by Georges Roux
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 inscriptions33 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:
‘The Umman-manda of whom you speak, they and their land and the kings who side with them no longer exist. In the coming third year I shall make Cyrus, King of Anzan, their young slave, expel them. With his few troops, he will disperse the widespread Umman-manda.
‘He (Cyrus) captured Astyages (Ishtumegu), King of Umman-manda and took him prisoner to his country.’
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
In the month of Tashritu (September – October), when Cyrus attacked the army of Akkad in Opis on the Tigris, the inhabitants of Akkad revolted, but he (Nabonidus) massacred the confused inhabitants.
The fifteenth day, Sippar was seized without a battle. Nabonidus fled.
The sixteenth day, Gubaru, the governor of Gutium, and the army of Cyrus entered Babylon without a battle. Afterwards, Nabonidus was arrested in Babylon when he returned (there).
Till the end of the month, the shield-carrying Gutians were staying within Esagila (the temple of Marduk), but nobody carried arms in Esagila and its buildings. The correct time (
for a ceremony) was not missed.
In the month of Arahsamnu (October – November), the third day, Cyrus entered Babylon. Great twigs were spread in front of him. The state of ‘peace’ was imposed on all the city. Cyrus sent greetings to all Babylon…
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:
All the inhabitants of Babylon, as well as of the entire country of Sumer and Akkad, princes and governors, bowed to him (Cyrus) and kissed his feet, jubilant that he had received the kingship, and with shining faces happily greeted him as a master through whose help they had come to life from death and had all been spared damage and disaster, and they worshipped his name.
CHAPTER 24
THE SPLENDOUR OF BABYLON
Short as it was (626 – 539 B.C.) the rule of the Chaldaean kings has left deep traces in the records of history. Monuments, royal inscriptions, letters, legal and commercial documents in great number concur to help us form of the Neo-Babylonian kingdom a fairly complete and accurate picture, and from this collection of data two main features emerge which give the whole period a character of its own: a religious revival combined with extensive architectural activity, and a resurgence of the temples as major social and economic units.
Geography, circumstances and the will of her rulers had turned Assyria into an expanding military nation. The same factors, acting through a thousand years of political abeyance, had made Babylonia the heir and guardian of Sumero-Akkadian traditions, the ‘sacred area’ of Mesopotamia, acknowledged as such and generally respected by the Assyrians themselves. A Babylonian renaissance in the sixth century B.C. was therefore bound to take the form of a religious revival. To the rebuilding of sanctuaries, the restoration of age-old rites, the celebration of religious festivals with increased ceremonial display, the Chaldaean kings devoted much time, energy and money. In their official inscriptions the stress was constantly laid on their architectural rather than their warlike performances. They could have claimed, like their predecessors, kingship over ‘the Universe’ of ‘the Four Quarters of the World’; they preferred to call themselves ‘Provider (zaninu) of Esagila and Ezida’* – a title which appears on thousands of bricks scattered throughout southern Iraq. Their colossal work of reconstruction involved all the main cities of Sumer and Akkad, from Sippar to Uruk and Ur, but the capital-city was given, as expected, preferential treatment: rebuilt anew, enlarged, fortified and embellished, Babylon became one of the world's marvels. Jeremiah the prophet, while predicting its fall, could not help calling it ‘a golden cup in the Lord's hand, that made all the earth drunken’, and Herodotus, who is believed to have visited it c. 460 B.C, admiringly proclaimed: ‘It surpasses in splendour any city of the known world.’1
Was this reputation deserved or was it, as in other instances, the product of Oriental exaggeration and Greek credulity? The answer to this question should not be sought in the barren mounds and heaps of crumbling brickwork which today form most of this famous site, but in the publications of R. Koldewey and his co-workers, who, between 1899 and 1917, excavated Babylon on behalf of the Deutsche Orient Gesellschaft.2 It took the Germans eighteen years of hard and patient work solely to recover the plan of the city in broad outline and unearth some of its main monuments, but we now possess enough archaeological evidence to complete, confirm or amend Herodotus's classical description and often share his enthusiasm.
