READING HALL

THE DOORS OF WISDOM

THE ASSYRIAN EMPIRE. TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER X

THE NEW BABYLONIAN EMPIRE

I.

ITS RISE UNDER NABOPOLASSAR

IN chapter V we saw the downfall of the Assyrian empire and the rise of the Chaldeans; we have now to take up the thread again and trace the fortunes of the new Babylonian power until it, in turn, fell before the Persians.

Nineveh, the bloody city, became a waste, and desolation fell on her thresholds. The enemy had done his work thoroughly, and the terraced mounds, fair palaces, imposing temples, lay ruined, and despoiled of their treasures. The great library of Ashurbanipal, stored with copies of thousands of clay tablets collected from so many sources and with such care, was broken up and the contents scattered broadcast over the ruins. The splendour of the Temple of Ishtar, which lay close to the east of Sennacherib’s palace, was brought to nought, and none was left to worship in the fane of the mother-goddess whose statue, so proudly dedicated many hundreds of years before by Ashur-Bel-Kala, was cast out headless to lie humbled in the dust. Fallen, too, was the second great temple of Nineveh, dedicated to Nabu, which lay near the southern corner of Ashurbanipal’s palace, solid of foundation and high of wall, wherein Ashurbanipal in his delight at his victories over the Elamites had commemorated his piety towards the god with stone slabs recording his prowess. The foe in his onslaught had broken them up, shattered the stone flooring, scattered the little library of which the priests were so proud, and left nought but the foundations. The parks with their almond blossoms, their fragrant lilies, their cotton-plants, the gardens where the lions roamed and the storks chattered, all the beauty of Nineveh now lay waste. ‘Where is the den of the lions, and the feeding place of the young lions, where the lion, even the lioness walked, the lion’s whelp, and none made them afraid?’ asked Nahum (II, 11).

One of the officers who took part in the overthrow of Assyria wrote back recounting the story of destruction. He tells how the king ordered him to set fire to the cities and bring woe on city and field. ‘As the king, my lord, commanded, so did I.’ He set fire to cities, brought woe upon city and field and ‘dragged the spoil of the Assyrians into the desert’. Then apparently arose a clamour in the stricken land: ‘Why hast thou not delivered thy land?’ The army came to the rescue and battle was joined, but the Assyrians met with disaster, and the writer of the letter ‘cut off the head of the prince’. The commanders of the Assyrians in the threatened area were panic-stricken, and clamoured for tidings of rescue by their king; he had pitched his advance-camp as far south as Baghdad, but fled in terror at the Babylonian approach, leaving the poor wretches to their fate. Nabopolassar, the king who with Cyaxares had brought about this ruin, prides himself on the utter desolation he had caused: ‘by the word of Nabu and Marduk, who favour my sovereignty, and by the great, raging weapons of Girra the terrible, who scatters my foes, I conquered Subarum and turned its land to ruin’. Nineveh ceased to exist. The noise of the rattling of the wheels and of the ‘prancing horses and of the jumping chariots’ was stilled, and in place of the hum of a populous city there was but the little plaintive cry of the golden plover in the umber fields.

But so vigorous a people would not die out without a determined struggle. A remnant under Ashur-Uballit escaped and made its way to Harran, more than a hundred miles to the west, where their leader assumed the throne of Assyria, and there they abode for a breathing-space. Cyaxares went back to his land on the 20th of Elul of 612 BC; Nabopolassar occupied Nisibis, and took tribute from the land of Rusapu, but he evidently did not propose to winter amid the hills, especially as his ally had gone home, and he returned to Babylonia; let the Assyrian wait in Harran. For the moment, therefore, we can break off from our paragraph to appreciate the situation which resulted from the tremendous upheaval and briefly survey the course of events amid which this occurred.

It was a curious turn of Fortune’s wheel which had brought the new conqueror to power. Nabopolassar, who had been the son of a nobody, had been sent as Sin-Shar-Ishkun’s general to defend Chaldea against an invasion of the People of the Sea, and had seized the opportunity of revolting against his royal master. He, a man who was elected by Nabu and Marduk, the gods whom he had always held in honour, to rule Babylonia, was, he says, a man of little power, and yet he had thrown off the yoke of the Assyrian who from of old had held sway over all peoples. Indeed, his insistent humility is a little nauseating; so devout did he become that, when he was rebuilding Etemen-Anaki, he made his sons Nebuchadrezzar and Nabu-Shum-Lishir help in the work like common fellahin. In all this piety we can foretell the influence which the priesthood of Babylon were to wield throughout the coming brief renaissance of their country; they were a powerful party whom it was well to placate, a fact which the usurper who might happen to be occupying the throne was not allowed to forget.

