Ancient Iraq (44 page)

The Fall of Babylon

Nabû-na'id or, as we call him after the Greeks, Nabonidus (556 – 539
B.C
.) is one of the most enigmatic and fascinating figures in the long series of Mesopotamian monarchs.
²⁷
He was the son of a certain Nabû-balatsu-iqbi, who belonged to the Babylonian nobility but was not of royal blood, and of a votaress of the god Sin in the city of Harran. A man in his sixties when he ascended the throne, he had held important administrative functions under Nebuchadrezzar and Neriglissar. Extremely fond of his mother – she died in 547
B.C
., at the age of one hundred and four, and was buried with royal honours
²⁸
– he had inherited from her a keen interest in religious affairs and a special, almost exclusive devotion to the god she had served all her life. After the death of Nabû-na'id, the pro-Persian
Babylonians, anxious to please their new sovereign, did everything in their power to sully his memory. In a libel known as ‘the Verse Account of Nabonidus’ they accused him of being a madman, a liar boasting of victories he had never won and, above all, a heretic who blasphemed Marduk and worshipped under the name of Sin ‘a deity which nobody had ever seen in the country’.
²⁹
These vicious accusations met with a success that their authors themselves could hardly have expected. Though a confusion of names they gave birth to the story of Nebuchadrez-zar's madness, as told in the Book of Daniel, and found an echo in a fragment of the famous Dead Sea Scrolls.
³⁰
Even the most cautious of modern historians are obliged to admit that they contain a spark of truth. Some at least of Nabonidus's inscriptions suggest that Sin ranked higher in his esteem than the national god Marduk, and the sanctuaries of the moon-god throughout the country were the objects of his special attention: not only did he splendidly restore the ziqqurat and several temples of Ur but the rebuilding of E.hul.hul, the temple of Sin in Harran, which had been ‘destroyed by the Medes during the war against Assyria, appears to have been the
idée fixe
of his reign. To say, however, that Nabû-na'id for political and sentimental reasons wanted to replace Marduk by Sin at the head of the Babylonian pantheon is perhaps going too far. Other temples in Mesopotamia – including the great temple of Marduk in Babylon – also benefited from his zeal, and the eagerness with which, before building anew, he sought the
temenu
, or foundation-deposit, which authenticated the sacred ground testifies to his attachment to the religious traditions of Sumer and Akkad. On account of his lengthy excavations in search of these written documents, Nabonidus has been nicknamed ‘the royal archaeologist’, though neither his aims nor his methods had anything to do with archaeology. Nevertheless, the king certainly shared with his subjects that passion for the study of the past which characterizes his epoch. During the Neo-Babylonian period – and indeed during the following Achaemenian period – a number of ancient chronicles were copied, king lists compiled
and antiquities collected with fervour. To quote an amusing example: when Sir Leonard Woolley was excavating at Ur the palace of En-nigaldi-Nanna (formerly read Bêl-shalti-Nannar) – Nabonidus's daughter and high-priestess of Sin – he was puzzled to find in the same building and in the same occupation-level objects of widely different periods, such as a Kassite
kudurru
, a fragment of a statue of King Shulgi and a clay cone of one of the kings of Larsa. Only later did he realize that he had been exploring the private museum of the priestess.
³¹

In complete contrast with this devout and apparently weak monarch stands the formidable figure of Cyrus II, ‘Great King, the Achaemenian, King of Parsumash and Anshan’, who ascended the Persian throne in 559
B.C
., three years before Nabonidus was crowned.

The Persians – an Indo-European speaking people – had entered Iran from the north at the end of the second millennium, at the same time as the Medes with whom they were closely related. Moving slowly across the Iranian plateau, they had eventually reached and occupied the mountainous range still known as Fars, along the Arabo-Persian Gulf. At the close of the seventh century
B.C.
, when their history becomes better known, they were divided into two kingdoms ruled by the descendants of Teispes, son of Achaemenes (
Hahamanish
). In Persia proper (
Parsa or Parsumash
), i.e. the region between Isfahan and Shiraz, reigned the family of Ariaramnes, elder son of Teispes, while farther west, along the border of Elam, the country of Anshan (or Anzan) was ruled by the family of Ariaramnes's brother, Cyrus I. Both kingdoms were vassals of the Medes. For one or two generations the House of Ariaramnes held sway over the House of Cyrus, but Cyrus's son, Cambyses I (
c
. 600 – 559
B.C.
), reversed the situation and added to his prestige by marrying the daughter of Astyages, his Median overlord. From this marriage was born Cyrus II. At the beginning of Nabonidus's reign Cyrus (
Kurash
) from his palace at Pasargadae ruled over a large but isolated district of Iran, paying tribute to his
grandfather. But the Persian prince lacked neither ambition nor intelligence. He had already started reducing to obedience the Iranian tribes of the neighbourhood and was slowly enlarging his kingdom, when the King of Babylon himself gave him an opportunity to acquire an empire.

