The Fall of Babylon (539 BCE)

Babylon was the last and richest of Cyrus's conquests. In a single decade the king of Anshan and Persia had thrown down the Median kingdom of Astyages and stripped Croesus of Lydia, and by 539 only Babylonia, the wealthiest land of the Near East, still stood between him and mastery of it all. The Babylonia he attacked was divided against itself, and the fracture reached the throne. Nabonidus, who took power in 556, favoured the moon-god Sin over Marduk, the god in whose temple, the Esagila, the kingship of Babylon was conferred, and for roughly a decade he abandoned the capital altogether for the Arabian oasis of Tema, leaving his son Belshazzar as regent (see Nabonidus for the reign, the Sin programme and the years in Arabia). One consequence of that absence bears directly on the conquest. The central rite of the Babylonian year was the Akitu, the New Year festival, at which the king clasped the hand of Marduk and so renewed his title to rule. A regent could not stand in for the king, and year after year, while Nabonidus lingered in Arabia, the festival went uncelebrated, an omission the Marduk priests recorded with pointed regularity. By 539 the king of Babylon had estranged the god who made kings and let the rite that legitimated kingship lapse, and a part of his own capital, priests and displaced peoples alike, was ready to greet a deliverer.

The military history is unusually well fixed because it survives in the Nabonidus Chronicle, a terse temple record that dates its notices to the day. Through the summer of 539 the divine images of the outlying towns were being carried into Babylon, Borsippa, Cutha and Sippar excepted, a measure Briant read as an attempt to keep the country's gods beyond Persian reach, and one the priests would recall as an impiety, the gods dragged from their proper homes.^[1] The Persian army came down the valley of the Diyala, the route Herodotus also describes, and there it was joined by the officer the Chronicle calls governor of the land of Gutium, whose name is written Ug/Gubaru and who would deliver the city.^[2]

The decision came at Opis, on the Tigris some forty miles above Babylon, where Nabonidus had massed his forces to hold the river crossing. In the month Tashritu, late September to October, the two armies met, and the Chronicle's notice is stark:

When Cyrus did battle at Opis on the [bank of] the Tigris against the army of Akkad, the people of Akkad retreated. He carried off the plunder (and) slaughtered the people.

Nabonidus Chronicle iii.12–14, trans. Kuhrt^[2]

The battle broke Babylonian resistance in the field. On the fourteenth of Tashritu, 10 October, Sippar fell without a fight and Nabonidus took flight; two days later, on the sixteenth, the forces of Ug/Gubaru entered Babylon unopposed, and the fugitive king, returning, was taken there. Persian troops sealed off the Esagila so that, in the Chronicle's insistence, no rite was interrupted and no festival date missed. The great city, ringed by the double wall the Greeks numbered among the wonders of the world, changed hands without a siege.

Seventeen days after his general took Babylon, on the third of the following month, Arahsamnu, corresponding to 29 October 539, Cyrus made his own entry. The Chronicle marks it with the rituals of accession rather than the spectacle of conquest. The haru-vessels were filled in his presence, very probably the moment he took on the Babylonian regalia, so that the entry doubled as an investiture in the old form; then "Peace was imposed on the city, the proclamation of Cyrus was read to all of Babylon", and the conqueror at once "appointed Gubaru, his governor, over the local governors of Babylon", an administration taking hold within days.^[2] The independence of Babylonia, the last of the great Mesopotamian kingdoms, was over.

The months after the entry are recorded with the same day-dating, and they show a conquest settling into a reign rather than a country in upheaval. Between Kislimu and Addaru, through the winter, the divine statues Nabonidus had gathered into the capital were sent back to their own cities, the reversal of his hoarding that the Chronicle sets down without comment: "the gods of Akkad which Nabonidus had brought down to Babylon returned to their places".^[2] The transition was not without its shadows. On the night of the eleventh of Arahsamnu, only days after Cyrus entered, Ug/Gubaru died; in the following month the king's wife, the queen usually identified with Cyrus's Cassandane, died also, and a national mourning of six days was kept across Akkad, the people baring their heads.^[2] At the New Year of 538, the festival that Nabonidus's absence had so long suspended was held again, and the Chronicle records that Cyrus's son and heir, Cambyses, went to the temple of Nabu and received the sceptre, apparently installed as sub-king of Babylonia under his father's supervision. The arrangement seems to have lasted no more than a year; its purpose is unknown, perhaps an interim device to cover the king's absence.^[3] The Chronicle's damaged closing lines add one telling image, if the restoration of the broken line is right: the new king, whom Kuhrt prints as "[Cyrus(?)]", performing the Babylonian ritual "in Elamite attire", taking the hand of Nabu in the dress of the king of Anshan, the old rite honoured in Persian clothes.^[2] Everyday control of the country stayed for some years in the hands of Nabu-ahhe-bulli, who had served Nabonidus as governor, a continuity of personnel that the tablets attest across the whole first generation of Persian rule.^[3]

Behind the Chronicle's laconic notices lies the sharpest problem the event presents: nobody agreed on how Babylon actually fell. Four ancient traditions give four different answers, and they cannot all be right. The contemporary cuneiform, the Chronicle and the Cylinder, insist the city was taken "without battle". The Greek writers, Herodotus and Xenophon, describe a determined siege broken by the diversion of the Euphrates. The Book of Daniel places it on the night of a doomed royal feast. Berossus, a Babylonian priest writing in Greek, has Cyrus storm the city and raze its outer walls. The versions diverge not on detail but on the essential character of the event, peaceful surrender or violent capture, and the divergence is old, already fixed within a century or two of 539.

The contemporary record is the better witness, and it says the city was not stormed. Two independent controls support it. The Chronicle is not a Persian text but a Babylonian temple document, with no motive to spare a Babylonian defeat; and excavation of the conquest levels at Babylon turned up no burn layer and no trace of violent destruction, exactly what a surrender, and not a sack, would leave.^[4] Yet the "without battle" formula cannot be taken at full face. The Chronicle's notice of Opis, recorded in the same breath and by the same source, places a real engagement behind the near-bloodless entry into the capital. What the notice says is itself contested. On the standard reading, followed by Kuhrt and Briant, Cyrus broke the Babylonian army and put the people of Opis to the sword;^[4] some Assyriologists instead re-read the two signs of the damaged line so that it is the people of Akkad who revolted, against Nabonidus, and his own side that did the killing, and Grayson, whose edition underlies the usual translation, summarised the chronicle as recording the mild treatment of the Babylonians by the Persians.^[5] The massacre is thus a translation choice on a damaged line, not a settled fact (see Cyrus the Great). What both readings share is a real fight at Opis, behind and against the record's picture of a walkover. Briant argued that the campaign's apparent speed is partly an illusion produced by the Chronicle's compressed manner, its author caring nothing for the detail of a campaign, and that hostilities had probably begun well before the notices that survive.^[1] Gauthier Tolini pressed the point further, reconstructing from the day-dates an actual assault: a detachment under Ug/Gubaru crossing the Euphrates on a forced march and forcing the Enlil Gate in the city's outer line of defence, the heavy damage to the wall there, repaired some three months later, standing as the physical trace of the fighting.^[6] On this reading, now taken up in the standard survey, the taking of Babylon "without battle" concealed a sharp local action, the shield-troops of Gutium then sealing the Esagila against plunder before the ceremonial entry.^[3] The contemporary account is thus reliable on the outcome, a city that did not fall to a formal siege, and unreliable as a picture of a bloodless walkover.

The four traditions are also a lesson in what each kind of source chooses to omit. The battle at Opis, the one certain large engagement of the war, appears in none of the propaganda: the Cylinder passes over it in silence, and it would be entirely unknown but for the Chronicle's single dry notice.^[7] A royal inscription celebrating a god-given deliverance had no use for a hard-fought battle, still less a massacre, and a Greek tradition reaching after a clever stratagem kept no memory of one. Only the temple chronicle, a terse annal entering its year with no case to argue, set the engagement down at all, and it is the more trustworthy for having none. The moral is general for the period: the least literary source is often the most reliable, and the fullest and most vivid the most shaped.