Nabopolassar was an interloper, not of royal blood, and, as such, a victim of sanctified blackmail. The power of the clerical party was admitted also by Nebuchadrezzar, who took care to hurry home at full speed from the wars in the west the moment he heard that his father had died, although, as it turned out, the priestly party at home was disposed to be friendly towards him. For one thing, the bulk of the army was still under his command in Palestine, where it had served him loyally, and therefore was likely to remain staunch, and it was salutary for ecclesiastics to remember that it would form a very powerful bodyguard which could easily be brought back in case of need, very much to the priestly detriment. For another, Nebuchadrezzar was prepared to assent to a large bakshish to the itching palms of the clergy, and he took care to court their favour unceasingly, rebuilding the temples, making Babylon splendid with his edifices, and thus remaining in their good graces. Never had Marduk, the great god of Babylon, received such honour as under this king, and yet, hardly had his son Amel-Marduk reigned a brief two years when revolution came and he was deposed by Neriglissar, a claimant to the true crown. Yet again this last usurper’s reign was but a short one, and the priests succeeded in raising the standard of revolt against his son, whom they killed, and, in turn, supplanted by Nabonidus, a scholarly gentleman after their own heart, but again not one of royal blood. Finally, when Cyrus invaded the land, the anti-clerical party, in sympathy with Persia, delivered over the land to the foe, and yet even then the power of the priests was still a factor to be feared, and Cyrus never forgot to enlist their favour on his side in all his actions.

We have now to return to the great power Egypt, which had again begun to recover after the withdrawal of Assyria from its delta when Shamash-Shum-Ukin revolted in 652. Psammetichus (663—609) could now again call his kingdom his own, and he, like all the other powers who had a few legions to spare, cast his eyes on the fertile lands of Palestine. He seems to have led an army into Philistia to besiege Ashdod, but through the stoutness of the defence was held there for twenty-nine years, by which time Babylon was pressing Assyria hard, putting a different complexion on the political conditions. He was therefore prepared to forget what Ashurbanipal had done against Egypt: Assyria was no longer the Assyria of Ashurbanipal, and it would be impolitic to stand aloof while the last remnants of the ancient kingdom were divided among the spoilers. After all, a weak Assyria might prove a very convenient shock-absorber between Palestine and the rising power of Babylon. Even before the fall of Nineveh, therefore, he helped Assyria against Nabopolassar (in 616) to an evanescent success. Doubtless he had not reckoned on Assyria having to cope with the joint forces of Babylon and Media within the next two years.

With this general indication of the two problems which beset the Babylonian king, at home the menace of a disaffected priesthood at Babylon, and abroad the entry of a revivified Egypt into the arena, we can return to the year 612, and observe the rapid changes which two such factors could bring about. The fortunes of Babylonia were to be as revolutionary as those of the typical Latin-American republic.

The Assyrian occupation of Harran lasted undisturbed for little more than a year. For some reason Cyaxares would not leave his winter quarters of 612, and held aloof during 611, so that Nabopolassar could do nothing more than clear the ground with small campaigns. But in 610, either because the army of Cyaxares had rested, or because Nabopolassar was importunate, or because the Assyrian power was seen to be weakening, or because Egypt had become threatening, the two kings again joined forces, and moved from the upper Tigris on Harran.

A gap in the new Chronicle makes it uncertain whether Egypt was able to help Ashur-Uballit. In any case, the Assyrians, recognizing their own weakness, evacuated Harran before the enemy’s advance, and retired on Syria. The Scythians and Babylonians occupied the town, and the wild hordes of the former pillaged the great temple of the Moon-god, and pressed on towards Palestine. Yet, although they crossed to the west of the Euphrates, theirs was only a transient sojourn. After all, they were merely barbarians who sought nothing more than the plunder and brides which smoking war would bring. Nabopolassar, for his part, was content to leave a garrison at Harran and another perhaps at Carchemish, and go home.

But in Egypt a vigorous king, Necho, had replaced his father Psamatik. His first act was in continuance of his father’s policy, to secure Palestine and join forces with the Assyrians, ‘because’, says Josephus, ‘he wanted to reign over Asia’. It must have been about this time that Necho cleared his road with the capture of Gaza; haste, he knew, was essential if he was to re-establish the Assyrian power. He was in no mood to brook opposition from insignificant tribes, and when he found Josiah the king of Judah barring his path at Megiddo, there was little time to parley. Yet he spared time to reason with him. But Josiah, who had already given token of his courage as a reformer, trusted in his army and his mountains; he would not budge, and so died a hero for his convictions, and the resistance of his people was brushed aside. Necho then secured his left flank against possible attack from the Phoenicians—if we may infer anything from his hieroglyphic inscription which is said to have been found at Sidon—and, effecting a junction with the Assyrians, pushed forward across the undulating brown lands to the old frontier on the Euphrates. One Babylonian garrison, perhaps, as we have suggested, at Carchemish, was slaughtered, and Necho occupied the city where the Euphrates had been crossed from time im­memorial, using it as a base for the next four years from which he and the Assyrians attacked Harran without success. He provided the sinews of war partly by laying Jerusalem under tribute (a method which he doubtless employed with other conquered cities), and assumed the right to select its king.

Babylonia could not tolerate an Egypto-Assyrian occupation so near home, and so in 609 Nabopolassar advanced to the relief of his outposts; but he was growing old and seems to have met with little success, and hereafter he entrusted the command of his army to his son Nebuchadrezzar.

The next three years are a blank; but presumably from the sequel the Assyrians and Egyptians were forced back on Carchemish, where they awaited the final tussle with Nebuchadrezzar, who in 605 set his army in motion against Necho ‘under whom all Syria then was’, as Josephus says.

The probable route taken was up the Euphrates’ right bank, for there were ample villages along the river, especially on this side, on which the army might feed. Moreover, the great problem of crossing the river would thus be avoided; what was an easy matter at Babylon would be a dangerous or impossible operation higher up. If this large army had to cross the Euphrates it would only be by a bridge of boats (for inflated skins do not commend themselves), and once Babylonia was left behind material for making such a bridge could not be found before the troops reached the neighbourhood of Til-Barsip (Tell Ahmar), some few hours’ ride before Carchemish. It was at Til-Barsip that Shalmaneser, in the ninth century, had ultimately found it more advantageous in his Syrian campaign to make his crossing, rather than risk a passage in the face of the enemy, who must have had a permanent boat bridge at the great city of Carchemish above. Sennacherib, again, in the seventh century, built his fleet of boats for the Babylonian campaign at Til-Barsip, which is an indication that the inhabitants of this town had by this time become professionals in such construction. Today it is Birejik, about a day’s ride upstream, which has inherited the tradition of boat-building: that town and Hit (where a very rough kind of boat is made) are the two places in these parts where the inhabitants have this capacity. The Babylonian army could, of course, have towed a boat-bridge upstream, just as they tow boats today, but such a laborious proceeding would be avoided by the simple plan of starting on the right bank.

Whether there was any element of surprise in the Babylonian army’s-movements cannot be said, but, in any case, the higher it pressed up the right bank the more dangerous did the Egyptian position at Carchemish become. The nearer the Babylonians approached Carchemish, the narrower grew the desert between them and the Syrian coast, and the shorter and easier the route which led to the sea, offering a chance of striking at Necho’s lines of communication up Palestine. Only a camel rider may pass the trackless wastes from Hit to Damascus; a company may cross from Der ez-Zor by Palmyra; at Meskeneh, some fifty miles below Carchemish, the roads into Syria are easily passable by chariotry. Since the Egyptian commander, if he wished to preserve the morale of his army, was obliged to see that his line of retreat down Palestine lay open, it is clear that all the advantage lay with a bold commander like Nebuchadrezzar, once he had reached Meskeneh.

The issue did not long remain doubtful. The two armies met near Carchemish, and the Babylonians inflicted a sweeping defeat on their foe, who ‘lost many myriads’, and fled back through Palestine. The late excavations on the site of this ancient city show how fiercely the defenders had fought until their very homes were burnt. The road to Egypt lay open to Nebuchadrezzar; the moral effect of his victory had been enormous. Jeremiah, the prophet, voices the terror which the great Babylonian had instilled. In front of him the disconnected little tribes who might otherwise have disputed his passage were overawed into friendliness; behind, his rear was secured, since the Medes, those ancient allies of Babylonia, whose princess Amyhia Nebuchadrezzar married, were hardly likely to interfere on behalf of the Egyptians. The king swept down on Pelusium in a triumphant progress, with the Egyptians in headlong flight before him. The Egyptian domination of Palestine was at an end.

Then news reached him of his father’s death at home, and knowing, as has been said above, how precarious was his title to the throne, he had perforce to dash home by the shortest route. He consigned his prisoners to his friends’ care, and with a small escort rode across the desert, probably by the Damascus-Palmyra-Der-Hit route, to Babylon, a journey of about a fortnight.

II.

BABYLONIAN SUPREMACY UNDER NEBUCHADREZZAR

Events had already shown that Nebuchadrezzar was a vigorous and brilliant commander, and physically as well as mentally a strong man, fully worthy of succeeding his father. He was to become the greatest man of his time in the Near East, as a soldier, a statesman, and an architect. Had his successors been of such a stamp instead of callow boys or dilettanti without redeeming vigour, the Persians would have found Babylonia a harder problem. ‘All the nations,’ says Jeremiah, ‘shall serve him, and his son, and his son’s son, until the time of his own land come.’

Syria and Palestine remained subservient to Nebuchadrezzar. There was no Napoleon, like Ben-Hadad of the ninth century, to weld all the princelings and their driblets of armed forces together in a common bond to eject the invader. One recalcitrant was presently to challenge the king’s power: Jehoiakim of Judah, who, although at first he chose discretion as a loyal vassal to Babylon for three years, presently rebelled and threw off the yoke. Taking counsel with his diviners and sorcerers, he relied on their advice, and cast prudence to the winds, albeit Jeremiah, sometimes far-seeing diplomatist and acute student of affairs, sometimes mystic, uttered warning after warning of what would result from this rash policy. In plain and wholesome fearlessness he urged him not to follow the wise men who said: ‘Ye shall not serve the king of Babylon: for they prophesy a lie unto you, to remove you far from your land... but the nation that shall bring their neck under the yoke of the king of Babylon, and serve him, that will I let remain in their own land, saith Yahweh’ (Jer. XXVII, 9—11). But the poor foolish king, ‘hearing,’ so Josephus says, ‘that the Egyptians were marching against the Babylonians,’ paid no heed and set Babylon at defiance.

Briefly, although it would appear that accounts differ, Nebuchadrezzar’s troops and their allies invaded Judah, and ultimately in 597 the Babylonian king besieged and captured Jerusalem. Jehoiakim had died three months before it was taken, and the brunt of Nebuchadrezzar’s wrath fell on the head of his son Jehoiachin, now the king. The unfortunate youth and his mother came forth from the city to the king of Babylon in token of surrender; the spoil of the Temple, the royal family, the princes, the craftsmen and the troops were all carried away as prisoners to Babylon, and the king appointed Mattaniah, a young man of twenty-one, whom he renamed Zedekiah, as ruler over Judah. Egypt was powerless to help (2 Kings XXIV, 17). The policy which king Psammetichus I had begun had failed.

Yet Judah still believed that Egypt, so much nearer than distant and vague Babylon, could help her. A new Pharaoh, Hophra (Apries), had succeeded Psammetichus II, the son of Necho, and, burning to reconquer the ancient tributaries of the Mediterranean coast, he invaded Palestine. The Babylonian army, doubtless now little more than an army of occupation, where homesickness and boredom at so long a sojourn in a foreign land would militate against discipline, gave way before him and retreated from Jerusalem. Again the Judaean king’s spirits rose in expectation that they had gone for ever; again did Jeremiah cast them down. ‘Behold,’ warned he, ‘Pharaoh’s army, which is come forth to help you, shall return to Egypt into their own land, and the Chaldeans shall come again and fight against this city, and they shall take it, and burn it with fire.’ It was of no avail to say that the Chaldeans would not return; they would certainly return: even though the Babylonian army had fallen back from Jerusalem, it was only a temporary retreat.

Hophra’s invasion, temporarily successful though it was, was but brief. He marched into Palestine, taking Sidon by storm, and, as Diodorus says, by the terror which he spread, he reduced the other cities of Phoenicia to subjection. According to one account he then returned to Egypt, probably because Nebuchadrezzar had again set forth to subdue Palestine, by 587 reaching Riblah on the Orontes. Then—if we are to include here that part of Nebuchadrezzar’s exploits which he describes on his stele at Wadi Brissa (a valley of the Lebanon)—the Babylonians routed a king who had stirred up trouble in the neighbourhood.

Tyre, safeguarded by the sea, appears always to have clung to her independence, both against Egyptian and Babylonian. Josephus says that a few years after the battle of Carchemish Tyre led a Phoenician revolt; according to Menander, Nebuchadrezzar besieged the city for thirteen years in the reign of Ithobalus (Ethbaal), and Ezekiel refers to the great difficulty of the operations: ‘Nebuchadrezzar, king of Babylon, caused his army to serve a great service against Tyre: every head was made bald and every shoulder was peeled: yet he had no wages, nor his army, from Tyre, for the service that he had served against it.’ Presumably Nebuchadrezzar was compelled to recog­nize that he must ‘contain’ it only, which he could do with a small force. His trivial success in the Lebanon was probably enough to keep the other tribes of these mountains in check, and so he besieged Zedekiah in Jerusalem for a year and a half, reducing him in the end by starvation. The resistance was a heroic episode worthy of all praise to the garrison, who knew the fate in store for them for having again roused the great king’s anger. In the end Zedekiah and his men of war, stealing forth secretly from the city, were discovered and pursued to the plains of Jericho, where they were captured and carried to the royal headquarters at Riblah. The king’s eyes were put out, his sons were slain in his very presence, and he was carried blind to Babylon; and a month later Nebuzaradan, who appears to have been conducting the siege, entered Jerusalem in triumph, looted, burned and destroyed the city, and carried off the remnant of its people to Babylon.

Nebuchadrezzar was reaching the zenith of his fame by his campaigns south of the mountainous latitudes of north Syria and Anatolia, where the Median king, Cyaxares, was separately consolidating his empire. While the Babylonians had been pushing across the flatter districts towards the sea, their allies the Medes had fought their way steadily westwards to the Halys, thus covering Nebuchadrezzar’s right flank and rear from any possible attack from Asia Minor. Here they met the powerful state of Lydia under Alyattes and tried conclusions with them, but behind the red waters of the river the Lydians were well able to check their further advance. The struggle lasted for five years (590—585) without advantage to either side, and for very weariness the two monarchs agreed to an armistice. They called in as mediators a Babylonian (Herodotus says it was Labynetus, i.e. Nabonidus) and the Syennesis of Cilicia. The Halys was fixed as the boundary between the two combatants in 585, and Alyattes cemented the bond by giving his daughter Aryenis in marriage to Astyages, the son of Cyaxares.

The great campaign of Nebuchadrezzar’s later years was directed against Egypt in retaliation for the trouble caused by Hophra. Doubtless the Palestinian wars had resulted in many small expeditions (Jer. XLIX, 28 would show, for instance, that Arab nomads of Kedar gave him trouble at one time), but it was Egypt which bore the brunt of his warfare. Hophra, the Egyptian king, who so basely left the cities of Palestine to their fate, brought nothing but evil to his own country, and after his disastrous expedition against the Greeks in Cyrene, a revolution broke out at home, where the people were utterly weary of his incapacity. He sent his general Amasis to deal with the revolutionaries, but they merely elected him as king, and in the end Hophra was practically dethroned, Amasis being elected co-regent about 569 BC.

The small fragment of a Babylonian Chronicle first published by Pinches shows that Nebuchadrezzar launched an expedition against Egypt in his thirty-seventh year, i.e. about 567. Whether Pinches’ ingenious restoration (Ama)su, ‘Amasis,’ for the lost king’s name is correct, or whether Nebuchadrezzar marched against Egypt with any aim other than conquest, we cannot say; the very distance to which he penetrated is a matter of dispute. One tradition says he made Egypt a Babylonian province, another that he invaded Libya, while Jeremiah ‘foretold’ that he would set up his throne in Tahpanhes, but there is no proof that he did so. We might almost assume from the tradition that certain Babylonian deserters built a ‘Babylon’ in Egypt near the Pyramids, which appears to have existed as an important fort in the time of Augustus, that his army at all events left some mark there.

Nebuchadrezzar was now an old man. According to Xenophon’s Cyropaedeia, on which we need not place too much reliance, he had subdued Syria, the ‘king’ of Arabia, and the Hyrcanians, and was attacking Bactria at the time when Astyages the Mede died. With the north, of course, which was under the Medes, he had no quarrel; as for the east, three of his inscriptions and one of Amel-Marduk were found in the excavations at Susa, but this is no proof that he conquered Persia, for these objects may reasonably be said to have been carried off at any time from Babylon as booty. What we can be certain about is that he established control over the Euphrates valley, Syria, and Palestine as far as Egypt.

As far as we know, he had no affection for literature; the formation of libraries had no interest for him, and he left such pursuits to the priests. His peaceful energies were devoted to building magnificent palaces and temples, and herein he excelled. The fame of his city Babylon which he made peculiarly his own spread far and wide; Josephus records how he adorned the Temple of Belus with spoil and rebuilt the old city, making the Hanging Gardens to please his queen, who was from Media. As it is today, partly uncovered of the dust of centuries, the ponderous buildings of brickwork, cream, yellow, red, still stand in towering rampart and bastion, solid wall and foundations, pavement and Processional Way. The vast area of temple and palace, the solemn masses of brickwork, mirrored in the sedgy pools, the loneliness of the ancient ruins of Nebuchadrezzar’s city, slowly stamp on the mind of the pilgrim an ineffaceable memory of the grandeur of the Babylonian king’s concepts, of his masterly genius in handling common clay, the only material to his hand. The little boy whose father had encouraged him to carry a labourer’s basket at the rebuilding of Etemen-Anaki was in time to create the pinnacles of the great temples, the Ishtar Gates with their wonderful gryphons and bulls, the towering zigurrats, which will remain his monument as long as the world cares for Assyriology.

The priests of Babylon would indeed have been insatiable beyond reason if they had not accepted such practical piety as a full concession to their influence. But the king also adopted a personal role of humility to Marduk, the patron-god of Babylon, whom they served, and from whose temple they drew their salaries, and he took care that this modest demeanour before his god should be published abroad even from his very accession, as his prayer to Marduk on that occasion bears witness:

Without thee, Lord, what could there be

For the king thou lovest, and dost call his name?

Thou shalt bless his title, as thou wilt,

And unto him vouchsafe a path direct;

I, the prince obeying thee,

Am what thy hands have made;

’Tis thou who art my creator,

Entrusting me with the rule of hosts of men.

According to thy mercy, Lord,

Which thou dost spread o’er all of them,

Turn into loving-kindness thy dread power,

And make to spring up in my heart

A reverence for thy divinity.

Give as thou thinkest best.

In his devotion to Marduk the king restored and beautified the Great Processional Way in Babylon called Aibur-Shabum along which Marduk passed in the great festival of the New Year. It was a broad street, decorated with breccia and limestone, and he left his record in it:

“Nebuchadrezzar, King of Babylon, son of Nabopolassar, King of Babylon, am I. Of the streets of Babylon for the procession of the great lord Marduk with slabs of limestone I built the causeway. Oh, Marduk, my lord, grant eternal life.”

Nebuchadrezzar died about August-September, 562, and was succeeded by his son Amel-Marduk (562—560), whom Jeremiah calls Evil-Merodach. He was given little time to prove his worth; the two years of his brief reign are merely enough to show that political conditions were again hostile to the royal house.

His sister had married one of the notables of the land, a man named Nergal-Shar-Usur (Neriglissar), the son of Bel-Shuma-Ishkun. His name appears on contract tablets as early as the ninth year of Nebuchadrezzar (about 596), so that by the time Amel-Marduk came to the throne Neriglissar must have been well past middle age. He was a rich seigneur, one of the ‘princes of the king’ (Jer. XXXIX, 3), with large properties at Babylon, Opis and elsewhere. More than that, in a letter from Erech he is mentioned as holding high military rank; he had already been rab-mag in the operations against Zedekiah at the siege of Jerusalem.

Evidently there was a strong feeling against the inefficient son of Nebuchadrezzar, for Neriglissar suddenly led a revolution against the reigning house, and Amel-Marduk was killed. We have no reason to suppose that the priests were consenting parties to this émeute; nay, this cuckoo dynasty was ousted from the throne only a few years later. We can fix the time of this revolution to the autumn or winter of 560, the latest document dated in the reign of the murdered king being written about August of that year, and it is therefore clear that the revolution was timed for the cool weather.

Neriglissar ascribes his accession to the fate which the great gods had allotted to him ‘to wield authority over the black­headed people’; and he lays stress, like many usurpers, on the ‘true crown’ which Marduk had placed on his brow. He does not, however, appear to have courted the favour of the hierarchy of Babylon overmuch, although it is true he spent a little time in building, and brought back the goddess Anunit to Sippar from Gutium (between the Lower Zab and the Diyala), whither she had been carried in some long-forgotten raid. He died c. March 556, and was succeeded by his son Labashi-Marduk, ‘who,’ says Nabonidus, in ingenuous conceit, ‘knew not how to rule.’

III

DECAY AND FALL OF BABYLONIA UNDER NABONIDUS

With a nonentity on the throne like Labashi-Marduk it was the moment for the hostile party to seize the opportunity to oust the usurping line and replace it by one more in accordance with their views. Again the torch of revolution was fired, doubtless after the summer, in 556 BC, and the new king was murdered, and a man, not of the royal family, named Nabunaid (Nabonidus), was elected to the throne shortly after the revolution. He was the son of Nabu-Balatsu-Ikbi, whom he calls rubu emga, ‘wise prince,’ and he had evidently inherited his father’s taste for learning. He was a scholar with a most conservative respect for old records and customs, and was never happier than when he could excavate some ancient foundation-stone. If we may infer anything from his pious feelings towards the city of Harran, where he so magnificently restored the Temple of the Moon, in which, as we know, one of his parents, probably his mother, ministered in the priesthood, he may well have been of north Syrian ancestry, with all a Syrian’s devotion to the Moon-god. Indeed, it may be that this concrete evidence of his worship of the Moon brought him under the ban of the powerful priesthood of Marduk at Babylon, and even perhaps led to his being considered an apostate, which would account for his long periods of residence away from Babylon, especially at Teima in north Arabia.

Babylon was rapidly nearing her end. With continual internal dissensions barely kept in check, it is a matter for wonder that Nabonidus should have been able to retain his throne as long as seventeen years. Obviously he was not a young man at his accession, for Belshazzar, his son, is mentioned on a contract of the fifth year of Nabonidus, whereon he is called ‘ the son of the king,’ and he may well have been, as has been computed, sixty years old when he came to the throne. With the accession of the new king came one of the usual revolts in the provinces, and in 555 a Babylonian force was assembled to quell an insurrection in the west. Moving on Hamath and spending a summer in the cool mountains of Ammananu, the king seems to have spent two years campaigning in Amurru and Edom, not escaping the sicknesses which fall to the lot of an old man in the wars. Yet in spite of this flourish of trumpets, Babylon was falling from her high estate; her ancient rival, Egypt, was in an equally pitiable condition, while her quondam vassals, Palestine and Syria, were powerless; while Arabia, that desert land of sparse nomad tribes without cohesion, bore little menace to anyone. The two powerful empires of the Medes and Lydians were still confronting each other on the banks of the Halys, the latter nation so soon to be absorbed in the rising tide of Persia, the ancient foe of Babylonia. Persia was almost at the very gates of Babylon, and the writing on the wall was unmistakable: ‘thus saith Yahweh to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden to subdue nations before him.’

Persia had gradually risen again. About the middle of the seventh century, after Ashurbanipal had quelled the Elamites, Hakhamanish (Achaemenes) founded the royal Persian line which was to produce the renowned monarchs, Cyrus II, ‘the Great,’ and Darius. His son, Chispis (Teispes), the first Persian to be called king of Anshan, evidently from his title absorbed the kingdom of Elam, whither the Persian royal family moved. From him sprang the double line of descent through his two sons, Cyrus I and Ariyaramna (Ariaramnes). Henceforth Persia was to be ruled by the descendants of one or the other and, as Darius says in the Bisitun (Behistun) Inscription, the kings were to rule ‘in two lines.’ Cyrus the Great claims descent as ‘son of Cambyses I, the great king, the king of Anshan, grandson of Cyrus, the great king.’ The Median king Astyages, still occupied with Lydia, admitted the strength of the rising kingdom of Persia by bestowing his daughter Mandane in marriage on Cambyses I.

