The Xenophile Historian

627 to 539 B.C.

	The Fall of Assyria
	Nebuchadnezzar II and Ramses II
	The Final Years of Judah
	Media Marches West
	Zoroastrianism
	By the Rivers of Babylon
	The First Shah of Iran
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In Anatolia, the new king Mursilis II faced many problems of his own, but he handled them all effectively. First was the epidemic that killed the previous two kings; that would be a problem throughout his reign. Judging from the records he left us, Mursilis was remarkably sensitive and honest for an Oriental monarch; he wrote many prayers in which he tried to take the blame for whatever sins his ancestors had committed, in the hope that it would stop the plague. He also had to deal with an overbearing Babylonian queen, Tawananna, the third and last wife of his late father Suppiluliumas. Mursilis eventually banished her from Hattusas because she gave him no peace and introduced disreputable practices at court; he even had to expel a prostitute from the palace.

For ten years Mursilis had to wage petty wars along the frontiers of his country to keep in line those local princes who saw the change of kings in Hattusas as an opportunity to revolt. The most troublesome of these rebels was a sizeable state to the southwest called Arzawa in Anatolian records--possibly Lydia under its third king, Sadyattes. A two-year war took place, ending when the Arzawan king was killed and his state paid tribute to Hattusas again. Mursilis appears to have received help at this point from the Ahhiyawans, another western people. Scholars still debate whether the Ahhiyawans were actually the Greeks (this author believes they were), but plenty of evidence suggests Anatolian-Greek interaction. It is worth investigating whether the name Alaksandu is an Anatolian rendition of Alexander, and if Tawagalawas is how the scribes of Mursilis rendered the Greek name Eteocles. Nor did all the borrowing of words go in one direction--the name Mursilis became the Lydian Myrsus and the Greek Myrsilios. Some have even suggested that the word "amazon" is Anatolian for "a woman [Am] from the land of Azzi," and that Asia comes from the Anatolian name for Phrygia, Assuwa.

Throughout his early years Mursilis prepared the defenses of Carchemish, because he thought that a war with Assyria was inevitable, and that it would begin around that city. Sure enough, it began in 618 B.C., when his brother, the viceroy of Carchemish, died during a religious festival. Several Syrian vassals chose this moment to defect, especially after the Assyrian army appeared in the upper Euphrates valley. The aged but still vigorous monarch of Egypt, Psammetich I, also got involved, marching with his four brigades through Samaria and Syria. Officially Psammetich was just keeping his part of the Assyro-Egyptian alliance, but what he was really doing was restoring the empire of Thutmose III, and as the most active pharaoh Egypt had seen in centuries, he was clearly qualified to do it. Whenever he put down an anti-Assyrian revolt somewhere, he kept the contested territory for Egypt; as for Assyria, he planned to make it a dependent buffer state protecting his realm.

Mursilis arrived at Carchemish before any of his enemies did, and suppressed the immediate revolt without any fuss. Then came some big battles between the armies of Anatolia, Assyria, and Egypt. For three years it was a seesaw struggle in the valley of the Euphrates, with the score tied. In 615 the balance started to tip against Assyria; Mursilis broke through enemy defenses and marched all the way to Babylon. There he was crowned King Nabopolassar of the Babylonians, the name by which he was known for the rest of his life; all of the Anatolian monarchs after him would have both Anatolian and Babylonian names⁽³⁾. Meanwhile the Medes began an invasion of their own through the Zagros mts.

In 614 Nabopolassar made a direct thrust at Assyria, but was turned back. Cyaxares of Media made a feint at Nineveh, then suddenly turned south and captured Assur. Nabopolassar arrived too late to take part in that action, but he hurried to meet Cyaxares under the ruined walls of Assur, and there they agreed to an alliance, sealed with a marriage between Nabopolassar's son, Hattusilis, and Cyaxares' granddaughter, Amytis. A year later they persuaded the Scythians to join the anti-Assyrian coalition, and Assyria's fate was sealed. In 612 B.C. the three allies fell upon Nineveh and burned it to the ground. Sin-shar-ishkun perished in the flames that consumed his palace.

In Syria, a brother of Ashurbanipal took what was left of the Assyrian army and crowned himself King Ashur-uballit II. Yet his days were numbered--in 610 the allies approached his headquarters in Haran, and he abandoned the city to them. One year later he disappeared while trying to recover Haran, and with that the history of the Assyrians ended. No one, so far as we know, sat on the ruins of Nineveh to write a lamentation.

Nebuchadnezzar II and Ramses II

As a youth, Hattusilis did not look like a future world emperor, being beardless, short in stature and feeble in health. His brother Muwatallis had a dream in which the goddess Ishtar appeared and said:

"The years which remain for Hattusil are few. His health is poor. Give him to me: he shall be my priest, and he will return to health."

