Nabonidus

Nabonidus reached the throne through a coup, in a kingdom that had grown used to them. When Nebuchadnezzar II died in 562 after a reign of more than forty years, the Chaldean dynasty he had led to its height came apart in a single decade. His son Amel-Marduk was eliminated by his brother-in-law Neriglissar; Neriglissar's young son Labashi-Marduk held the throne for only a few months before he too was removed, and in May 556 the conspirators raised up Nabonidus, a man already advanced in years and outside the royal blood. The instability had a structural root. As the Companion to the Achaemenid Persian Empire observes, the kings of this period "did not succeed in creating a new dynasty": the line "always broke down at the latest in the third generation with the appearance of a successful usurper," and several of these usurpers had no royal ancestry and did not even claim any, a sign of a monarchy whose legitimacy was fraying.^[1]

Nabonidus fitted the pattern. He was, in the older reference formula, "an Aramean, not a Chaldean",^[2] an outsider to the tribal aristocracy that had held Babylon for seventy years, and he made no attempt to attach himself to the previous dynasty. Instead he founded his own, known to scholars as the dynasty of Harran, after the northern Mesopotamian city of his mother and of the moon-god's great temple. His father, Nabu-balatsu-iqbi, was a man of no royal standing, and Nabonidus made no secret of his ordinary birth: his own inscriptions frankly concede the non-royal background.^[1] Where exactly he came from is itself disputed. Dandamayev held that Nabonidus, unlike the Chaldean kings before him, was a leader of an Aramean tribe long settled in northern Mesopotamia;^[3] Finkel and Waters suggest instead a northern family in Assyrian service, the father "an Assyrian official", which would fit the son's later fixation on Harran and his conspicuous borrowing of Assyrian royal forms.^[4][5] Either way he came to a throne he had helped to seize, without the descent that made a Babylonian king, and this weakness at the root of his kingship shaped everything that followed.

The dominant figure in Nabonidus's background was not his father but his mother, Adad-guppi, a devotee of the moon-god who lived to a great age and left one of the more remarkable documents of the reign. Her memorial, carved after her death on twin stelae set up in the temple at Harran, is written as an autobiography in her own voice, and it survives to be read against the propaganda as a rare private testimony. In it she presents herself as a lifelong servant of Sin, passes over in silence the military catastrophe that had left his temple in ruins, and says instead only that the god "became angry with his city and temple and went up to heaven." She describes how, in a dream, Sin himself chose her son Nabonidus to rebuild the temple of Harran.^[4][6]

Whatever the stele's apologetic shaping, its point for the reign is that the devotion which would dominate Nabonidus's kingship was not a royal invention but a family inheritance. He was raised in a household bound to the cult of Sin, and he brought that devotion to the throne rather than discovering it there. Adad-guppi lived until about 547, dying at an age the tradition reckoned well past a hundred; the Nabonidus Chronicle records her death in the same passage that notes a Babylonian army stationed in the north as Cyrus crossed the Tigris, so that the queen-mother's passing and the first shadow of the Persian threat fall together in the record.^[5]

The defining act of the reign was religious. Harran, an ancient seat of the moon-god's worship in Upper Mesopotamia, had been sacked in 610 when the Medes and Babylonians destroyed the last Assyrian resistance there, and its great temple of Sin, the Ehulhul ("House of Rejoicing"), had lain in ruins for half a century. Around 552, with Median troops withdrawn from the region during the war between Media and Persia, Nabonidus rebuilt it. In his own inscriptions the delay itself becomes a charge against others: he claims that the Babylonians could not restore the temple because the Medes, whom he casts as a destructive barbarian flood, were still "roaming around" the country, an ideologically loaded account that makes an enemy people accountable for the god's long homelessness.^[1]

The rebuilding was the visible edge of a wider programme. Nabonidus set out to raise Sin toward a precedence that would rival, and in the priestly telling eclipse, Marduk, the patron and guarantor of Babylon whose temple Esagila was the ritual centre of the kingdom. The collision this produced was sharpened by the theology of the day. Marduk had for centuries been king of the gods, and in Nabonidus's own time Babylonian theologians were pressing the claim further still, recasting the other great gods as mere aspects of a Marduk who was becoming almost the sole god. Sin, by contrast, was a less familiar deity in Babylon, his cult little practised there. To promote him at Marduk's expense, and, most provocatively, to install a statue of the moon-god within Esagila itself, was to strike at the standing of Marduk's priesthood and at the religious identity of the capital.^[4] The older reference synthesis put the political effect plainly: the reforms set Nabonidus at odds with the priests of Marduk in his own capital.^[2]

How this looked depended entirely on where one stood. To the Marduk priesthood and to Cyrus's propagandists it was sacrilege. 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. Both descriptions are of the same programme, and the seam between them runs through the whole of the evidence for the reign.

