Nabonidus

Nabonidus (Akkadian Nabû-naʾid, "the god Nabu is exalted"; the Nabonnedos of Berossus, and probably the Labynetos of Herodotus) was the sixth and last king of the Chaldean or Neo-Babylonian dynasty, ruling from 556 to 539 BCE. He matters to this compendium not for anything he did to Persia, but for what his reign made possible: it was the fall of his Babylon to Cyrus in 539 that turned the young Persian realm, already master of Media and Lydia, into an empire straddling Mesopotamia and the whole fertile crescent, heir to the oldest kingship in the world. He is also, with Cambyses, one of the two great early studies in how a hostile tradition can bury a king. Almost every ancient narrative of Nabonidus was composed by his enemies, the priests of Marduk whom his religious policy had alienated, and the Persian conquerors who found it useful to cast him as an impious tyrant whom Cyrus came to depose. Yet, unusually, Nabonidus's own royal inscriptions also survive, and between the propaganda and the self-portrait modern scholarship has recovered a very different figure from the deranged apostate of the legend.

Not of the royal line: origins and usurpation

Nabonidus did not belong to the dynasty he ended. Where Nabopolassar, Nebuchadnezzar II and their heirs were Chaldeans, Nabonidus was, as the Encyclopaedia Iranica states plainly, "an Aramean, not a Chaldean" (Dandamayev, Babylonia i)^[7], an outsider to the tribal aristocracy that had held the throne for seventy years. He came to power in a period of acute instability. After the death of Nebuchadnezzar II in 562 the kingdom fell into crisis: a conflict between Chaldean and Aramean factions, and tensions between the priestly and military parties, in which the priesthood's interference extended even to deposing kings it found unsuitable. Three kings followed Nebuchadnezzar in a few brief years before Nabonidus seized power in May 556 BCE, a coup, in effect, that raised to the throne a man already advanced in years and outside the royal blood.

About his family the tradition is clearer than usual, and it points to the moon-god who would dominate his reign. His mother was Adad-guppi, a devotee of the god Sin who lived to a great age (her own memorial stele from Harran, one of the sources for the reign, records her long service to the moon-god and a life said to span more than a century). It was in that household piety, a family bound to the cult of Sin at Harran in Upper Mesopotamia, that the religious program of the reign had its root. Nabonidus did not invent his devotion to the moon-god as a king; he brought it to the throne.

The devotion to Sin and the rebuilding of the Ehulhul

The defining act of the reign was religious. Harran, an ancient centre of the moon-god's worship, had been sacked when the Medes and Babylonians destroyed the last Assyrian resistance there in 610 BCE, and its great temple of Sin, the Ehulhul ("House of Rejoicing"), lay in ruins. Around 552 BCE, when Median troops were withdrawn from Harran during the war between Media and Persia, Nabonidus rebuilt it. As Iranica summarizes the policy: "The revival of this shrine was an integral part of a program of major religious reforms which Nabonidus gradually put into effect. His aim was that precedence should go to the cult of Sin, which would eclipse the cult of the supreme Babylonian deity Marduk" (Dandamayev, Babylonia i).^[7] This was the flashpoint. To raise the moon-god of Harran over Marduk, the patron and guarantor of Babylon whose temple Esagila was the ritual centre of the kingdom, was to strike at the heart of Babylonian religious identity, and at the priesthood whose power and income were bound to Marduk's supremacy. "These reforms," Iranica continues, "brought Nabonidus into conflict with the priests of Marduk in Babylon." Whatever the king's own understanding of his piety, the political effect was a rupture with the most powerful institution in his own capital.

Here the two-sidedness of the record must be held open. To the Marduk priesthood and to Cyrus's propagandists, this was sacrilege: the Babylon article of Iranica records that the city's citizens had been "deeply offended by the sacrilegious innovations of Nabonidus" (Cardascia, Babylon).^[9] But in Nabonidus's own inscriptions the same acts are the pious restoration of neglected ancient shrines, the work of a king recovering the proper worship of the gods. He was, on the modern reading, an antiquarian: a ruler fascinated by the deep past of Mesopotamia who excavated the foundation deposits of temples to recover the names of their original builders, restored sanctuaries that had fallen into ruin, and dated his own work by the reigns of kings centuries dead. The very devotion the tradition damns as impiety is, from another angle, an unusually learned reverence for the sacred antiquity of his own land.

The long sojourn at Teima

The strangest episode of the reign, and the one that did him the most political damage, was his prolonged absence from Babylon. For roughly ten years Nabonidus lived not in his capital but at the oasis of Teima (Tayma) in the northern part of central Arabia, where, in Iranica's words, "he appropriated extensive territories" (Dandamayev, Babylonia i). Throughout this absence he "handed over the administration of the territory to his son Belshazzar", the Belshazzar (Akkadian Bel-shar-usur) who would become, through the Book of Daniel, the most famous regent in the ancient world, though he was never king. The reasons for the withdrawal have never been securely explained, and remain one of the genuine puzzles of the period. Modern scholars have proposed a range of motives: the devotion to Sin (Teima and Harran both lay within the moon-god's sphere), the pursuit of the caravan trade of northern Arabia, a strategic interest in the desert routes, or a deliberate withdrawal from a Babylon grown hostile to him. The compendium flags this as unresolved: the sources report the fact of the sojourn and its length, not its purpose.