Nabopolassar heeded the advice and gave the boy to the temple of Ishtar, where he grew up as a priest. For the rest of his life Hattusilis would call himself a priest, and though he would eventually build monuments to many gods, including a huge idol of himself (Daniel 3), he always remained grateful to the one who had restored his health. One of his best known public works is the famous Ishtar Gate of Babylon, covered with blue glazed bricks and reliefs of animals. He stayed in the temple until his father died and Muwatallis-Nergilissar became king; at that point, as we saw above, Hattusilis became a youthful but very capable (and ruthless) general.

That much power in the hands of an individual who is not king is often dangerous. Almost immediately an elder prince named Sin-Uas accused him of plotting to seize the throne. However, they did not produce sufficient evidence; Nergilissar overruled his father's advisor and acquitted Hattusilis.

The changing of monarchs in an Oriental country is always very important, so other matters had to wait until the issues surrounding the throne were settled. The most important of these matters concerned the Levant, or eastern Mediterranean shore. Seti the Great had died of old age in Egypt while Assyria was crumbling, and was succeeded by Ramses II, an egotistical ruler determined to outdo his father both as a builder and as a soldier. In 608 B.C. Ramses (called Necho in the Bible and Herodotus) marched out of Egypt to support the Assyrians, only to find they were gone when he arrived at the Euphrates. He did, however, make the best of the situation by occupying Carchemish before he went home. The possession of Carchemish and the Levant was more important to the Babylonians than it had been to the Assyrians, since most of Babylon's commerce was now directed toward the west. The rise of new economic powers in that direction (Greece, Lydia, Carthage, Etruria and soon Rome) meant that the Mediterranean basin was now replacing the Fertile Crescent as the center of civilization. The kings of Babylon could leave Assyria in ruins, and let the Medes have anything they wanted north and east of the Tigris, but Babylon could not have its gateway to the Mediterranean blocked by the Egyptians. Furthermore, the easiest route for communication and commerce between Iraq and Turkey ran through Syria, meaning that an Egyptian presence there would nearly cut the empire in two. We can thus see the conflict between Ramses and Nebuchadnezzar, with the Jews caught in the middle of it, as a struggle to control the source of Babylon's prosperity.

The Egyptian and Babylonian armies met at Carchemish (called Kadesh, meaning the holy city, in Egyptian records) in the spring of 605 B.C. The battle that followed is described in the annals of both sides, and is the first battle in history where tactical information has survived, so we can tell in detail what happened here.

Ramses arrived on the scene with 20,000 Egyptian troops, divided into four brigades named after Egyptian gods: Amen, Ra, Ptah, and Sutekh (Set). As he approached Carchemish from the southwest he could not see that an Anatolian army of equal size was waiting for him, because it was hiding on the other side of the city. He became overconfident when he found some nomads with pro-Anatolian sympathies, who told him that the enemy had retreated to the north when they heard the Egyptians were coming. Eager to catch up with them, Ramses took the Brigade of Amen and marched around the city's west wall, leaving the other three brigades several miles behind. Meanwhile Nebuchadnezzar (we'll call Hattusilis by his Babylonian name from now on) moved his army south along the east wall, keeping the city between himself and the pharaoh.

As Ramses was preparing to cross the Euphrates, his troops captured two spies in the Egyptian camp, and beat them until they got a confession of what was really happening. Too late, Ramses realized that he had walked into a trap. At that point, 2,500 Anatolian heavy chariots ambushed the Brigade of Ra on the south side of the city, cutting one fourth of the Egyptian army to ribbons. The survivors fled north to the Brigade of Amen, and Nebuchadnezzar pursued them, cutting off Ramses from his reinforcements and avenue of escape. Trapped with his back to the river, Ramses might have ended his career right there, had not Anatolian discipline broken down when they saw an opportunity to raid the pharaoh's camp. Ramses saved himself by driving the nearest enemy soldiers into the river; then the Brigade of Ptah arrived just in time, allowing him to get away. He ran back to Egypt, adorned temples with pictures of his most heroic moment, and fooled the world into thinking that he had won a glorious victory.

Nevertheless, he had abandoned all of the Levant to his enemy. Nebuchadnezzar now marched all the way to Pelusium, the nearest town of Egypt itself, only turning back when he heard news of a barbarian raid on Syria. A brief campaign in Cilicia took care of that problem before the king recalled him a second time. As head of the army, victor of Kadesh-Carchemish and conqueror of the Levant, he was now behaving so much like a real king that his adversaries accused him of coveting the throne again. At the trial he deftly reversed the roles and accused his accuser, charging Sin-Uas with impiety, which had always been a serious offense in the Anatolian law codes. Nergilissar ruled in his brother's favor and delivered Sin-Uas into his hands, and Nebuchadnezzar exiled the old prince's sons to Cyprus.