Set against the tradition of a negligent apostate, Nabonidus's own inscriptions present a ruler unusually preoccupied with the deep past of his land. He was an antiquarian in a precise sense: he had the foundation deposits of ruined temples excavated to recover the names of their original builders, dated his restorations by the reigns of kings centuries dead, and reached back over the Chaldean dynasty to the Assyrian empire for his models. His scholars, he records, unearthed the foundation stone of Naram-Sin of Akkad, a king who had ruled some two millennia before him, and his inscriptions are studded with the names of rulers long dead, from the founders of the Third Dynasty of Ur through Hammurabi to the Assyrian kings of nearly his own day.^[7] He installed his own daughter, En-nigaldi-Nanna, as high priestess of Sin at Ur, reviving an ancient sacred office; the collection of old inscribed objects assembled there, one of them fitted with an explanatory label, has been called, half in jest, the oldest museum in the world.^[7] His titulary, "king of the world, great king, strong king, king of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four quarters," was, Matthew Waters notes, a formula no other Babylonian king had used, an Assyrian style borrowed from Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal; and Nabonidus was the only Babylonian king to name Assyrian predecessors explicitly. His fixation on Harran, on this reading, answered to his family's northern origins as much as to devotion.^[5] The Sippar cylinder, his foundation record for the restoration of Ebabbar, the temple of the sun-god Shamash, shows the same learned reverence at work: a king who rebuilt what time had thrown down and rendered the gods, as he understood it, their due.^[8]

The standard modern edition of these texts, Hanspeter Schaudig's collection of the inscriptions of Nabonidus and of Cyrus together with the hostile pamphlets that grew up around them, gathers the king's own words and the counter-literature side by side, and its very title, setting the royal inscriptions against the "Tendenzschriften" (tendentious writings) of the other party, frames the source problem exactly.^[9] Read on their own, the inscriptions describe a reign of restoration and prosperity, and the documentary record supports the claim: the several thousand administrative and legal tablets that survive from these years attest a country whose economy went on functioning through the reign, and belie the ruined kingdom of the propaganda.^[2]

The strangest episode of the reign, and the one that did him the most political harm, was his long absence from his own capital. For about a decade, from around 553 to 543, Nabonidus lived not in Babylon but at the oasis of Teima (Tayma) in north-western Arabia. He did not merely visit it. According to the sources he killed the local ruler, took the town, built a palace there in the manner of Babylon, and held the surrounding oases of the Hijaz, fortifying and garrisoning his desert seat and settling into it for years on end.^[1][10]

The reasons have never been securely established, and remain one of the genuine puzzles of the sixth century. The explanations modern scholars have offered fall into a few families. The most traditional ties the move to the cult of Sin, since Teima, like Harran, lay within the moon-god's Arabian sphere, and reads the withdrawal as an act of devotion, even of proselytising zeal; this is the reading, Waters notes, on which Nabonidus "has been portrayed in a negative light, even as a crazed lunatic."^[5] A second family is economic and strategic: control of Teima and the northern Arabian oases secured the caravan routes of the incense trade and the desert approaches to Babylonia, a policy consistent with the defensive, consolidating temper that the Neo-Babylonian kings brought to a shrunken empire.^[1] Bruno Landsberger read the years in Arabia as a deliberate attempt to gather the Aramean, Sin-worshipping tribes of the region into a barrier against the rising power of Iran, a reading that makes the desert king a strategist rather than the estranged scholar of the caricature.^[3] A third reads the absence politically, as a withdrawal from a Babylon grown hostile to him, or as an attempt to build a base of power and revenue independent of Marduk's priesthood and the entrenched urban elites. The evidence does not decide between them. The sources report the fact of the sojourn and its length; they do not disclose its purpose, and the motive stays out of reach.

Whatever drove it, the consequence was grave and specific. The king of Babylon had one ritual duty that no one could discharge for him. 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 fortune for the coming year. A king in Arabia could not perform it, and a regent could not stand in his place. Year after year through the Teima decade the central rite of the Babylonian calendar went unkept, and the priesthood recorded the failure with pointed regularity. The Nabonidus Chronicle notes it in the flat, damning idiom of a temple record:

Nabonidus, the king, stayed in Teima. … The king did not come to Babylon for the ceremony … the god Nabû did not come to Babylon, the god Bel did not go out of Esagila in procession; the festival of the New Year was omitted.

the Nabonidus Chronicle (ABC 7), trans. via Finkel^[11]

To the clergy of Marduk 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 was this precise failure that the Persian propaganda would later seize on, and that made Cyrus's posture as Marduk's restorer so effective.

Through the years in Arabia the government of Babylonia was left to Nabonidus's eldest son, Belshazzar (Akkadian Bel-shar-usur). The Verse Account renders the handover in its own hostile verse: the king, it says, "entrusted his military camp to his first born," and then "gave it (all) up, entrusted the kingship to him (sc. his son), and himself set out on a far journey."^[10] The arrangement was real, and it was consequential, but it stopped short of kingship. Belshazzar was crown prince and viceroy, never king, for the crown of Babylon could not pass to him while his father lived and stayed away.

The administrative record shows him governing in earnest. Belshazzar ran the affairs of state in his father's absence, and the interventions of the crown in the great temples during these years, the removal and later restoration of high temple officers at Uruk and Sippar, were carried through under his authority, part of a tightening of royal control over the temple administrations that the reign pursued.^[1] Business and legal documents were dated and sworn in his name alongside his father's, so that the cuneiform record preserves, in its dry way, exactly the co-regency that the biblical tradition would later garble. It is this historical Belshazzar, viceroy of an absent king, whom the Book of Daniel would remember, four centuries on, as the doomed last king of Babylon.

By the late 540s Nabonidus's position at home was precarious, and the religious quarrel had hollowed out his support from within. Nabonidus returned to Babylon around 543, most probably not from any easing of the tensions in the city but because the rising power of Cyrus, now master of Media, Lydia and the Iranian plateau, had grown too dangerous to watch from the desert.^[4] His return did not mend the breach. Influential sections of the priesthood had been so estranged by his policies that they were prepared to welcome an outside deliverer, and the country held, besides, large populations of deportees settled by the Chaldean kings, among them the Judaeans, who had their own reasons to look on the Persians as liberators.^[2] A king cut off from his own priesthood, ruling a capital full of the discontented, would meet the largest and best-equipped army of the age with his own forces worn by years of desert war.

What the propagandists would later dress as a moral reckoning was, in cold political terms, a kingdom divided against itself by a religious dispute. The scholarship has cautioned that even this account of an all-consuming Sin-versus-Marduk conflict is refracted through the grievance it explains. Waters notes that the negative image of Nabonidus was "probably augmented (initiated?)" by the resentment of the priesthoods whose sanctuaries felt slighted, and then "enhanced" by Cyrus's propaganda, which those same Babylonian priesthoods helped to shape.^[5] How far the reign's religious character is Nabonidus's own doing, and how far it is the shape his enemies gave it after the fact, is a question the sources cannot fully answer.

When Cyrus struck in the autumn of 539 the grievance became the conqueror's charter, and the campaign itself was swift. The Persian advance broke the Babylonian army at Opis on the Tigris, took Sippar without a fight, and entered Babylon unopposed; the city that ringed itself with walls the Greeks counted a wonder of the world opened its gates almost without resistance. The campaign of 539, the near-bloodless entry, recorded in a coordinated set of Babylonian sources (see the fall of Babylon). What remains of Nabonidus himself in that year is his own end. He had supervised the defence of Sippar in person; when it fell he fled to Babylon, and there, after the city was taken, he was captured and passed into Persian hands.^[11]

