Topic: propaganda (1)

• PersonNabonidus

  The last king of Babylon (r. 556–539 BCE), and the man whose fall handed the ancient Near East's richest and holiest kingdom to Cyrus, turning the Persian realm into a Mesopotamian empire. An Aramean who seized a throne he was not born to, Nabonidus is remembered above all for two things his enemies never forgave: an extraordinary religious policy that raised the moon-god Sin, whose temple at Harran he rebuilt, toward precedence over Marduk, the supreme god of Babylon; and an unexplained decade-long absence at the desert oasis of Teima in Arabia, during which his son Belshazzar governed Babylon in his place. Those years estranged the Marduk priesthood, whose Akitu (New Year) festival could not be kept in the king's absence, and it was exactly this grievance that Cyrus exploited: the Persian conqueror entered Babylon in 539 posing as Marduk's chosen restorer, come to undo Nabonidus's impieties. He is therefore the compendium's foundational case of the hostile source, for nearly everything the tradition says of him, the [[the-cyrus-cylinder|Cyrus Cylinder]], the Nabonidus Chronicle, the so-called 'Verse Account,' the Book of Daniel, is Persian or pro-Marduk propaganda, even as his own inscriptions survive to tell a different story. Modern scholarship has largely rehabilitated him: not the mad or negligent apostate of the legend, but a pious antiquarian and restorer of ancient temples, undone by a conflict with a powerful priesthood and by the arrival of [[cyrus-the-great|Cyrus]]. His deposition is treated in full at [[the-fall-of-babylon]].