Cyrus proclaimed his victory in the oldest idiom of the land he had taken. The Cyrus Cylinder, a clay barrel 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 (see the Cyrus Cylinder). In its narrative Marduk, disgusted by the impiety of Nabonidus and the suffering of his people, searches the lands for a just ruler, finds Cyrus, and marches into Babylon at his side:

He sought a just ruler to suit his heart, he took him by the hand: Cyrus, king of Anshan, he called, for dominion over the totality he named his name.

The Cyrus Cylinder, line 12, trans. Kuhrt^[8]

The conqueror then presents the taking of the greatest city on earth as an entry in peace, a deliverance and not a sack, under the protection of the city's own god:

My numerous troops marched peacefully through Babylon. I did not allow any troublemaker to arise in the whole land of Sumer and Akkad.

The Cyrus Cylinder, line 24, trans. Kuhrt^[8]

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, Cyrus, king of the universe, mighty king, king of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the four quarters, son of Cambyses, great king, king of Anshan, grandson of Cyrus, great king, king of Anshan, descendant of Teispes, great king, king of Anshan, eternal seed of kingship

The Cyrus Cylinder, lines 20–22, trans. Kuhrt^[8]

Behind the theology lies a genuine and consequential policy. Cyrus restored the cults Nabonidus was charged with neglecting; he returned the divine images to their cities; he lifted a hated labour-service laid to the old king's account; and he permitted deported peoples to return home. The reversal of the Mesopotamian practice of deportation was real, at least for the gods, and it is confirmed by the independent Chronicle notice that the gods of Akkad went back to their places over the winter.

The two fullest contemporary witnesses to the fall are works of the Marduk priesthood, the very corporation Nabonidus had alienated and Cyrus restored to its cult and its revenues. Kuhrt placed the Cylinder in a conventional Babylonian genre of legitimation, the building inscription in which "the right to rule of the new king is stressed by vilifying his defeated (or deposed) predecessor".^[4] The frame the Chronicle and the Cylinder share, the impious Nabonidus hated by gods and men, the righteous Cyrus sent by Marduk to set things right, is precisely the story that served the incoming king and the priests who wrote for him. Dandamayev judged the whole dossier coordinated propaganda, drawn up by Babylonian priests to the conqueror's order on older Assyrian models.^[9] Its fullest surviving piece is the Verse Account of Nabonidus, a poem that catalogues the old king's heresies and cruelties, the nobles put to the sword and the merchant's road blocked, and closes with Cyrus undoing his works and restoring the normal order.^[10] The Verse Account was very probably composed as a direct companion to the Cylinder, its structure running parallel, and it sets out at length the charges the Cylinder makes only in passing, so that the two texts together give the priestly case against Nabonidus at its most complete.^[7] Nor was the propaganda one-sided: Babylonian texts of the other party survive in which Nabonidus is praised and Cyrus condemned, the contest of claim and counter-claim named in the title of Wolfram von Soden's study of the affair.^[11]

Recent work has added a caution against reading even the priestly quarrel as pure invention. The tension between Nabonidus's promotion of the moon-god and the Marduk establishment reflects a real conflict rather than a device composed after the fact, and the support of the Marduk priesthood is plausibly one cause of Cyrus's smooth entry and Nabonidus's capture. That does not make the sources neutral. It means the propaganda was built on a genuine grievance, which is what made it effective.^[7]

The Greeks remembered the fall very differently, and less reliably. Herodotus, writing a century later, describes a Babylon that resisted: its people had stocked the impregnable city against a siege of years, and Cyrus prevailed only by a stratagem. He divided his army, turned the Euphrates aside into a marsh where it entered the city, and sent his men wading in along the drained channel, the water fallen to the height of a man's thigh, while the citizens were caught unawares at a festival.^[12] The detail of the revelling city is the one point at which the Greek account brushes the cuneiform, for the Chronicle too has the fall come at a season of rites:

Those in the outer parts of it were overcome, yet the dwellers in the middle part knew nothing of it; all this time they were dancing and making merry at a festival which chanced to be toward, till they learnt the truth but too well.

Herodotus, Histories 1.191, trans. Godley^[12]

As a whole the tale is contradicted by the contemporary record of a near-bloodless surrender, and the diversion of the Euphrates is very likely a Greek elaboration: Kuhrt reads it as a recurrence of the river-diversion motif Herodotus attaches at Babylon to the earlier queen Nitocris, who was said to have turned the same river aside to build her bridge.^[4] Xenophon, in the historical romance of his Cyropaedia, tells a related version: Cyrus digs a trench round the city, waits for a night "in which all the Babylonians drank and reveled the entire night", opens the trenches to drain the Euphrates, and sends his men down the dry riverbed to storm the palace and kill the Babylonian king. His account has the disaffected noble Gobryas guide the assault, "lead in the quickest way to the king's palace", and end it prostrate in thanks before the gods.^[13] Berossus gives a third and harsher version still, in which Cyrus, far from sparing the city, ordered its outer walls thrown down.^[14] The Greek and Babylonian traditions cannot be reconciled on the manner of the fall, and where they conflict the contemporary cuneiform, for all its bias, is the better guide. The standard commentary draws the balance: the two families of sources agree on two events only, the battle outside the city and the almost peaceful capture of Babylon, and in Herodotus the fall is "reduced to a string of anecdotal descriptions and selected episodes".^[15]

The best-known version of the fall is the one furthest from the events. In the Book of Daniel the city falls during a great banquet at which Belshazzar, cast as reigning king, and his lords drink from the sacred vessels carried off from the Temple in Jerusalem; a disembodied hand writes four words on the plaster, and Daniel is called to construe them:

And this is the writing that was written, Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin.

Daniel 5:25, KJV^[16]

He reads them as the doom of a realm weighed and found wanting, "Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting",^[16] and before the night is out, in the story, Belshazzar dies and the kingdom passes to the Persians. Almost nothing in the scene is historical: Belshazzar was regent and never king, Nabonidus is absent from the book altogether, and the conqueror is not Cyrus but a "Darius the Mede" who answers to no other source. The chapter is a work of the Hellenistic period, roughly four centuries removed from 539, turning the conquest into a parable of divine judgment on royal pride. Its hold on later memory has nonetheless outrun every chronicle: "Belshazzar's feast" and "the writing on the wall" fixed the event for the Western imagination, and the real Belshazzar owes his survival in memory largely to Daniel, who kept the name alive long before cuneiform proved that such a man had governed Babylon.

The officer who delivered Babylon has generated one of the more tangled problems in the dossier, and it is worth setting out because it touches how the conquest was won. The Chronicle names a governor of Gutium, written Ug/Gubaru, whose troops entered the city, and a little later has Cyrus set a man named Gubaru over the local officials of Babylon as his governor; the general who took the city died within days of the entry, on 6 November 539.^[2] Whether the dying general and the appointed governor are one man or two the text does not make clear, and a further Gubaru, attested from 535 as governor of the vast new province of Babylon and Beyond-the-River, adds a third figure who may or may not be either of the first two.^[1] The names are close, the Akkadian spellings overlap, and the sources do not resolve them.

A separate and older identification connects this Ug/Gubaru with the Gobryas of Xenophon's Cyropaedia, the Babylonian noble spurned by his king who defects to Cyrus and leads the assault into Babylon. The equation is tempting, and Briant judged that Xenophon's fiction rests on a genuine memory of Ug/Gubaru as a provincial governor in the Diyala foothills who had gone over to Cyrus some years before the war.^[1] It is nonetheless doubted. Grayson, editing the Chronicle, kept Ugbaru and Gubaru distinct from each other and both apart from Xenophon's Gobryas,^[5] and the caution is sound: the disaffected insider who opens the gates to the conqueror is a folktale motif, the same shape as Herodotus's Harpagus betraying Astyages, and a name-match with a figure in a Greek romance is thin ground for history. The safe position is that a general the Chronicle calls Ug/Gubaru took Babylon and died at once, that the province was soon governed by a Gubaru, and that the classical Gobryas is a literary character who cannot be securely fixed to any of them.

The strongest control on the whole loaded tradition is the least dramatic. Babylonia in the sixth century is documented by tens of thousands of legal and economic tablets, the archives of temples, priestly families and business houses, and these records simply carry on across the year of conquest. As Michael Jursa puts it, the change of masters "left nearly no trace in the nature of the documentary record; archives continue, tablet formats and tablet contents remain unchanged".^[3] The larger archives straddle 539 without a break; what developments can be traced are gradual, not abrupt. Tablets are dated by Cyrus's regnal year within weeks of the entry. The officials of the old regime kept their desks: a scribe at Sippar is attested without interruption from 545 to 500, the highest official at Nippur held his post from the seventeenth year of Nabonidus into the seventh of Cambyses, and the great house of Egibi, active since the early seventh century, went on trading under Cyrus and his successors.^[1] The reader who wants to know whether Babylon was sacked has only to notice that its account-keepers never paused.

That continuity is the deflationary answer to the propaganda on both sides: neither the Cylinder's deliverance nor Herodotus's storming left much mark on the way the city actually lived, which changed remarkably little in the first years. More recent work has qualified the picture without overturning it. Beneath the surface continuity, the routes of tribute and the ceremonies of kingship were being refocused on Iran: Babylonian notables such as the Egibi and, in Egypt, Udjahorresnet, now had to present themselves at royal courts on the plateau, and Babylonian labour was called up for the building works of Persia. The change of ruler was gentle at street level and real at the level of where power now lay.^[3]

With Babylon, Cyrus gained the wealthiest land of his empire and one of its great capitals, and he governed it as a Babylonian king, 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.^[9] The province was the richest of all: in Herodotus's tribute list the ninth district, "Babylon and the rest of Assyria", owed each year "a thousand talents of silver and five hundred boys for castration", the heaviest of the silver assessments, and fed the king and his army for a third of the year.^[12] More than a province, though, the conquest gave the empire a method. Cyrus did not dismantle the Babylonian state or plant a Persian administration over it; he stepped into the existing structure, kept its officials at their posts, its temples in their revenues and its law in force, and ruled through the machinery he found. The restored cults, the repatriated gods and peoples, the conqueror crowned by the god of the conquered, furnished a template of rule through accommodation that the Achaemenids applied from Egypt to Judah and that Darius inherited whole.

The accommodation held only so long as Babylon accepted the Persian as its king. The city that surrendered so quietly rose twice against Darius, and twice more, in a single year, against Xerxes, in the revolts of Bel-shimanni and Shamash-eriba in 484. Their suppression shows in the cuneiform as a targeted purge of the old urban elites, the abrupt end of the great temple archives of northern Babylonia among its traces. An older account had Xerxes go much further, carrying off the golden statue of Marduk, abolishing the Akitu, and striking "king of Babylon" from his own titulature; that reconstruction has been dismantled, for the statue Herodotus mentions was of a man and not the god, the festival had in practice long lapsed, and the royal title faded only gradually, still in occasional use into the reign of Artaxerxes I.^[17] The union of 539 was durable, but it was never unconditional.

The fall of Babylon carries a double weight. It is, first, the making of the Persian empire, the conquest that turned a king of Anshan into lord of the four quarters. It is, second, a paradigm case of the problem that runs through the whole of Achaemenid history, that the sources are interested parties. The fall is not, like the accession of Darius, an event whose very facts are in doubt: its outline is secure, and what is compromised is not the what but the why. The impiety of Nabonidus, the joy of the welcome, the election of Cyrus by Marduk all reach us in the voice of the priesthood his coming enriched. To read the fall well is to keep the bare narrative the Chronicle and the Cylinder agree on, the battle at Opis, the quiet surrender, the entry of Cyrus, while holding their evaluation at arm's length, and to let the account-books, which had no case to argue, correct the interested accounts that did.