Cyrus spared him. The Cyrus Cylinder records only that Nabonidus was delivered up, and the Chronicle does not follow him further, but two later Babylonian traditions agree that his life was spared and that he was sent away. The so-called Dynastic Prophecy, a text of the Seleucid age, says the defeated king was exiled; and Berossus, the Babylonian priest who wrote in Greek in the early third century, supplies the destination. In his account Nabonidus surrendered before a siege could begin, and Cyrus "received him graciously, exiled him from Babylonia, but gave him Carmania," the country of modern Kirman in southern Iran, where the last king of Babylon lived out his days and died.^[12] The treatment fits a pattern the Greek tradition also attached to Cyrus's sparing of Croesus, the merciful victor granting the deposed king a distant estate. The oldest continuous kingship in the world thus passed to the Persian without a battle in its capital, and its last holder ended not on a scaffold but in comfortable exile at the empire's edge.

Nearly every ancient narrative of Nabonidus was written by his enemies, and they worked, as the modern scholarship stresses, in concert. The contemporary Babylonian texts that tell of the conquest, the Nabonidus Chronicle, the Cyrus Cylinder, and the Verse Account, were, in the Companion's summary, "all commissioned by Cyrus or written under his supervision," a coordinated body of writing that praised the incoming king, stressed his closeness to Marduk, and set him as the bright counterpart to the reviled Nabonidus.^[1] The older reference synthesis reached the same verdict: the conquest narratives are deliberate propaganda, compiled by Babylonian priests to the new regime's order and modelled on the royal inscriptions of Assurbanipal.^[2] They are not neutral memory but a literary product cast in an inherited royal form, and their purpose was to make Cyrus a restorer rather than a conqueror.

The sharpest of these voices is the Verse Account of Nabonidus, a fragmentary Akkadian poem almost certainly composed by the Marduk priesthood after the conquest. It is a sustained caricature. It has the king abandon the New Year festival in his own mouth, "I shall omit the festival, the New Year Festival I shall order to cease"; it follows him to "Tema in the midst of Amurru," where "he slew the prince of Tema with weapons" and slaughtered its people; and, most damagingly, it mocks his claims to learning, putting into his mouth a grandiose boast of secret wisdom, "I am wise; I am knowledgeable; I have seen hidden things," before staging a scene in which he lectures the assembled scholars on the true symbol of the temple and browbeats them into agreement.^[10] Behind the satire lies a real and recognisable target: the antiquarian king proud of his esoteric knowledge, turned by his enemies into a deluded fool. The Cyrus Cylinder performs the same reversal in the register of theology, opening with an indictment of Nabonidus's impiety and presenting Cyrus as the righteous king Marduk sought out to set matters right, its charges against the old king turning on the same neglect of the gods (see the Cyrus Cylinder).^[13]

The charge of madness was made in Babylon and made to stick. Nabonidus was, in Finkel's summary of the Verse Account's effect, "described by the Babylonians as 'mad'," a condemnation that "by Babylonian standards was justifiable" given his neglect of Marduk. Its afterlife is one of the curiosities of the tradition: the image of the mad Babylonian king was transferred in later memory from Nabonidus to his more famous predecessor Nebuchadnezzar, and it is Nebuchadnezzar, not Nabonidus, whom the Book of Daniel drives mad to crawl on all fours in a field.^[4] A fragmentary text from Qumran, the Prayer of Nabonidus, preserves the older form, in which it is Nabonidus who is stricken and healed at Teima, and supports the view that Daniel's madness scene grew from a memory of the last king of Babylon.^[3]

The Greeks knew of a last Babylonian king but knew him at a distance and under another name. Herodotus calls him Labynetos, a Hellenised form usually, though not quite certainly, identified with Nabonidus, and hands down a garbled genealogy: he makes this Labynetos the son of a queen Nitocris and of a father also named Labynetos, the sort of thin, repetitive royal lineage, Waters observes, that Greek authors tended to invent where their information ran out.^[5] Herodotus's account of the fall of Babylon, with its diverted Euphrates and its citizens dancing through a festival while the Persians waded in along the drained riverbed, is contradicted by the contemporary Babylonian record and belongs to the reception of the event rather than to its history. Xenophon tells a similar tale of a diverted river and a Babylonian king killed in his palace during a feast.^[14] Berossus, writing from within the Babylonian tradition, gives the truer shape, naming the king Nabonnedos, sparing his life, and sending him to Carmania.