We have seen that Nabonidus's most cherished dream was to rebuild the temple of Sin in Harran. Not only was this sanctuary dear to his heart but the possession of the market-place and strategic city commanding the roads from northern Mesopotamia to Syria and Asia Minor was of extreme importance to the economy and security of the Babylonian kingdom. Unfortunately, Harran had been in the hands of the Medes since 610
B.C.
, and against the Medes Nabonidus alone was powerless. Seeing in the Persians the true successors of the Elamites upon whose assistance the Babylonians had often relied in the past, he called upon Cyrus for help. Cyrus accepted. Astyages got wind of the plot, summoned his grandson to Ecbatana, but met with a refusal to obey. A bitter war ensued, ending with the victory of the Persians. Betrayed by his own general, Astyages was captured by Cyrus, who in one day found himself the master of both the Persian and the Median kingdoms (550
B.C.
). This important event, long known to us from the works of classical authors,
³²
is also mentioned in contemporary cuneiform texts. In one of his inscriptions
³³
Nabonidus tells us that Marduk appeared to him in a dream and ordered him to rebuild E.hul.hul in Harran. As the king objected that Harran was in the hands of the ‘Umman-manda’ (Medes), Marduk replied:

Another, more precise account of the conflict is given in the so-called ‘Nabonidus Chronicle’:

King Ishtumegu called up his troops and marched against Cyrus, King of Anshan, in order to meet him in battle. The army of Ishtumegu revolted against him and in fetters they delivered him to Cyrus.
³⁴

Following his victory over the Medes, Cyrus embarked upon a series of brilliant military campaigns which after ten years gave him an empire considerably larger than anything the world had ever witnessed. His first objective was Lydia, where reigned the fabulously rich Croesus. Rather than cross the Armenian highlands, Cyrus led his troops along the road that ran parallel to the Taurus range, through the steppe of Jazirah. Crossing the Tigris below Nineveh and marching westward via Harran, he occupied Cilicia, then a vassal-state of Babylon, thereby breaking the alliance he had just formed with Nabonidus and throwing the Babylonians on the side of Lydia and her traditional allies, the Egyptians. But neither the Egyptians nor the Babylonians could send troops to the aid of Croesus, who met the Persians alone and was defeated at Pteryum (547
B.C.
). Lydia absorbed, the Greek cities of Ionia fell one by one, and the whole of Asia Minor submitted to Persian rule. No sooner was the conquest achieved than Cyrus turned his weapon in the opposite direction. Successively, Parthia and Aria, kingdoms of eastern Iran, Sogdia and Bactria in Turkestan and Afghanistan, and part of India fell into his hands. The Persian empire now stretched from the Aegean to the Pamirs, a distance of almost five thousand kilometres. Confronted with such a giant, Babylon had no hope of surviving.

During that time Nabonidus was in Arabia. We read in the Chronicle that in his third year he went to Syria, raised troops in ‘the land of Hatti’ (as Syria was then called), entered the Arabian desert and besieged Edom (al-Jauf, 450 kilometres due east of Akaba), an important settlement once occupied by the Assyrians. Whether he returned home after this campaign is uncertain owing to an unfortunate break in the tablet, but the entries for the seventh to the eleventh years state that ‘the king
was in Temâ’, with the result that the New Year Festival could not be celebrated in Babylon.
³⁵
Temâ (Arabic Teima) is a large oasis in western Arabia, and from Temâ Nabonidus could easily wander from oasis to oasis as far away as Iatribu (Yathrib, Medina), as we learn from an inscription discovered at Harran.
³⁶
What the King of Babylon was doing in Arabia is one of the most vexing problems in the history of ancient Iraq. Various suggestions have been put forward,
³⁷
the most plausible, perhaps, being that Temâ lay at the intersection of several trade routes in the Arabian peninsula, as well as being an important centre of the cult of Sin, and Nabonidus endeavoured to weave close ties with the Arabs in order to secure their alliance against the Persians. The official reason, given in the document known as the Harran inscriptions, is that he voluntarily abandoned Babylonia in the throes of civil war and famine. Yet none of these explanations can account for those
ten
years of uninterrupted absence from the capital-city, unless we suppose that Nabû-na'id was prevented by his enemies from returning to Babylon. He had left the government in the hands of his son Bêl-shar-usur (‘Belshazzar’ of the Old Testament), a capable soldier but a poor politician, whose authority was challenged by an increasingly influential pro-Persian party, for in almost every country which his victories had placed under Persian rule it had been Cyrus's policy to win the goodwill of his new subjects rather than frighten them into obedience, to pose as liberator and treat his prisoners with mercy, to respect and even encourage local cults, traditions and customs. He was therefore extremely popular throughout the Near East, and among the Babylonians many thought that they would lose little by becoming the subjects of such a good prince. The writing was on the wall: Babylon would be an easy prey.

Cyrus attacked Babylonia in the autumn of 539
B.C.
Nabonidus, who had at last returned from Arabia, ordered Belshazzar to deploy his troops along the Tigris in order to cover the capital-city. But the Persians had overwhelming numerical superiority. Moreover, Gubaru (Gobryas), governor of Gutium
(i.e. Assyria), who ought to have protected the left flank of Belshazzar's army, went over to the enemy. The subsequent events are described in detail in the Nabonidus Chronicle.
³⁸

Belshazzar was killed in the battle at Opis, and Nabonidus probably lost his life in Babylon, although, according to other sources, Cyrus appointed him governor of Carmania (Central Iran).
³⁹
Far from being destroyed, as its rival Nineveh had been, Babylon was treated with the utmost respect. From the first day of Persian occupation (12 October 539
B.C
.), care was taken not to offend the Babylonians in any way, and every effort was made to resettle them in their homes, to enforce law and order throughout the country. The gods of Sumer and Akkad, whom Nabonidus had brought into Babylon during the war, were reinstalled in their chapels, ‘the places which make them happy’, and even the gods of Assyria, once taken captive by the Medes, were returned and their temples rebuilt. Cyrus made it known to all that he considered himself as the successor of the national rulers, that he worshipped Marduk and ‘praised his great godhead joyously.’ Indeed, we can believe the Persian conqueror when, in an inscription written in Akkadian on a clay cylinder,
⁴⁰
he declares that the Babylonians accepted his rule with enthusiasm: