The Fall of Babylon (539 BCE)

In the autumn of 539 BCE the last great native empire of Mesopotamia came to an end. Cyrus II, king of Anshan and of Persia, who in a single decade had already thrown down the Median kingdom of Astyages and taken the wealth of Lydia from Croesus, turned at last against Babylonia, the richest and most ancient state of the Near East, and took its capital, the greatest city the world then knew, in a campaign of a few weeks and, by the account of its own priests, almost without a battle. With Babylon fell the Chaldean dynasty of Nebuchadnezzar; the empire of Persia now reached from the Aegean to the Iranian plateau and down the two rivers to the edge of Arabia; and Cyrus, taking up the ancient Mesopotamian style "king of Babylon, king of the lands", became the master of the civilised world. The fall of Babylon is therefore one of the hinge events of ancient history. It is also, for anyone who would tell it truthfully, a lesson in the reading of sources, because the two contemporary texts that describe it most fully were both written by the priesthood of Marduk that had reason to hate the fallen king and to bless the conqueror, and both, for all their nearness to the event, are arguments before they are records.

The last king of Babylon: Nabonidus and the neglected god

The Babylonia that Cyrus faced was internally divided, and the division ran through its king. Nabonidus, who had seized the throne in 556 BCE, was, unlike the Chaldean kings before him, an Aramean, a man without the dynasty's blood, raised up in a court riven between priestly and military factions. His reign became notorious for a religious programme that set him against the most powerful institution in his own capital. Nabonidus promoted the moon-god Sin, whose great shrine was at Harran and whose cult his mother had served, and sought to give Sin a precedence that would eclipse Marduk, the supreme god of Babylon and the deity in whose temple, the Esagila, the very kingship of Babylon was conferred. The Encyclopaedia Iranica's account of the period, by Muhammad Dandamayev, sets out the collision plainly: the revival of the Sin cult "was an integral part of a program of major religious reforms which Nabonidus gradually put into effect", whose "aim was that precedence should go to the cult of Sin, which would eclipse the cult of the supreme Babylonian deity Marduk", and "these reforms brought Nabonidus into conflict with the priests of Marduk in Babylon".^[1] The breach was made worse by a stranger fact still: for some ten years of his reign Nabonidus simply left Babylon, withdrawing to the oasis of Tema in the Arabian desert, where he held extensive territory, and leaving the government of the homeland to his son.

Belshazzar the regent, and a festival left undone

That son was Belshazzar, who ruled as his absent father's regent and to whom the administration of Babylonia was handed over during the long years at Tema. He is the Belshazzar of the biblical Book of Daniel, and though that late and novelistic text makes him the last "king" of Babylon and Nabonidus vanishes from it entirely, the cuneiform record shows the truer shape: Belshazzar was crown prince and viceroy, never king, for the kingship of Babylon could not pass to him while his father lived and stayed away. The king's absence carried a grave religious cost. The central rite of the Babylonian year was the Akitu, the New Year festival, at which the king took the hand of Marduk in the Esagila and so renewed both the god's favour and his own title to rule; without the king present in Babylon the festival could not properly be held, and a regent could not stand in the king's place. Year after year, while Nabonidus lingered in Arabia, the New Year festival went uncelebrated, an omission the priests of Marduk recorded with pointed regularity and never forgave. By the time Cyrus came, the king of Babylon had alienated the god who made kings, neglected the rite that legitimated kingship, and left many in his own capital, priests and displaced peoples alike, ready to welcome a deliverer.

The campaign of 539: Opis, Sippar, and the entry into Babylon

The military history of the conquest is unusually well fixed, because it is recorded in the Nabonidus Chronicle, a terse Babylonian temple record that dates its events to the month. In the spring of 539 the Persian army moved down the valley of the Diyala, and there, Dandamayev notes, "it was joined by Ugbaru, governor of the region of Gutium", the Median commander who would deliver the city. Nabonidus, alarmed, had the divine images of the outlying towns carried into Babylon, meaning to bind the country's cults to the capital, a act of desperation the Marduk priests read as one more impiety, a disturbance of the gods in their proper homes. The decision came quickly. In the month corresponding to late September or early October the two armies met at Opis on the Tigris, and the Babylonian force under Belshazzar was broken; the Chronicle records a massacre of the retreating Babylonians. "After the fall of Opis there were no major battles." The Persians crossed the Tigris, and Sippar, whose defence Nabonidus himself was supervising, "capitulated after token resistance, on October 10"; Nabonidus fled to Babylon. Then, in Dandamayev's summary of the Chronicle, "two days later the army of Ugbaru entered Babylon unopposed and Nabonidus was taken prisoner."^[2] The great city, ringed by the double wall that the Greeks counted among the wonders of the world, opened its gates without a fight. That the surrender was genuinely peaceful is confirmed not only by the priestly record but by the spade: excavation of the levels of the Persian conquest turned up, in Dandamayev's words, "no traces of fires and no signs of the violent destruction of houses".^[1] Seventeen days after his general took the city, on 29 October 539, Cyrus entered Babylon in triumph, and, in the Chronicle's account, the people "laid on a triumphal welcome for him". The independence of Babylonia was lost forever.