Then follows Herodotus’ story of Astyages’ dream of the spreading vine, interpreted to mean that his grandson would rule all Asia. Anxious for his own future safety, the Median king, when Mandane bore a son, delivered the babe into the hands of Harpagus, with orders that he should make away with it. But a herdsman, to whom it was finally committed, substituted his own wife’s still-born son for it, and brought up the royal babe in his own hut as his son, and ultimately the fraud was discovered by the dramatic, if apocryphal, story of the young lad Cyrus playing at being king, a story which has almost an echo of the legend of Sargon about it. Astyages, on the advice of the sooth­sayers, sent him back to Mandane, where he became, as he says, ‘a little servant’ of the Median king, presently to revolt with Harpagus successfully against Astyages about 553. Astyages was taken prisoner, Cyrus was accepted by the Medes as king, and so the Median supremacy passed to Persia.

Nabonidus, with the close of his Syrian campaign, withdrew the Babylonian army from Palestine about 553, with the risk of losing his hold over the sea-coast, but giving an elaborate explanation that this was done in order that the troops might rebuild the temple of Harran. The great temple E-khulkhul, sacred to the Moon, had long suffered from the ravages of the Umman-manda of Cyaxares and Astyages, the barbarians who cared little for ancient fanes or other people’s gods, and Marduk came to Nabonidus in a dream, bidding him restore this temple. But, urged the king, exhibiting a curious ignorance of events in north Syria, it was surely still in the hands of the Umman-manda, how could a Babylonian king interfere with their share of the spoil obtained by Cyaxares? The god answered that the Umman-manda were dead or scattered, for in the third year of Nabonidus, Cyrus, the king of Anzan, had defeated them, carried Ishtumegu (Astyages) into captivity, and had spoiled their city Ecbatana. Dutifully the king recalled his army from Gaza, ‘on the border of the land of Egypt, from the Upper Sea beyond the Euphrates to the Lower Sea, the kings, princes, governors, and my numerous troops,’ and despatched it to Harran to restore the ancient glories of the temple. Nay more, his own mother, now an old lady within a few years of her death, was a priestess of the Moon there. Whether the withdrawal was prompted by fear of the growing power of Persia is uncertain; but what is clear is that it was flying in the face of the priestly party at home to decorate a temple of the Moon, and particularly one in Harran, for not only was Sin not the national god, but Harran had been the city of refuge whither the Assyrian government had escaped in the day of its downfall. Nay, more, Nabonidus dedicated his own daughter, Bel-Shalti-Nannar, to the great temple of Sin at Ur; and again, although he writes of his restorations to the temples of the Sun in Sippar and Larsa, and others to Anunit in Agade and Sippar-Anunit, he must needs boast of his homage to Sin and Ishtar, that posterity may hear. It was a tactless thing to do, and may, as has been suggested above, have been the cause of his subsequent voluntary exile.

With the completion of his temple Nabonidus again took the field, this time against the Arabian township of Teima, leaving the government in his son’s hands. Why such a campaign was necessary we do not know, but he went thither with his troops and slew its king. This was the town in which he was presently to spend his declining years; it is not easy to see the causes that prevented him from taking up his abode in Ur, where his daughter was, or Harran, where his mother ministered in his temple. If reasons may be suggested, Ur would be unpleasantly near to Babylon for a heretic, and as for Harran, the fact that we have two different dates given for the downfall of the Medes shows that there was some doubt about the completeness of their defeat, and consequently Harran was no safe city of refuge, a description confirmed by the withdrawal of the king’s mother to Babylonia, where she died. But, whatever may have been the reason for the king’s adoption of Teima, a camel-rider was despatched thither from Babylonia in the fifth year (551), doubtless on the king’s business, with a bakshish of fifty shekels for the journey. So much we can glean from a little tablet from Erech dated in Adar of this year; a pregnant piece of evidence, for camels and the city of Teima are rarely mentioned in contracts.

Teima, with its three-mile circuit of stone walling, was at least safe. Indeed, it was not an unpleasant haven, as the greatest of Arabian travellers describes it, delightful with its green palms, its blossoming plum-trees, its spacious houses, its prosperity. Ancient wells nowadays abound to prove the wealth and energy of its inhabitants; fever and plagues are unknown. By the seventh year (549) Nabonidus was safely and not uncomfortably installed there, hundreds of miles across desert country, while his son was acting as regent at home in Babylon, where the army now was. Here in this Arabian town the old king spent much of the remainder of his life until certainly his eleventh year (c. 545); there remains some little survival of the Babylonian influence here in the monument known as the Teima Stone, a relief of a ritual scene with a king, in obvious Assyrian style, albeit with its inscription in Aramaic. An amusing detail of the king’s old age appears on a tablet, where it is told that a man who had been specially hired to take some kind of food, doubtless luxuries, to Teima, was compelled to bring it back to Erech, where it was ordered to be sold on the 19th of the tenth month of Nabonidus’ tenth year. Indeed, in this note of his domestic details at Teima, his steward may have calculated on the king’s departure for good from that city early next year.

