Babylon

Babylon is a group of mounds on the east bank of the Euphrates in the alluvial plain of southern Iraq. The largest are Babil, the northern palace mound, Qasr over the Southern Palace, Amran ibn Ali over the temple complex of Esagila, and Homera. Robert Koldewey excavated the site for the German Oriental Society across eighteen seasons from 1899 to 1917, the longest single campaign the mound has had. He recovered the plan of Nebuchadnezzar's city: the Processional Way, the Ishtar Gate, the Southern Palace with its throne room, the double city wall, the bridge piers in the river and the platform of the ziggurat Etemenanki. His popular report is Das wieder erstehende Babylon (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1913), translated as The Excavations at Babylon (London: Macmillan, 1914). The glazed brick panels went to Berlin, where the reconstructed Ishtar Gate stands in the Pergamon Museum. What the digging produced touches Scripture at several points. Nebuchadnezzar II stamped his building bricks with his own name and titles, calling himself provider of Esagila and Ezida and son of Nabopolassar, and thousands of them survive in museums worldwide. The long text known as the East India House Inscription, now in the British Museum, records his building works in detail. The boast of Daniel 4:30, that this is Babylon the Great, which I myself have built by the might of my power, is the same claim in the same terms, in a king's own hand. Two finds bear directly on the exile. Tablet BM 21946, the Babylonian chronicle covering Nebuchadnezzar's early years, records that in his seventh year he besieged the city of Judah, captured it, seized its king and appointed a king of his own choosing. The date converts to March 597 BC, and Donald J. Wiseman published the tablets in Chronicles of Chaldaean Kings (626 to 556 BC) in the British Museum (London: British Museum, 1956). This is the tightest correlation in the Old Testament between a biblical event and a dated foreign record. 2 Kings 24:12 gives the eighth year of the king of Babylon and the chronicle gives the seventh, a difference that comes from two systems for counting regnal years rather than from a conflict about the event. The second find is a set of administrative tablets recovered near the Ishtar Gate, listing oil and barley issued to foreigners resident in Babylon, published by Ernst Weidner in 1939. Among the recipients is Ya'u-kinu, king of the land of Yahudu, with his sons and other Judahites. Jeremiah 52:31 to 52:34 says Jehoiachin was released from prison and given a daily portion at the king's table for the rest of his life, and the tablets are that daily portion in an accountant's hand. The year Jerusalem fell is genuinely disputed. 2 Kings 25:8 dates the burning to the nineteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar, and that converts to either 587 or 586 BC depending on how the regnal years of Zedekiah and Nebuchadnezzar are aligned and which calendar is assumed for Judah. William F. Albright and Abraham Malamat argue 587 BC. Edwin R. Thiele argues 586 BC in The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951). The difference is one year, no doctrine rests on it, and this page names both. Belshazzar is the case where the evidence changed. Until the middle of the nineteenth century no source outside Daniel named him, and the last king of Babylon in the classical writers is Nabonidus, so Daniel 5 was treated as proof that the book was written late and knew the period badly. In 1854 Henry Rawlinson published clay cylinders recovered at Ur which name Bel-shar-usur, the eldest son of Nabonidus, in a prayer for the king's son. Further texts filled the picture. The Nabonidus Chronicle records that Nabonidus stayed at Tema in Arabia for years while the king's son was in the land, and the Verse Account of Nabonidus says Nabonidus entrusted the kingship to his son. Raymond P. Dougherty assembled the case in Nabonidus and Belshazzar (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929), and read Daniel's offer of the third place in the kingdom at 5:29 as the highest post a co-regent could give, since the first two were taken. Two things stand honestly beside that. The inscriptions establish that Belshazzar existed, that he was the son of Nabonidus and that he exercised royal authority in Babylon, and they do not give him the formal royal titulary, which is where the remaining discussion sits. And Daniel calls Nebuchadnezzar his father. The usual answer, that Semitic usage takes father for an ancestor or a royal predecessor, is old, well attested and accepted by many, and some scholars hold it insufficient. Darius the Mede is still unresolved. Daniel 5:31 says Darius the Mede received the kingdom at the age of sixty-two, and no text outside Daniel names such a ruler. Four proposals are on the table. John C. Whitcomb argued in Darius the Mede (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1959) that he is Gubaru, the governor Cyrus installed over Babylon. Donald J. Wiseman proposed in 1965 that Daniel 6:28 should be read as the reign of Darius, even the reign of Cyrus, which makes Darius a second throne name of Cyrus himself. Older commentators, Jamieson, Fausset and Brown among them, followed Xenophon and identified him with Cyaxares II. Much of critical scholarship holds the figure unhistorical. This page names the four and settles nothing. The fall of the city has one contemporary account and two later Greek ones, and they do not say the same thing. The Nabonidus Chronicle records that in Tishri of Nabonidus's seventeenth year the army of Cyrus entered Babylon without a battle, under Ugbaru governor of Gutium, and that Cyrus himself entered some days later. That converts to October 539 BC. Herodotus in Histories 1.191 and Xenophon in Cyropaedia 7.5 both say the Persians diverted the Euphrates and walked in along the riverbed while the city was at a festival. The chronicle is contemporary and says only that the city was taken without a fight; the Greek accounts are later narrative. Daniel 5 describes the feast and the death and says nothing about the tactics. The classical sources and the excavation disagree about the walls as well. Herodotus in 1.178 gives the city as a square of 120 stades a side with a wall fifty royal cubits thick and two hundred high, while Koldewey's excavated circuit is far smaller, and most archaeologists treat the figures as exaggerated or as measuring an outer defensive system rather than the city wall. The Cyrus Cylinder belongs beside all of this and is often asked to carry more than it says. Found at Babylon in 1879 by Hormuzd Rassam and now British Museum 90920, it is Cyrus's own account of taking the city: Marduk chose him, he entered peacefully, he restored sanctuaries and returned gods and peoples to their cities. It never mentions the Jews, Judah or Jerusalem, and it orders no rebuilding of a temple there. What it establishes is a Persian policy of restoring displaced cults and populations, which is the policy Ezra 1 describes being applied to Judah. That is strong corroboration of the setting and it is not a copy of the decree. Etemenanki, the house that is the foundation of heaven and earth, was the ziggurat of Marduk beside Esagila, and Koldewey cleared its foundation. Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar built and rebuilt it in the seventh and sixth centuries BC, and a cuneiform text now called the Esagila Tablet gives its stages and dimensions. Three positions are held on its relation to Genesis 11. The first is that Etemenanki is the tower of Genesis 11, or stands where that tower stood, which is the identification held from antiquity onward and printed in most Bible dictionaries and atlases; the argument is that Genesis sets the story in Shinar, describes baked brick and bitumen, which is Mesopotamian construction exactly, and calls the place Babel, which is the city's own name. The second is that Genesis 11 describes an earlier structure of the same kind and the Neo-Babylonian ziggurat is its distant successor, since the Genesis account sits many centuries before Nabopolassar and what Koldewey excavated is a sixth-century rebuild. The third is that the link is thematic rather than archaeological, and that no excavated course of brick can be tied to the account. The honest statement is that Genesis 11 describes the kind of building Mesopotamia built, in the place Mesopotamia built it, and that no excavated stage of Etemenanki has been shown to be the tower of Genesis 11. The desolation oracles are read three ways as well. Isaiah 13:20 says Babylon will never be inhabited and Jeremiah 51:37 says it will become a heap without inhabitant, and what the ground shows is a long decline rather than a sudden erasure. The city stayed alive under the Persians. Alexander died there in 323 BC having begun clearing Etemenanki with the intention of rebuilding it. Seleucus I founded Seleucia on the Tigris about 305 BC and the population drifted there, and by the Parthian period the site was largely abandoned and has held no city since. Some readers take the oracles as fulfilled in that long abandonment, and Matthew Henry cites the twelfth-century traveller Benjamin of Tudela as an eyewitness to the ruin. Others hold that a fulfilment is still to come, taking the comparison to Sodom and Gomorrah in Isaiah 13:19 and the Day of the LORD language of 13:9 to 13:11 as requiring a sudden overthrow that has not happened. Others read a near and far pattern and take both. This page names the three and does not adjudicate. One more fact about the site belongs here and nothing beyond it: from the late 1970s onward new brick walls were raised on the ancient foundations of the Southern Palace and other structures, archaeologists have criticised that work for damaging original fabric and for building on unexcavated deposits, and conservation of the damage is part of the site's management. Finally, a word about the pictures. The engravings on this page are Gustave Doré's, drawn from imagination in 1866 rather than from the site. This site holds no photograph of the mounds, no image of the reconstructed Ishtar Gate or the Processional Way, no image of the Cyrus Cylinder or a ration tablet, and no map of Mesopotamia, so every archaeological claim above stands on the texts and reports cited beside it.