The Cyrus Cylinder: the conquest as deliverance

Cyrus proclaimed his victory in the oldest idiom of the land he had taken. The Cyrus Cylinder, a barrel of inscribed clay buried as a foundation deposit in the wall of Babylon, tells the fall not as a conquest but as a rescue willed by Babylon's own god. In its narrative Marduk, disgusted by the impiety of Nabonidus and the cry of his oppressed people, searches the lands for a righteous king and finds Cyrus, whom he takes by the hand and marches into Babylon at his side.^[3] In the words the compendium's quote-library carries from Mordechai Cogan's translation of the Babylonian, the god's choice is announced:

"Marduk sought out a righteous prince after his own heart, and took him by the hand: Cyrus, king of Anshan, he called by name to the kingship of the whole world." — the Cyrus Cylinder (paraphrase of the Babylonian text)^[4]

The conqueror then presents the taking of the greatest city on earth as an entry in peace, a deliverance rather than a sack, under the protection of the city's own god:

"My vast army marched into Babylon in peace; I did not permit anyone to frighten the people." — the Cyrus Cylinder (paraphrase of the Babylonian text)^[4]

And he assumes, in the first person, the full Babylonian royal titulary, claiming not the style of a Persian king but the ancient dignity of Mesopotamian world-kingship, so that the empire's founder speaks, on this clay, wholly as a Babylonian:

"I am Cyrus, king of the world, great king, mighty king, king of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four quarters," — the Cyrus Cylinder, lines 20–21 (trans. Mordechai Cogan)^[4]

Behind the theology lies a genuine and consequential policy. Cyrus restored the cults Nabonidus was charged with neglecting; he sent home the divine images that Nabonidus had gathered into Babylon, returning them to their own cities; he lifted the hated labour-service the text lays to Nabonidus's account; and he permitted deported peoples to return to their homelands. This reversal of the characteristic Mesopotamian practice of deportation was real, and it is corroborated for the return of the cult-statues by independent administrative tablets. It is the tolerationist statecraft the Achaemenids would practise for two centuries and that Darius inherited when he came to hold the provinces "by the grace of Ahura Mazdā".

The two Babylonian sources, and why they cannot be neutral

Here the reader must be warned. The two fullest contemporary witnesses to the fall, the Nabonidus Chronicle and the Cyrus Cylinder, were both, on the scholarly consensus, composed by the priesthood of Marduk, the very institution that Nabonidus had alienated and that Cyrus restored to its cult and its revenues. Their shared frame, that Nabonidus was an impious tyrant hated by gods and men, and Cyrus the righteous instrument of Marduk sent to set things right, is precisely the frame that served both the incoming Persian king and the priests who wrote for him. Dandamayev states the matter without softening: "the Persian administration put out meticulously coordinated propaganda: several contemporary Babylonian texts present Cyrus as the liberator of the land from its oppression under Nabonidus, while Nabonidus is said to have despised even the gods of his own country, to have committed crimes against the temples, and to have plundered the possessions of others." And he draws the conclusion the honest reader must hold: "yet all these texts are propagandistic in character. They were compiled by Babylonian priests on the orders either of the king or of his servants, and they were modeled on the earlier inscriptions of Assurbanipal."^[1] The charges against Nabonidus are the standard accusations a Mesopotamian text lays against any fallen predecessor; his real offence, in the eyes of the men who wrote the record, was the promotion of Sin over Marduk. The German scholarship framed the problem exactly, in the title of Wolfram von Soden's study of the affair, "Kyros und Nabonid: Propaganda und Gegenpropaganda", propaganda and counter-propaganda, for there survive Babylonian texts of the other party too, in which Nabonidus is glorified and Cyrus condemned.^[5] Our clearest windows onto the fall of Babylon are stained glass, coloured by the hands that made them.