Whatever its cause, the consequence was grave and specific. The king of Babylon had an indispensable ritual role: each year, at the Akitu or New Year festival, he was required to "take the hand of Marduk" in Esagila, the ceremony by which the god renewed the king's authority and the city's prosperity for the coming year. A king absent in Arabia could not perform it. Through the years of the Teima sojourn the Akitu festival, the central rite of the Babylonian calendar and the visible bond between king, god and city, could not be kept in its proper form. To the Marduk priesthood this was the accumulated grievance of a decade: a king who had raised a rival god, and who was not even present to render Marduk his due. It is this precise failure, the neglected New Year festival, that the Persian propaganda would seize upon, and that made Cyrus's posture as Marduk's restorer so effective.

The alienation of Marduk's priests

By the late 540s Nabonidus's position at home was precarious. Iranica is unambiguous about the internal weakness the religious conflict had produced: "in Babylonia itself the position of Nabonidus was precarious. Influential sections of the priesthood were so dissatisfied with Nabonidus' policies that they were prepared to assist any external enemy of his" (Dandamayev, Babylonia i).^[7] To this was added a second fifth column: the many thousands of deported non-Babylonians settled in the country by earlier Chaldean kings, Judaeans among them, who "viewed the Persians as their liberators." A king estranged from his own priesthood, ruling a capital full of peoples who longed for his enemy, faced the largest and best-equipped army in the world, and faced it, as Iranica notes, "without allies," his own forces worn down by years of desert war in Arabia. The stage the propagandists would later dramatize as a moral reckoning was, in cold political terms, a kingdom hollowed out from within by a religious quarrel.

When Cyrus struck, the grievance became the conqueror's charter. The Cyrus Cylinder, the baked-clay foundation deposit inscribed in Akkadian after the city fell, opens with an indictment of Nabonidus as an impious ruler who had offended Marduk by imposing improper rites, and presents Cyrus as the god's own answer, the righteous prince Marduk sought out to set matters right. In the Cylinder's Babylonian telling the supreme god himself elects the Persian: as one rendering has it, "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, in paraphrase of the Babylonian text)^[1]. The claim is precisely the mirror image of Nabonidus's supposed crime: where the last Babylonian king had raised Sin over Marduk and left the god's festival unkept, Cyrus is made Marduk's chosen restorer, come to take the god's hand as a rightful king should. The Cylinder's account of what Cyrus then did, the restoration of the neglected cults and the return of the displaced gods and peoples, is set out in its own words:

"I returned the images of the gods, who had resided there, to their places and I let them dwell in eternal abodes. I gathered all their inhabitants and returned to them their dwellings." (the Cyrus Cylinder, lines 31–32, trans. Mordechai Cogan)^[1]

Every clause of that programme is an implied charge against Nabonidus: the images returned are those he had gathered into Babylon, the cults restored are those he had let lapse. The propaganda works by making Cyrus the undoing of Nabonidus point for point.

The fall to Cyrus (539 BCE)

The conquest itself was swift, and the Babylonian Chronicle (the soberest ancient account, though it too was composed under Cyrus and is, as Iranica notes, "written in a tone hostile to Nabonidus", Dandamayev, Babylonian Chronicles)^[8] records its stages. In the spring of 539 the Persian army moved down the Diyala valley, where it was joined by Ugbaru (the Gobryas of the Greek tradition), governor of Gutium. In August 539, at the town of Opis on the Tigris, the Persians routed the Babylonian army led by Belshazzar. After Opis there were no major battles. The Persians crossed the Tigris, and Sippar, its defence supervised by Nabonidus himself, capitulated after token resistance on 10 October; Nabonidus fled to Babylon. Two days later, on 12 October, the army of Ugbaru entered Babylon unopposed and took Nabonidus prisoner. Archaeology confirms the Chronicle's report of a bloodless fall: no burn layers, no signs of violent destruction, appear in the stratum of the Persian conquest. On 29 October 539 Cyrus himself entered the city, and, in the Chronicle's account, the people gave him a triumphal welcome; he pronounced words of greeting to the inhabitants, and the rites of the temples went on without interruption. In his own titulary, cut in Babylonian after the city was his, Cyrus took up the whole inheritance of the kingship he had seized:

"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)^[1]

The Greek and biblical traditions dramatized the fall very differently, and their versions are the ones the West remembered. Herodotus (1.188–91) and Xenophon (Cyropaedia 7.5) tell of a besieged city taken by a stratagem, the Persians diverting the Euphrates and entering along the drained riverbed while the Babylonians feasted at a festival, a colourful scene that the archaeological silence and the Chronicle's account of a peaceful surrender make unlikely as literal history. The most enduring image belongs to the Book of Daniel, which stages the fall as a divine judgment delivered at a feast of Belshazzar, when a disembodied hand writes the doom of the kingdom upon the wall:

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

In Daniel it is Belshazzar, called king, who dies that night as Babylon falls; the historical Belshazzar was regent, not king, and it was his father Nabonidus who wore the crown. The book is a late and novelistic composition, and its famous scene is theology, not chronicle, but it fixed "the writing on the wall" and the fall of Belshazzar's Babylon in the Western imagination far more firmly than the cuneiform record ever could. As for the last king himself, the sources agree that Cyrus spared him. By the account preserved in the Chronicle tradition and the later writers, Belshazzar was killed but Nabonidus's life was spared; where he was sent, and how he ended, the record does not say. The oldest continuous kingship in the world passed, without a battle in its capital, to the Persian.

The source problem: propaganda against Nabonidus

Nabonidus is the compendium's clearest early instance of a historiographical trap that recurs across the whole Achaemenid period: a king known chiefly through the writings of those who overthrew or resented him. Iranica states the problem directly. The narratives of the conquest, it observes, are propaganda: "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 it names the mechanism: "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" (Dandamayev, Babylonia i).^[7] The hostile portrait, in other words, is not neutral memory but a deliberate literary product, cast in an inherited royal form and serving Cyrus's need to appear a restorer rather than a conqueror.

Four hostile sources shaped the tradition. The Cyrus Cylinder is the founding document of the Persian version, indicting Nabonidus's impiety and crediting Marduk with electing Cyrus. The Nabonidus Chronicle, though the most reliable ancient account of the fall (Amélie Kuhrt called it the soberest we have), was, as Iranica notes, composed at least in part under Cyrus and in a tone hostile to the fallen king. The so-called "Verse Account of Nabonidus," a poem surviving in fragmentary form, is the most venomous of all: a savage caricature that portrays the king as a blasphemer who insulted the gods and neglected Marduk, almost certainly composed by the Marduk priesthood after the conquest to justify the transfer of the kingship.^[4] And the Book of Daniel, latest and most famous, transmuted the whole business into a parable of divine judgment on a doomed dynasty. The pattern is consistent: each of these voices had reason to blacken Nabonidus, and none is a disinterested witness.

His own voice survives

What makes his case unusually recoverable (and here he differs sharply from Cambyses, who left no voice of his own) is that Nabonidus's own inscriptions survive. Against the tradition of a ruined and neglected kingdom, the king himself claims, in Iranica's summary, "that Babylonia flourished under his rule," and the documentary record bears him out: "several thousand administrative and private legal documents from the time of Nabonidus bear witness to the continuing economic prosperity of the country" (Dandamayev, Babylonia i).^[7] His Harran inscriptions and the Sippar cylinder (the foundation record of his restoration of Ebabbar, the temple of the sun-god Shamash at Sippar) present the antiquarian restorer in his own words: a king who dug for the deposits of ancient builders, rebuilt what time had thrown down, and rendered the gods, as he understood it, their proper honour.^[3] The historian's task with Nabonidus is precisely the inverse of the task with Darius, whose overwhelming self-portrait at Behistun must be distrusted: here a chorus of hostile voices must be corrected against the fragmentary but genuine testimony of the man himself.

The modern reassessment

The figure that emerges from that correction is far removed from the legend. The tradition made Nabonidus a mad or negligent apostate, a king who abandoned his capital for a desert whim, despised his country's gods, and let his kingdom rot until a righteous conqueror came to end him. Modern scholarship, weighing his own inscriptions and the documentary record against the propaganda, has recovered instead a pious and learned antiquarian: a restorer of ancient temples, an excavator of the deep Mesopotamian past, a devotee of the moon-god whose reverence was genuine even where it was politically catastrophic. His central error was not impiety but a miscalculation of power, an attempt to raise the god of his family's devotion over the god of his capital, which set him against a priesthood strong enough to wish, and to work, for his fall. The decade at Teima, whatever drove it, deepened the breach by making the estrangement visible and the New Year festival impossible. The German scholar Wolfram von Soden framed the whole affair, in a study Iranica cites, as a war of "propaganda and counter-propaganda" (von Soden, Kyros und Nabonid)^[10]: Nabonidus's own inscriptions asserting the flourishing of his reign, the Cyrus-era texts asserting its ruin, each a bid for legitimacy over the same events.

For this compendium his significance is twofold. He is, first, the necessary predecessor: the king whose religious quarrel hollowed out Babylon from within and whose fall in 539 gave Cyrus the oldest and richest kingship of the Near East, the event that more than any other made the Persian realm a world empire and set the pattern (the conqueror as pious restorer, working through the local cult and its priesthood) that the Achaemenids would use again in Egypt and elsewhere. He is, second, a lesson in method. To read Nabonidus is to learn to distrust the winners' account, to notice when a king is being described by the men who deposed him, and to set the propaganda against whatever independent testimony survives. That lesson, learned first on the last king of Babylon, is the one the compendium carries forward to every reign that follows.