As it turned out, Sin-Uas was right when he warned the king of his brother's ambitions. In 601 B.C. Nergilissar died and was succeeded by his son, a child named Labash-Marduk. Nine months later Nebuchadnezzar found fault with his nephew and deposed him with the army's help. Labash-Marduk was first sent to a place called Nuhasse (Baalbek in Lebanon?), but that was too near when a counter-coup could set the boy free, so later he exiled the rightful king to a distant unnamed island, either in the Persian Gulf or the Black Sea. Nebuchadnezzar then rewrote the Babylonian history texts to "prove" that he had always been the heir of Nabopolassar, and erased all mention of anyone holding the throne between his father and himself. A copy of the true story, however, was kept in the archives of Hattusas, perhaps because of the guilt he felt from breaking his oaths of loyalty to his brother and nephew, and that is why we now know what really happened.

The Final Years of Judah

Seven years later Zedekiah, offended by the cruelties of Babylon and seduced by the pompousness of Ramses, launched a second revolt against Babylon, and Nebuchadnezzar promptly sent another army to Jerusalem. An Egyptian army came to the rescue, and the Babylonians withdrew from Jerusalem to meet it. From Judah's point of view, however, it was only a temporary reprieve; the Egyptians withdrew without a battle, as Jeremiah predicted (Jer. 37:7), and the Babylonians soon returned. Then Nebuchadnezzar proposed a peace treaty on his own terms, and the pharaoh gladly accepted, sacrificing Judah to save Egypt. Copies of the treaty, one of the oldest known, have been found on a wall of the great Karnak temple and on a cuneiform tablet at Hattusas.

While the former enemies were becoming friends, the final siege of Jerusalem began. Zedekiah released Jeremiah--whom he had previously persecuted--from prison, in the hope that the prophet would give him an encouraging word. However, no miracle saved God's people this time. The siege went on for eighteen months, and food ran out, but the people would not submit. Finally, in the summer of 587 B.C., the siege engines breached the walls. Zedekiah tried to escape with the last defenders, but the victors caught up with them near Jericho. They brought Zedekiah before Nebuchadnezzar at his base camp in Riblah (a town in central Syria); there Zedekiah's children were slain, and that was the last thing he saw in his life. The unfortunate king was then blinded, bound in chains, and thrown into a Babylonian prison. Then came the rest of Nebuchadnezzar's final solution; the entire nation of Judah, except about 20,000 of its poorest citizens, followed their king into exile. Every building in Jerusalem, including the Temple, was turned into a heap of ruins. The whole land was left a desolate waste, as an example for others to remember.

To the north, Tyre was also in revolt, but because it was on an offshore island, with a supply line from Carthage, it was safely out of the Babylonian war machine's reach. Nebuchadnezzar left an army behind to deal with it while he returned home, but thirteen years went by (587-574) before he could capture the city and replace its king with a more submissive one.

Media Marches West

Back in Ecbatana, Cyaxares ruled from a hilltop citadel surrounded by seven walls. According to Herodotus, nobody could laugh or spit in the royal presence, and no visitor was allowed to meet the king; an intermediary delivered all messages from visitors. Despite the pomp of the Median court, however, the king ruled more like a feudal monarch than an absolute one, his main job being to resolve disputes between his subject princes. Most of our information on Ecbatana (and the Median kingdom) comes from Herodotus; the ancient capital, located under the modern Iranian city of Hamadan, has never been excavated⁽⁶⁾.

Shortly after the Battle of the Eclipse and the treaty, Astyages succeeded Cyaxares. Herodotus portrayed Astyages as a cruel tyrant (which may or may not be anti-Iranian propaganda), but his 35-year reign (585-550) was one of peaceful growth. With Lydia tied to Media by a royal marriage, and other marriages linking Babylon to both Media and Egypt, one happy family ruled the whole Middle East at this point. No wars took place while Astyages was king, quite remarkable in a land which has produced so many aggressive empires. This situation ended when a vassal of Astyages, a provincial governor named Cyrus II, became both strong enough and popular enough to overthrow every rival. We'll cover his amazing career in the final section of this chapter.

Zoroastrianism

Greece = Thales, Anaximander and Pythagoras.
Judah = Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel.
Iran = Zoroaster.
India = Buddha and Mahavira.
China = Confucius and Laozi.
Egypt = No single figure, but animal worship began to be carried to extremes, with the mummification of cats, birds, baboons, crocodiles, etc., by the thousands.