The Greek tradition: Herodotus and the diverted river

The Greeks remembered the fall very differently, and less reliably. Herodotus, writing a century later, tells (1.188–191) of a Babylon that resisted: the citizens, he says, had stocked their impregnable city with supplies to withstand a siege of years, and Cyrus took it only by a stratagem, dividing his army, demolishing a dike, and diverting the waters of the Euphrates where it ran through the city until the level fell far enough for his men to wade in along the drained riverbed, entering while the Babylonians, deep in the celebration of a festival, danced on unawares in the heart of the town.^[6] It is a magnificent story, and it may hold a kernel of the truth, for the Chronicle too places the fall at a time of festival and the biblical account remembers a feast; but as a whole it is contradicted by the contemporary Babylonian record of a near-bloodless surrender, and the river-diversion is very likely a Greek elaboration. Xenophon, in the historical romance of his Cyropaedia (7.5), tells a similar tale of a trench and a diverted Euphrates, and has the Persians break into the palace and kill the Babylonian king;^[7] and Berossus, the Babylonian priest who wrote in Greek, gives a third and harsher version in which Cyrus, far from sparing the city, ordered its outer walls thrown down.^[8] The Greek and Babylonian traditions cannot be reconciled on the manner of the fall; the contemporary cuneiform, for all its bias, is the better witness to what happened, and it says the city was not stormed.

Belshazzar's feast: the writing on the wall

The most famous telling of all is the least historical. The Book of Daniel (chapter 5) sets the fall on the night of a great feast given by Belshazzar, whom it makes the last king of Babylon; as the king and his lords drink from the sacred vessels looted from the Temple in Jerusalem, a disembodied hand appears and writes upon the plaster of the wall four words in an unknown tongue, and Daniel is summoned to read them:

"And this is the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN." — Daniel 5:25 (KJV)^[9]

Daniel's interpretation is the sentence of a reign weighed and found wanting:

"Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting." — Daniel 5:27 (KJV)^[9]

That same night, the story ends, Belshazzar was slain and the kingdom passed to the Persians. As history the tale fails at almost every point: it makes Belshazzar king rather than regent, forgets Nabonidus entirely, and hands the conquered city not to Cyrus but to a "Darius the Mede" unknown to any other source. It is a moral and theological composition of the Hellenistic age, some four centuries after the event, and it uses the fall of Babylon as a parable of divine judgment on royal pride. Yet "Belshazzar's feast" and "the writing on the wall" have shaped the Western memory of the fall more powerfully than any chronicle, and the historical Belshazzar's name survives at all chiefly because Daniel preserved it, long before the cuneiform record confirmed that such a man had indeed governed Babylon.

The significance: the richest province and the tolerationist template

With Babylon, Cyrus gained the wealthiest land of his empire and one of its great capitals, and he took care to hold it as a Babylonian king. He did not dismantle the Babylonian kingdom or overturn its society; he ruled, in Dandamayev's phrase, "in the form of a personal union with the Babylonians, taking the official title King of Babylon, King of the Countries", a style his successors kept until Xerxes.^[1] The civil servants of the old regime stayed at their desks, Babylonian law and administration carried on with little break, and the great business houses such as the Egibi went on flourishing across the change of masters. Babylonia became the richest satrapy of the empire, assessed by Herodotus at a thousand talents of silver a year and five hundred boys for the royal service. Above all, the manner of the conquest, the restored cults, the repatriated gods and peoples, the conqueror crowned by the god of the conquered, furnished the template of rule-through-accommodation that the Achaemenids applied from Egypt to Judah, and that Darius would inherit whole. The fall of Babylon was thus more than the acquisition of a province; it was the invention of a style of empire. Its shadow, too, was long: the city that surrendered so quietly to Cyrus rose twice against Darius and twice against Xerxes, and after the last revolt Xerxes stripped away even the title "king of Babylon", carried off the golden image of Marduk from the Esagila, and reduced the holy city to an ordinary satrapy, so that the very rite of kingship that Nabonidus had neglected could never again be performed. The peaceful union of 539 held only so long as Babylon accepted the Persian as its king.

Why this event matters for the compendium

The fall of Babylon belongs in this collection twice over. It is, first, the making of the empire whose reign this compendium describes: the conquest that turned a king of Anshan into the lord of the four quarters and set in place the tolerationist statecraft that is one of the Achaemenids' true and remarkable achievements. But it is, second, a paradigm case of the problem that runs through every entry here, that our sources are interested parties. The fall of Babylon is not, like the accession of Darius, an event whose very facts are in doubt; the outline is secure, cross-checked between a royal proclamation, a temple chronicle, and the archaeologist's trench. What is compromised is not the what but the why and the colour: the impiety of Nabonidus, the joy of the welcome, the righteousness of the conqueror, all of it comes to us in the voice of the priesthood that gained by his coming. To read the fall well is to accept the bare narrative the Chronicle and the cylinder agree upon, the battle at Opis, the quiet surrender, the entry of Cyrus, while holding their evaluation at arm's length, remembering that the men who called Nabonidus a godless tyrant and Cyrus the chosen of Marduk were the men his fall enriched.