted from Beaulieu, Blackwell History of the Ancient World (2018)aside?What aside means

Almost every date in the preceding six chapters comes from one class of document, and it is worth describing, because nothing else in the ancient world offers anything quite like it.

The Babylonian Chronicles are a series of tablets, compiled in Babylonia and copied and recopied for centuries, recording events year by year in a plain annalistic register: in the nth year of king X, in the month Y, the king marched to Z, took it, and returned. They are not royal inscriptions. They do not praise anybody. They record defeats. The tablet covering the fighting with Egypt in 601 says the two sides inflicted heavy losses on each other and that Nebuchadnezzar went home and spent the next year rebuilding his chariotry, which is not a sentence any Assyrian royal inscription would contain about its own king.

Why that matters

For most of the Bronze Age Near East, the chronology rests on synchronisms, king lists and reconstructed regnal totals, and the absolute dates move by decades depending on which framework is adopted. Hittite dates are given in one of three competing chronologies; Mitanni's can hardly be given at all.

None of that applies here. 626, 612, 605, 597, 587, 539 are fixed. The reason is that the Chronicle series is anchored to astronomical observation — Babylonian scribes recorded eclipses and planetary positions alongside the regnal years, and those can be computed backwards and matched exactly. The Late Bronze Age has no such anchor and the Iron Age does.

So the shape of this region's evidence changes sharply somewhere in the eighth century, and it changes for reasons that have nothing to do with how important the states were or how well they governed. Mitanni was a great power and can barely be dated. This was a smaller empire that lasted eighty-seven years, and it has an economy reconstructed from twenty-one thousand tablets and a calendar correct to the day.

That asymmetry is the single most important thing to know about the evidence for this part of the world, and it has nothing to do with the states themselves.

The wisest of their customs

Drafted from Herodotus, The History of Herodotus (1890)aside?What aside means

Alongside the walls and the fall, Herodotus reports how he was told Babylonians lived. It is the earliest description of Mesopotamian society by an outsider, it is largely wrong, and the shape of the wrongness is worth having.

The auction

He calls it the wisest custom they have.

Once a year in each village the girls who had reached marriageable age were brought together in one place with a ring of men around them, and a crier sold them one at a time — the most beautiful first, who fetched a large sum, then the next, and so on. Wealthy men bid against each other for these. Then, when the comely ones were gone, the crier stood up the least shapely, and any who were crippled, and asked who would take them for the smallest sum; each went to the man willing to accept least.

And the money came from the first half of the sale. The dowries of the women nobody would bid for were funded by the prices paid for the women everybody wanted.

The safeguards are the part that makes it sound like a real institution rather than a traveller's story. A man could not simply give his own daughter to whomever he liked. A buyer could not take a woman away without providing sureties that he would actually marry her. If the two did not get on, the law required him to pay the money back. Men from other villages were allowed to come and bid.

Herodotus then says it has stopped. Since the conquest, he writes, the people have been oppressed and ruined, and the poor now prostitute their daughters for want of a living.

The sick in the marketplace

The second-wisest custom, he says, is that they carry the sick out into the market square, because of physicians they make no use. Passers-by come up and advise, if they have had the same complaint or seen somebody who has. Walking past a sick man without speaking is not permitted; you must at least ask what is wrong with him.

This one is demonstrably false, and the refutation is a Babylonian document. The laws of Hammurabi, twelve centuries before Herodotus, fix the surgeon's fee for opening an abscess in the eye at ten shekels for a citizen, five for a dependant, two for a slave, and specify that a surgeon who blinds a citizen has his fingers cut off. A society that schedules operating fees and malpractice penalties has physicians.

What he was actually collecting

The third custom he calls the most shameful: that every woman must once in her life sit in the precinct of the goddess he names Mylitta and go with a stranger who throws a silver coin into her lap. He describes the enclosure with its cords and its straight passages, the rich arriving in covered carriages with attendants, the coin that may be of any value and cannot be refused because the act has made it sacred — and the women who are not beautiful waiting three or four years to discharge the obligation.

Read the three together and a pattern appears. Each is a story about Babylonian women — sold, or obliged, or ruined — and each is framed as a custom the Greeks should judge: the wisest, the next wisest, the most shameful.

He is not reporting Babylon. He is reporting what a fifth-century Greek audience found it useful to believe about the largest and oldest city in the world: that it was fabulously rich, that it organised sex and marriage by public transaction, and that it had been brought low. The walls in the other chapter are ninety metres high for the same reason these customs are extreme. Babylon was the place against which everything was measured, and a measure has to be conspicuous.

The one line in the whole passage that is probably straight reporting is the sad one — that since the conquest the poor sell their daughters. That is what happens to cities that lose wars, and it required no informant with a story to tell.

What Herodotus was told

Drafted from Herodotus, The History of Herodotus (1890)afterlife

About a century after Cyrus took Babylon, a Greek came to look at it and wrote down what he was told. By then it was a provincial capital of the Persian empire and had already revolted against it twice.

Herodotus is not evidence for what the Neo-Babylonian empire was. He is the best evidence there is for what the world had decided about it, and the difference is the whole point of the chapter.

The city

He gives it as a square, each side a hundred and twenty furlongs, four hundred and eighty in circuit, standing in a great plain — a city, he says, of a magnificence greater than any other of which we have knowledge. Round it a deep broad trench full of water, and then a wall fifty royal cubits thick and two hundred high, the royal cubit being three fingers longer than the common one.

The figures are impossible. The wall he describes would be about ninety metres tall. What the numbers record is not the city but its reputation: by the fifth century Babylon had become the standard against which the size of cities was measured, and the way to say a place was enormous was to give it Babylonian dimensions.

The fall

His account of the conquest is the part everybody knows.

Cyrus, he says, put half his army where the Euphrates entered the city and half where it left, and told them to go in by the riverbed when the water became passable. Then he took the rest of his men upstream and turned the river into an old swamp. The stream sank to the middle of a man's thigh and the Persians walked in along the channel.

And then the detail that has kept the story alive for two and a half thousand years. The city was so large, Herodotus says — and he attributes this to the people who lived there — that after the outskirts had fallen the Babylonians in the middle did not know it. They were holding a festival at the time, and went on dancing and rejoicing until they learned the truth only too well.

He adds, drily, that if they had understood what was happening they could have shut the river gates, lined the embankments, and caught the Persians in the channel like fish in a trap.

Against the cuneiform

The Babylonian sources say something else. The Nabonidus Chronicle has the army defeated at Opis, Sippar taken without a battle, and Babylon entered without a fight; the cylinder Cyrus had deposited in the city wall, described two chapters earlier, tells the same handover as a god's own choice rather than a conquest.

Those two are propaganda too, produced by or for the winner. But they are contemporary, they are in the language of the place, and they describe an administrative handover rather than a siege.

So the most famous thing about the fall of Babylon — the diverted river, the soldiers in the riverbed, the dancers who did not know — is a story that grew in the hundred years afterwards, in a city that had learned to explain to visitors how it had been taken.

What that is an afterlife of

The empire lasted eighty-seven years and left twenty-one thousand tablets, an economy that can be reconstructed to the price of barley, and a chronicle series accurate to the day.

What travelled was none of that. What travelled was the walls, the gardens nobody can locate, the feast on the night of the fall, and the name — used ever afterwards, by people who had never been there, as the word for a great and doomed city.