The most enduring image of all is the least historical. The Book of Daniel sets the end on the night of Belshazzar's feast, at which a disembodied hand writes the kingdom's doom on the wall; it makes Belshazzar the last king of Babylon and lets Nabonidus vanish from the story altogether.^[15] The scene is theology, not chronicle, a late Hellenistic composition some four centuries after the event, and the feast itself belongs to the account of the city's fall rather than to the reign. Its bearing on Nabonidus is narrower and real: the doomed figure of the legend was in truth his son and viceroy Belshazzar, a regent and never a king, and it is chiefly through Daniel that his name came down at all, the cuneiform record only later restoring his real rank.

The recovery of Nabonidus is one of the successes of modern Assyriology, and it turns on holding his own inscriptions and the documentary record against the propaganda. The tradition made him 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 ended him. Weighed against his own evidence, that figure dissolves. The reign shows a functioning economy in its thousands of tablets, a king of conspicuous learning and piety in his inscriptions, and a religious policy that, however it estranged Marduk's priests, was devotion and not derangement. Amélie Kuhrt's caution captures the shift in a phrase: for all that the priestly texts vilify him mercilessly, "Nabonidus's reputation was not consistently negative," and the winners' portrait cannot simply be taken as his measure.^[16] The rehabilitation was carried furthest by Paul-Alain Beaulieu, whose study of the reign, and whose later reconsideration of "Nabonidus the mad king," reread the Harran and Babylon stelae as the self-presentation of a serious and traditional ruler rather than the ravings the tradition alleged.^[17]

The open question is not the fairness of the hostile portrait but how much of the reign's religious drama is Nabonidus's own and how much his enemies' construction. A. Leo Oppenheim, writing in the Cambridge History of Iran, argued that the whole opposition of the mad king and the saviour king "should be recognized as mainly a propaganda device, created for political reasons," and that the conflict which brought Nabonidus down "need not have been primarily a religious one," even though the age expressed it in religious terms.^[18] On this reading the elevation of Sin was real, but the picture of a fanatic wrecking his own kingdom for the moon-god is the shape the victors gave a more ordinary struggle over power and revenue between a king and an entrenched priesthood. Kuhrt has pressed the caution furthest: since almost all the evidence for popular hatred of Nabonidus comes from the very texts written to justify the Persian conquest, the degree to which "Nabonidus promoted the cult of Sin and the discontent it unleashed" may well have been "exaggerated by modern scholars", and the idea of a king loathed by his subjects reflects the success of Cyrus's propaganda more than any measurable fact.^[19] Against this, others hold the religious breach genuine and central, the installation of Sin in Esagila a deliberate provocation a Marduk clergy defending its primacy could not forgive; Waters, weighing the same evidence, judges that the clash between the king's promotion of the moon-god and the priesthood's resistance "seems to reflect a real tension", and "was not simply a propagandistic device post eventum."^[4][5] Oppenheim added a further complication that resists any tidy resolution: the hostile caricature is "not at all incongruous" with the self-portrait of Nabonidus's own inscriptions, which, exceptionally for the genre, present a king guided by dreams and visions.^[18] What is missing is a source less committed than either the king's apology or the priests' invective, and until one appears the intent behind the Teima decade and the promotion of Sin stays beyond recovery.

Nabonidus bears on the Achaemenid story in two ways. He is, first, the predecessor who made the conquest possible. A king estranged from his own priesthood and long absent from his capital had hollowed Babylon from within, and in taking it Cyrus gained a working method of conquest as much as a great prize: rule through the local cult, take up the offices the old king had let lapse, and stand before the city as the gods' chosen deliverer rather than a foreign master. The very charges laid against Nabonidus, the neglected gods and the lapsed festival, furnished the acts by which Cyrus made himself a Babylonian king, a method his successors would use again when they took up the throne of a conquered land.

He is, second, a lesson in method that reaches well beyond his own reign. 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. The task with him is the exact inverse of the task with Darius, whose overwhelming self-portrait at Behistun must be treated with suspicion: here a chorus of hostile voices has to be corrected against the fragmentary but genuine testimony of the man himself. That discipline, worked out first on the last king of Babylon, applies to every reign of the empire that his fall began.