Most of these individuals are covered in the author's other works (e.g., you can find a biography of Buddha in my Indian history). Before I continue this narrative, however, discussing Zoroaster would be appropriate, because he founded a major religion in the land that would shortly become the Persian Empire. About Zoroaster⁽⁷⁾ himself only legends are available. We do not know for sure where or even when he lived. Most scholars put his main area of activity in eastern Iran and Afghanistan, a newly civilized frontier at this time. Estimates of when he lived are usually around 600 B.C., but some (i.e., the Baha'is) are bold enough to place him 1,000 years earlier than that. The Encyclopaedia Britannica ventures to date the conversion of Vishtaspa, his most important follower, "258 years before Alexander." Since he was 40 years old when this happened, and lived to be 77, this gives him a lifespan of 628-551 B.C., making the dates of his birth and death roughly equivalent to those of the Median Empire. Until more reliable information appears, these dates will do.

Tradition says that Zoroaster was born not too far from modern Tehran. When he was a youth the Iranians, like nearly everybody else, had many gods, so he had a keen interest in religion. Though he had an excellent education, he became restless, and at age 20 he left his home to ponder the mysteries of life, and to find a real meaning to it all. Wherever he went, he asked people for answers to his questions, and used his medical knowledge to help the elderly and heal those wounded by nomads (Scythians?) making raids from Central Asia.

At the age of 30 Zoroaster received enlightenment. As the account goes, he was on the banks of the Daitya River when a large figure appeared to him. This person called himself Vohu Manah, or "Righteous Thought," and he took Zoroaster to meet the ultimate source of good, Ahura Mazda. In heaven Ahura Mazda instructed Zoroaster in the true religion.

When Zoroaster proclaimed the truth he had discovered he ran up against the Magi, or Median priests. They forced him to leave Media and wander in the wild lands to the east. His fortunes finally turned upward when he converted a local prince named Vishtaspa. Some historians equate Vishtaspa with Hystaspes, the father of the Persian king Darius I. This makes sense, because Darius was the first monarch to openly practice Zoroastrianism. We don't know what Cyrus the Great believed in--he wouldn't force his religion on anyone!

During Zoroaster's last years the faith spread rapidly, forming a sizeable community around Balkh, in Afghanistan. Still, he could not convert the nomads, whom he called "followers of the lie." Tradition records two holy wars fought between the nomads and the faithful; Zoroaster was killed in the second one.

Zoroastrianism teaches that only one god deserves worship: the wise lord Ahura Mazda, who created justice, truth, and everything else that is good. Since the beginning of time an evil god named Ahriman has opposed him. Ahura Mazda and Ahriman are equal in strength, but at the end of the world Ahura Mazda will win the last battle and destroy Ahriman. Then the soul of every man who ever lived will face judgment. Only those whose good deeds outweigh the bad will cross the bridge into the "Kingdom of Everlasting Light and Joy"; the unrighteous will fall into a dark, burning Hell.

The rest of Zoroastrian scriptures teach how to be one of the righteous. We can summarize the main rules for doing that as follows:

1. The most honorable work is to farm and/or make new land arable.
2. Cattle, dogs and chickens are the most noble of animals and they must be taken care of. We should destroy creatures of Ahriman (insects, frogs, lizards, wolves, snakes, flies, ants and heretics).
3. Truth and purity are the most important virtues. The greatest evil is the lie.
4. The three elements--earth, water and fire--are holy and must not be contaminated. For that reason Zoroastrians will not bury, burn, or immerse a corpse. Instead they leave the dead on a high place, called a Tower of Silence, for the vultures to dispose of. Zoroastrians regard fire as the ultimate symbol of cleanliness. Consequently an eternal flame is kept burning in each of their temples, causing many to wrongly call Zoroastrians fire-worshippers.

Zoroastrianism may have influenced or received influence from Judaism, since both religions have similar views on ethics and God's judgment. Most Iranians observed it for over a millennium, but it never made many converts outside Iran. After Islam swept across the Middle East in the seventh century A.D., Zoroastrianism ceased to be a major influence on world affairs. A few thousand Zoroastrians (nowadays called Gabars, meaning unbelievers) survive to this day in the Iranian cities of Yazd and Kerman. A larger community of about 55,000, known as the Parsees (Persians), can be found close to Bombay, India. Altogether there are an estimated 130,000 Zoroastrians left in the world, and their community is steadily shrinking, because they do not accept converts; even so, they continue to defend their rich heritage against all outsiders. Thomas Bullfinch, in his encyclopedia of mythology, quotes from a tale called Lalla Rookh, the Fire Worshipers, where a Gabar chief says:

"Yes! I am of that impious race,
Those slaves of Fire, that morn and even
Hail their creator's dwelling-place
Among the living lights of heaven;
Yes! I am of that outcast crew
To Iran and to vengeance true,
Who curse the hour your Arabs came
To desecrate our shrines of flame,
And swear before God's burning eye,
To break our country's chains or die."

By the Rivers of Babylon

Another building worthy of note is the palace of Nebuchadnezzar, which had in its corner the Hanging Gardens, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Flowers and trees covered this ziggurat-like structure, and had ferns and running water cascading down the sides. Legend says that Nebuchadnezzar built this to please Queen Amytis, who was homesick for the mountains of her native Media. In the center of Babylon stood another artificial mountain, a 300-foot-high restored Tower of Babel. On the south side of Babel Nebuchadnezzar restored and enlarged the city's main temple to Marduk, a compound called the Esagila. Everything he built used bricks with his name stamped on them: "Nebuchadnezzar the Great, King of Babylon."⁽⁸⁾

Few records from the last years of Nebuchadnezzar's reign have come down to us. Presumably this was the time in which the events of the first four chapters of the Book of Daniel took place, including the king's seven-year bout with insanity. In 576 B.C. he visited Ramses II in Egypt, and gave his daughter in marriage to his former rival. In return Ramses had to make the Babylonian princess his chief wife and queen. Later, when they had a baby girl, Ramses visited Babylon so that Nebuchadnezzar could see that they were treating his daughter and grandchild right. A place called Beth-Niki (House of Necho), still undiscovered but mentioned in a building inscription, was presumably the place where the pharaoh stayed on this trip.

The prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel both predicted that Nebuchadnezzar would "smite the land of Egypt," but there is no evidence that he ever actually conquered Egypt. However, Jeremiah hid some stones in a kiln at Tahpanheth in Egypt, to show where Nebuchadnezzar's throne would one day be set up (Jer. 43:9). Early in this century Sir Flinders Petrie found Babylonian-style kiln-baked bricks on the same site.⁽⁹⁾ It now appears that the Babylonian domination of Egypt was more symbolic than real, since the agreements between Ramses and Nebuchadnezzar were always on the latter's terms. However, it came true so far as the Jews were concerned, because many of them were extradited when they fled to Egypt to escape Babylonian rule.

None of Babylon's kings after Nebuchadnezzar measured up to his standards. Of two of them, Awel-Marduk (562-560, called Evil-Merodach in 2 Kings) and Nergilissar II (560-556), we know little besides their names. Around 560 B.C., Cyprus transferred its vassalage from Babylon to Egypt.

The last king, Nabonidus (556-539), was not a relative of the previous kings, but the son of Adad-Guppi, a high priestess of Sin (Nanna, the ancient moon-god of Ur). He was both unsuited and uninterested in his job. Instead of handling affairs of state, he spent most of his time restoring old temples. Before he started rebuilding, he would excavate the foundation of each structure to learn its age; this has earned him the nickname of "the royal archeologist."⁽¹⁰⁾ Because of his mother's exalted status (she received a royal funeral when she died in 547, at the age of 104), he gave the sanctuaries of Sin special attention.

This behavior alienated the priests of Marduk, who feared he was going to replace Babylon's chief god with his own. In 550 Cyrus, the king of the Persians, overthrew the Medes, and gave the city of Haran, on the upper Euphrates River, to Nabonidus (more about that in the next section). Nabonidus raised taxes to pay for the reconstruction of Haran and its famous moon-god temple, and his enemies ran him out of Babylon. He stayed away for an astonishing ten years, spending much of that time at the oasis of Tema, in the Arabian desert. While he was away, his son Belshazzar managed the government, but the New Year festival could not take place without the king, so many feared for the city's future. Economic stagnation set in, and prices went up, concentrating wealth in the hands of a few bankers, slavers, and real estate speculators. Meanwhile across the border, Cyrus treated all of his subjects generously, and allowed them to practice their religion and customs without persecution. Many pro-Persian Babylonians thought that they would lose little by becoming subjects of such a good king. Before Belshazzar and the prophet Daniel saw the handwriting on the wall, Cyrus knew that Babylon would be easy prey.

The First Shah of Iran

The land they found along the Persian Gulf was a sweltering landscape of sand and rocks that held little promise, but the Persians made do with what they had, by growing wheat in the valleys and leading their flocks of fat-tailed sheep up the mountains in the spring and down to the plains when the weather turned cooler in the fall. Not yet a strong nation, they came under the successive domination of their more powerful neighbors: first the Elamites, then the Assyrians, and finally their relatives, the Medes.

The first Persian leader whose name has come down to us was Hakham-Anish (700?-675? B.C.), known as Achaemenes to later Greek historians. His name meant "wise man," and the stories concerning him are pure legends, but he went down as the founder of the dynasty; later Persian monarchs often called themselves Achaemenids. His successor, Chishpish (Teispes in Greek, perhaps 675-640 B.C.), divided his land between two sons, Kurush I (Cyrus) and Ariaramna (Ariaramnes). For the next ninety years there were two Persian kingdoms, both ruled by Achaemenids and paying tribute to Media: Anshan, on the border of old Elam, and Parsumash (also called Parsa or Persis), farther to the east. Around 600 B.C. Kambujiya I (Cambyses I in Herodotus) succeeded his father Cyrus as king of Anshan.

Unfortunately for us Herodotus is the only historian who left us detailed records on how the Persian Empire got started. The sources he used were unreliable, since all kinds of wild stories circulated in his day concerning the early years of the empire's founder, Cyrus II; one said he was abandoned as a baby and suckled by a she-wolf, like Romulus and Remus. Since no other source is as thorough, the material on the next few pages will come from Herodotus; decide for yourself how much of this is a true story.

Early in the reign of Astyages, the last Median king, strange things happened in his court at Ecbatana. One night he had a dream in which his daughter Mandane urinated and flooded all of Asia! The Magi interpreted the dream as meaning that a son of Mandane would become king of Asia. Attempting to nip this threat to his rule in the bud, Astyages decided that Mandane must not marry a Mede, for the child of such a union would automatically become the legitimate heir to his throne. Instead he gave her to Cambyses of Anshan, a man "of good family and quiet habits."

After Mandane became pregnant with a son, the future Cyrus, Astyages had another dream, in which vines sprang out of Mandane's loins and covered Asia. The Magi interpreted this dream to mean the same thing as the first, and Astyages realized that his half-Median grandchild could still be dangerous. He ordered his chief steward, Harpagus, to slay the newborn Cyrus in the wilderness. But Harpagus, overcome by the child's beauty, could not bring himself to commit such a foul deed. Instead, he told a mountain shepherd to do it, but the shepherd, whose wife had just given birth to a stillborn baby, had other ideas. The shepherd took the infant prince home and raised him as his own son, and left the dead baby in Cyrus' royal clothing on the mountain for Harpagus to find and bury.

The next paragraph contains the part of the story I find hardest to believe. When Cyrus was ten years old, he and a group of boys played a game, where they made him "king," and he appointed each of the others to the jobs found in a real king's court. One boy, the son of a Median noble, refused to do what Cyrus commanded, and Cyrus ordered him seized and beaten. The boy went and complained to his father, who was so angry that he took the matter to Astyages. Astyages sent for the young Cyrus and his herdsman "father," recognized Cyrus for a relative, and found out through a series of interviews what really happened. At that point he decided he liked his Persian grandson, and called for the Magi again. This time the Magi suggested that the prophecy had been fulfilled in an unexpected way; if Cyrus had already been "king" in a children's game, then maybe the predicted danger was past. Astyages agreed and sent Cyrus off to his real parents in Anshan. For the disobedience of Harpagus, however, he devised a ghastly punishment; he summoned the son of Harpagus to the palace, had him killed and cooked up, and served him to his father at a banquet that night. Harpagus did not know what he was eating until they lifted the lid from the final platter, whereupon he saw his son's head, hands and feet.

In Anshan, Cyrus grew up toughened by the desert life, and received a basic Persian education, which was learning "to ride a horse, to draw a bow, and to speak the truth." In 559 B.C., he became king of Anshan. Three years later he annexed Elam, a territory which the Babylonians claimed, but nobody occupied. Nabonidus, who became king of Babylon in the same year, recognized Cyrus as heir to the Elamites, so the Persian capital was moved from Pasargadae, the hometown of the Achaemenids, to Susa, the old Elamite capital. As Cyrus behaved more like an independent monarch, and less like a loyal vassal, Astyages saw everything he feared coming true.

A cuneiform text from Nabonidus tells thus that a religious matter caused the final break between Cyrus and Astyages. We saw earlier how Nabonidus liked to repair the ancient temples of the moon-god, and one of the biggest was the E.HUL.HUL in Haran; it very well may have been the same temple where Terah, the father of Abraham, worshiped the Mesopotamian gods, approximately fifteen hundred years earlier (see Chapter 1). The E.HUL.HUL was destroyed when the Assyrians made their last stand at Haran in 610, and Haran had been in Median hands since then. According to Nabonidus, the god Marduk appeared to him in a dream and ordered him to rebuild the E.HUL.HUL, but he protested, saying he couldn't do it while the Medes controlled Haran, so Marduk replied:

"The Umman-manda (Medes) of whom you speak, they and their land and the kings who side with them no longer exist. In the coming third year I shall make Cyrus, king of Anzan, their young slave, expel them. With his few troops, he will disperse the widespread Umman-manda."

Accordingly, Nabonidus invited Cyrus to join him in an alliance. Astyages got wind of this, and in 550 B.C., he summoned Cyrus to Ecbatana, to explain his actions; Cyrus responded that he would come sooner than the Median monarch wished. A Median army was promptly sent to put down the upstart Persians. However, Harpagus led the army, and he understandably had no stomach for supporting his king. When the Medes and Persians met outside Pasargadae, Harpagus and most of his troops defected to the cause of Cyrus. After he switched sides, Harpagus proved to be Cyrus' best general and administrator. Then Cyrus marched to Ecbatana and seized Astyages in an encounter that was more of a coup than a real battle. Although he stripped Astyages of his rank and titles, Cyrus showed more benevolence than any other monarch of the day by letting him live. That marked the end of the Median Kingdom and the beginning of the Persian Empire.

Cyrus left most of the Median institutions intact, so from an outsider's point of view, his takeover may not have looked like much of a change. Still, one foreign leader was not fooled: Croesus (560-546), king of Lydia and heir to his father Alyattes. Easily the richest man of his time, Croesus was sitting on so much money that his name became a byword for wealth among the Greeks. Early in his reign he accomplished what no previous Lydian king could do: he subdued all of the Ionian city-states except Miletus. At home he lavishly entertained visiting guests, like the Athenian lawgiver Solon.⁽¹¹⁾ Then his favorite son died in a hunting accident. Croesus mourned him for two years, until the rise of Cyrus brought him back to his senses. Astyages was the Lydian's brother-in-law, so Croesus felt duty-bound to make war upon the enemies of Media.

Before he attacked the Persians, Croesus did what any prudent monarch of that time would do: he consulted a soothsayer. For Croesus, the only soothsayer that would do was the best that money could buy, namely the Oracle in the temple of Apollo at Delphi, in Greece. Accordingly he sent a ship to Delphi loaded with the biggest donation that the Greeks had ever seen: it included 117 ingots of gold, two huge basins (one gold and one silver), four silver chests, a gold and a silver holy water sprinkler, a gold statue of a lion, a gold statue of a woman (said to be the king's baker), and all of the Lydian queen's jewelry. The Oracle gave the kind of answer Croesus wanted: if he attacked the Persians he would destroy a great empire. Confident of victory, he marched across the Halys River in 547 B.C., without bothering to ask which empire the Oracle meant.

Cyrus responded by leading his army of Medes and Persians west. On the way he passed through Assyria and occupied Cilicia, doing both without the permission of the Babylonians. Croesus burned Hattusas and met the Persians at a place Herodotus called Pteria, which may have been the Greek name for Hattusas. A one-day battle between the two forces ended in a draw. Then Croesus did an about-face and returned to Sardis. He wasn't chickening out. The year was ending and the Lydians, like the Greeks, called off their campaigns every fall to harvest their crops, coming back in the following spring to pick up where they left off. Croesus felt he had done all he could do for 547 B.C., and as he went home, he paid off his soldiers and sent letters to Babylon, Egypt, and Sparta, asking them to send him troops for next year's campaign.

However, Cyrus had no intention of waiting. He pursued so closely behind Croesus that, as Herodotus put it, "He was his own messenger." Croesus hastily recalled what troops he had and sent his best against the Persians, the formidable Lydian cavalry with iron-tipped lances. Cyrus defeated them with a clever trick: he took the camels that carried the Persian army's baggage and put them in front of his own horses. The Lydian horses had never smelled a camel before, and one whiff from these strange beasts was enough to make them turn tail and run. Afterwards Croesus was forced to take refuge in his capital. He thought that the walls of Sardis were impregnable, but the Persians, being mountain-climbers, scaled them and took the city two weeks later.

Cyrus spared Croesus, but it was a close call. At first he placed Croesus and fourteen Lydian youths on top of a great pile of wood, to make a burnt offering of them all. Croesus managed to talk him out of it, but not before the edges of the pyre were lit. Now it was too late to put the fire out, and both Cyrus and Croesus cried for the gods to help them. Fortunately, a rainstorm came at that point and saved the day. Croesus spent his last years as an advisor to Cyrus and his son Cambyses II. He also realized that he had misunderstood the words of the Oracle. Croesus had indeed destroyed a great empire--Lydia!

The conquest of Lydia technically gave Cyrus authority over the Ionian Greeks. The Ionians, however, saw the fall of Sardis as the return of their own independence, and Cyrus was forced to subjugate each of their cities one by one. Then he made Harpagus satrap (governor) of the region. Ionia brought commerce and wealth into the new empire, but the Persians' first impression of the Greeks was not a favorable one. To Cyrus, the Greeks were a dishonest race, whose marketplaces "were set apart for people to go and cheat each other under oath."

The next few years saw Cyrus spread his rule into Central Asia. This campaign is completely undocumented, but we know what happened from the situation in that area a few years later. First he marched through Hyrcania (the part of Iran along the shore of the Caspian Sea), Parthia (northeastern Iran), and Bactria (Afghanistan), stopping just short of the Indian border. Then he went north across the Oxus (Amu Dar'ya) River, subduing local nomads as he advanced. He chose the Jaxartes (Syr Dar'ya) as his northern boundary, and built a string of fortresses to secure it. Then he returned home and prepared to conquer Babylon and the Fertile Crescent.

The Persian army invaded the land between the rivers in 539 B.C. There was a bloody clash outside the city of Opis, which was decided when the governor of Assyria defected to the Persian camp. At the walls of Babylon, the Persians dug a canal to divert the Euphrates away from the city, lowering the water level enough to march under the city's gates. As a result, they took the city without a battle. Cyrus worshiped in Marduk's temple afterward, showing himself as the rightful heir to the Babylonian throne, and allowed everyday life to continue without interruption. The replacement of Nabonidus by Cyrus marks the end of the Babylonian Empire, the end of the age when the Fertile Crescent marked the center of world civilization, and the beginning of an age lasting nearly 1,200 years in which Japhetic peoples⁽¹²⁾, not Semites or Hamites, ruled the Middle East.

2. Seti I in most textbooks but Seti II in my histories.

3. Nabopolassar means "O Nabu, protect (my) son!" In Babylonian mythology Nabu was the son of Marduk and god of intellectual pursuits; they saw the planet Mercury as his manifestation in the sky. Three of Babylon's last kings had Nabu in their names, suggesting a preoccupation with a minor god that they had ignored before. For those readers who want to know the meanings of the other two names, Nebuchadnezzar means "O Nabu, protect my offspring" and Nabonidus means "Nabu has exalted (the king)."

4. Astronomers later set the date at May 28, 585 B.C.

5. Technically, this divided Nebuchadnezzar's ancestral homeland between Lydia and Media. Apparently this entire area, including Hattusas, dwindled to political insignificance after the Anatolian kings started calling themselves Babylonians. It may also have meant that Nebuchadnezzar was so busy with other projects (the humiliation of Egypt and Judah, the glorification of Babylon, etc.) that he simply didn't care who got Hattusas. At any rate, the city was apparently deserted not long after this date; Hattusilis-Nebuchadnezzar was the last king to put records in its archives.

6. Today some Kurds claim to be descended from the Medes. The scanty evidence we have does seem to agree; the Kurds are Indo-Iranians, they live in the same general area as the Medes, and they are first mentioned as a separate people by Xenophon in 401 B.C., about a hundred and fifty years after the Median kingdom was overthrown. If we had more of the ancient Median language, we would know for sure.

7. Zoroaster is really the Greek version of his name; it is Zarathushtra in Old Persian and Zartosht in modern Farsi.

8. In the late twentieth century, Saddam Hussein restored much of Nebuchadnezzar's city. As part of his propaganda campaign, he replaced missing bricks with new ones that said on them: "Saddam Hussein, President, Iraqi Republic." Unfortunately, Hussein had no interest in the older, still unexcavated levels of Babylon, and may have damaged them in his restoration effots. Undoubtedly we would learn much about the Amorite, Kassite and Aramaean periods of Babylonian history if a complete excavation of the city was permitted.
The international coalitions that invaded Iraq in 1991 and 2003 were under strict orders not to target the country's numerous archaeological sites. Saddam Hussein knew this, and protected some of his equipment by moving it to the sites; e.g., he put a radar station on top of the ziggurat of Ur. However, after the second war, Iraq's ruins and museums fell victim to looters. While most of the priceless artifacts in the Baghdad Museum, like the treasures of the Assyrian queens, were eventually recovered, the archaeological sites themselves suffered from looting and unintentional damage, when foreign troops built their bases too close. Babylon, for example, became a helicopter base, resulting in oil leakage, old buildings shaken excessively from the vibrations of nearby vehicles, and artifact-laden parts of the ground dug up to lay the foundations for military buildings. Who knows how much of mankind's ancient heritage was lost, in order to make the present-day world a better place?

9. The Egyptians never used burnt brick; stone was used to build temples and tombs, while the buildings of daily life, up to and including the pharaoh's palace, contained sun-dried bricks. This makes sense in a land where it hardly ever rains, since the bricks would require replacement after a good rainstorm.

10. Ennigaldi-Nanna, the daughter of Nabonidus, served as high priestess in Ur, ran a scribal school for upper-class women, and shared her father's interests. When Sir Leonard Woolley excavated her palace, he was surprised to find a collection of objects that were much older, including a Kassite boundary marker, a piece of a statue of King Shulgi, and a clay cone that had been part of a building at Larsa. With them were clay cylinders that identified the objects in three languages. In other words, this was the oldest known museum.

11. Herodotus claimed that Alcmaeon, the founder of one of the most powerful families in Athens, obtained his fortune by stuffing his clothes and mouth with so much gold dust from the treasury of Croesus that he could hardly walk! From The Histories, Book VI, 124.

12. Persians, Greeks, Romans and Parthians.

© Copyright 2000 Charles Kimball