Babylon, the Great City
Unquestionably, Babylon was a very large town by ancient standards. It covered an area of some 850 hectares, contained, we are told, 1,179 temples of various sizes, and while its normal population is estimated at about 100,000, it could have sheltered a quarter of a million people, if not more. The city proper, roughly square in plan, was bisected by the Euphrates, which now flows to the west of the ruins, and was surrounded by an ‘inner wall’. But ‘in order that the enemy should not press on the flank of Babylon’, Nebuchadrezzar had erected an ‘outer wall’, about eight kilometres long, adding ‘four thousand cubits of land to each side of the city’. The vast area comprised between these two walls was suburban in character, with mud-houses and reed-huts scattered amidst gardens and palm-groves, and contained, as far as we can judge, only two official buildings: Nebuchadrezzar's ‘summer palace’, whose ruins form in the north-eastern corner of the town the mound at present called Bâbil, and perhaps the bît akîtu, or Temple of the New Year Festival, not yet exactly located.
Reinforced by towers and protected by moats, the walls of Babylon3 were remarkable structures, much admired in antiquity. The inner fortified line surrounding the city proper consisted of two walls of sun-dried bricks, separated by a seven-metre wide space serving as a military road; its moat, about fifty metres wide, contained water derived from the Euphrates. The outer fortification, some eight kilometres long, was made of three parallel walls, two of them built of baked bricks. The spaces between these walls were filled with rubble and packed earth. According to Herodotus, the twenty-five metre wide top of this outer town wall could accommodate one or even two chariots of four horses abreast, enabling a rapid movement of troops from one end of the town to the other. When tested, however, this formidable defensive system proved useless: probably helped by accomplices in the city, the Persians entered Babylon through the bed of the Euphrates at low water and took it by surprise, proving that every armour has its faults and that the value of fortifications lies in the men behind them.
Eight gates, each of them named after a god, pierced the inner wall. The north-western gate, or Ishtar Gate, which played an important part in the religious life of the city, is fortunately the best preserved, its walls still rising some twelve metres above the present ground-level.4 Like most city gates in the ancient Near East, it consisted of a long passage divided by projecting towers into several gateways, with chambers for the guard behind each gateway. But the main interest of Ishtar Gate resides in its splendid decoration. The front wall as well as the entire surface of the passage were covered with blue enamelled bricks on which stood out in relief red-and-white dragons (symbolic of Marduk) and bulls (symbolic of Adad), arranged
Caption
Plan of central Babylon.
Montage of the author after the plans of R. Koldewey, Das wieder erstehende Babylon, 1925.
in alternating rows. Even the foundations were similarly decorated, although not with enamelled bricks. The total number of animal figures has been estimated at 575. The passage was roofed over, and the sight of these strange creatures shining in the dim light of torches and oil-lamps must have produced the most startling, awe-inspiring effect.
The Ishtar Gate was approached from the north through a broad, truly magnificent avenue called by the Babylonians Ai-ibur-shabu, ‘may the enemy not cross it’, but better known today as ‘Procession Street’. The avenue, more than twenty metres wide, was paved with slabs of white limestone and red breccia and was bordered by two thick walls which were no less impressive than those of the Gate, for on each side sixty mighty lions (symbolic of Ishtar) with red or yellow manes were cast in reli
ef on blue ceramic. Behind these walls were three large buildings called by the Germans ‘Northern Citadel’ (Nord-burg), ‘Main Citadel’ (Hauptburg) and ‘Advanced Work’ (Vor-werk). All three formed part of the defensive system of the city, though the Hauptburg seems to have also been used as a royal or princely residence or as a kind of museum.5 It ruins have yielded a number of inscriptions and sculptures ranging from the second millennium to the fifth century B.C., among which the basalt statue of a lion trampling on a man, known as ‘the lion of Babylon’. The origin of this colossal, roughly made piece of work is unknown, but foreign as it is to all that we know of Mesopotamian sculpture, it conveys such an impression of strength and majesty that it has become a symbol of the glorious past of Iraq. Beyond Ishtar Gate, Procession Street continued, somewhat narrower, through the city proper. It passed in front of the Royal Palace, crossed over a canal called Libil hegalla (‘may it bring abundance‘), skirted the vast precinct of the ziqqurat and, turning westwards, reached the Euphrates at the point where the river was spanned by a bridge of six piers shaped like boats. It divided the city into two parts: to the east lay the tangle of private houses (mound of Merkes),6 to the west and south were grandiose palaces and temples.