There was good reason to be nervous, for the sands were rapidly running out. Cyrus the conqueror was overrunning the north, and it would be the turn of Babylonia shortly. Croesus, who was now on the Lydian throne, was equally uneasy about the foe across the Halys. He turned for advice to numerous oracles, especially to the oracle at Delphi, whence he received the double-edged answer that if he crossed the Halys frontier he would destroy a great kingdom. He chose to accept it as a favourable decision, and his army, which included Ionian troops, crossed the Red River and climbed the downs beyond, thrusting towards the ancient Hittite capital at Pteria, which they took. Cyrus met the Lydian foe in the broad rolling valleys near the city, but neither force secured an advantage, and Croesus then fell back on Sardes, where he disbanded his army, doubtless imagining that the winter snows would check the Persian king. Cyrus, hearing of this, pressed on vigorously to the very capital, and before the Lydian troops could be assembled again routed such as withstood him, driving them within the walls. He laid siege to it, and by the ingenuity of one of his men who discovered a way through the defences, captured it after two or three weeks’ fighting (? 547 BC). Lydia thus became a Persian province, and its king so far became Cyrus’ friend as to accompany his son subsequently on the expedition against Egypt. With all northern Asia Minor in Persian hands the capture of Babylonia was comparatively simple, and Cyrus set himself to the task.

It has already been mentioned that the Babylonian army after rebuilding the temple at Harran was withdrawn to Babylon. The Chronicle records nothing whatever for 548, but the year 547, in which Nabonidus’ mother died, marks the date of Cyrus’ earlier operations against Babylon. The Persians crossed the Tigris below Arbela, and in the spring of 547 slew a king on the west of the river (possibly Croesus, but more probably nearer home), thus controlling the upper waters of the Tigris.

There is now some indication that Cyrus, thus secure in the north, threatened the sea-coast of southern Babylonia from Elam in the next year (546); at all events, the Chronicle mentions that Elam (came?) to Akkad, and an (Elamite?) governor was appointed to Erech, and if so, Babylonia was caught between pincers. The southern marshes had always been an easy mark for the Elamites; and if Erech was really held by the foe, then farewell to any Babylonian control over the great city of Ur and its temple to the Moon. Indeed, there is no reason to doubt this restoration; from the fact that Cambyses subsequently found it convenient to make his palace there it might even be inferred that Erech was one of the earliest cities in which the Persians established themselves in Babylonia. It is small wonder that the Chronicle records the abrogation of religious ceremonies in Babylon; the empire had become a miserable remnant, hemmed in on all sides, and there were probably neither men for an army nor money to pay them.

Cyrus was by now in control of Kutu, or Gutium, the quadrilateral contained by the Lower Zab, Tigris, the hills of Sulimaniyah, and the Diyala. This district had but lately come under Babylonian rule; Nebuchadrezzar appears to have held some control over the district of Arrapkha near here, and Neriglissar had even recaptured from Gutium a statue of Anunit which had long before been carried away from Babylonia. Now, however, it was ruled by a Persian governor, Gobryas (Gubaru, Ugbaru, in Persian Gaubaruva), who was subsequently to rise to fame.

The people of Babylonia were not under any misapprehension of the future; they at least could read the writing on the wall. Their king was helpless, and their country at the mercy of the invader by 539; moreover there is a pregnant mention of ‘the Sea (as a danger-zone?) in the Chronicle. Cyrus set his army in motion after the end of the summer, and about the beginning of Tishri (September—October) in 539 he fought a battle at Opis, and this action was the signal for a general revolt in Akkad. By the fourteenth of the month Tishri he had appeared before the walls of Sippar, which threw open its gates to the invader. The wretched king Nabonidus, now at the eleventh hour back in his land, fled to Babylon; two days later Babylon yielded without a blow to Gobryas and the Persian army, and the king was given up1. Little more was needed; the army occupied the great capital, and then Cyrus entered Babylon formally on the third of Marcheswan (October—November) and appointed Gobryas as its governor. The old king Nabonidus was given Carmania to rule, or much more probably as a place of abode in a new land; and three weeks after the fall of the city commercial transactions had begun to be dated by the reign of the new conqueror. Cyrus, as a wise ruler, left the religious institutions of the people alone, and saw to it that this conquest should be attributed to the invitation of Marduk, the great god of Babylon. Nabonidus had carried off the sacred images of many a foreign nation; Cyrus, recognizing the first fundamentals of an empire, restored them to their shrines in sympathy with the different religions of his new subjects. It was a remarkable act of enlightened vision.

And so Babylon fell. The little nations round about could clap their hands at her distress, the virgin daughter of Babylon never more to be lady of kingdoms; but farther west, where men had once spoken of her magnificence and power in the same breath with a proverb of her impregnability, the crash must have roused uneasy anticipations. Cyrus had achieved the impossible: would this rising nation thrust itself next on Europe?

But Babylon the City was for ever to sit silent in the darkness. Presently, when the tide surged back, Seleucia would usurp her title of Royal City; and then one day, when Seleucia was beneath the dust, her fame renascent would centre on Baghdad; but henceforth Mesopotamia was to be the cockpit for all nations to fight in, and Macedonians, Greeks, Sassanians, Arabs, Turks, Germans, and British were to leave their mark on it in turn in the ages to come.

CHAPTER XI

THE INFLUENCE OF BABYLONIA