Babylon was the turning point in the reign of Kuruš; a defeat at Babylon could have unraveled what Kuruš had achieved up to that point in his kingship.
So, why did Babylon really fall into his hands? How?
Well, no one knows for certain.
Royal Annals & the Book of Heaven
There is no concrete reason to believe that the fate of Babylon was sealed after the fall of the Lydians. Kuruš had to either cross or move along the Babylonian borders to reach Lydia. It is highly unlikely that Kuruš would have encountered the Lydian aggression, without securing the rear of his army first. Without a reliable alliance with the Babylonians, he could have easily been attacked by the Babylonians in the rear, while his front was engaged with the Lydians. Likewise, Nabű-nâ’id, the King of Babylon, was reportedly away from Babylon for nearly ten years with a portion of his army, during the same period. If the Persian threat was looming in the horizon, it would have been unlikely that the Babylonian king and part of the royal army would have left Babylon to campaign in the west (Arabia).
While Kuruš is commonly thought of as a conqueror, it could be argued that until the ‘conquest’ of Babylon, the known wars of Kuruš were mostly either dynastic or defensive.
Like other accounts of Kuruš’ life, the source(s) of hostilities between Babylon and Persia are obscure.
Contemporary Babylonian sources, the royal annals and the Book of Heaven (Astronomical Diaries), do not shed any light on the kingship of Nabű-nâ’id [Nabonidus] and the regency of his son, Bęl-šar-usur [Belshazzar], while the Babylonian king was away from Babylon.
YHWH & the Great God of Blackheaded People
Contemporary Judean sources are hostile to all the Babylonian kings, and their prophetic records revolve around the fall of Babylon.
Chapters 40-55 were added by the Second Isaiah, a nameless prophet, to the Biblical Book of Isaiah, predicting the coming of Kuruš to liberate the Judeans from their Babylonian captivity.
According to Second Isaiah 45:1:
“So said the Lord to His anointed one, to Cyrus, whose right hand I held, to flatten nations before him,
and the loins of kings I will loosen, to open portals before him, and gates shall not be closed.”
It is not known how the Judean exilic community reacted to Second Isaiah's prophecy that the divine action to release them from bondage was to be through the agency of the Persian Kuruš. Scholars have pointed out the literary affinity between the presentation of Moses in Exodus and Cyrus in Second Isaiah.
But on one issue both Babylonian and Judean sources are topically aligned.
According to both Babylonian Nabű-nâ’id Chronicle and Biblical Book of Isaiah, Marduk, the great god of Babylon, and YHWH, the Lord of the Judeans, call on Kuruš, to go to Babylon and deliver their people, one from forced labor and the other from captivity. The chronology of these sources is not clear and could have been written after the outcome of the battle for Babylon was known. But while it is not wise to question the words of the divine, from whatever religion, initiating an unprovoked attack on Babylon could have been disastrous for Kuruš and the Persians. It would have been foolish to attempt the outright conquest of Babylon, without knowing or assuming some sort of native support for such an attack.
So, the two surviving Babylonian and Judean records from two such different sources are more than likely preserving a nougat of historical truth.
While Kuruš was not realistically “called” by the gods, he could have been approached by the men of gods who were genuinely caught in the waves of a massive religious reformation that nothing short of foreign assistance could have turned the tides and return order to chaos. Caught between the kingdom of gods and the kingdom of men, both Babylonian and Judeans could have independently sought the assistance of a foreign liberator.
Kuruš was not just one of the kings whom Marduk and YHWH had considered among many; he was one of the only 2 kings with an army left who could have come to the aid of the Babylonians and the Judeans. The other king was the Egyptian Pharaoh whose armies had not proven to be a match for the formidable power of the Persian army.
So both the ‘Lord’ and the ‘great god’ called on the Persian Kuruš.
The victorious addition of Babylon to the Lands and People of the Persian Empire turned a king into a Great King and consolidated the known Asia under one powerful imperial command; an extraordinary event that forever changed the face of Asia.
When Kuruš entered Babylon, the Gate of Gods, he was no longer just a king; he was ‘The King’, the new master of Asia. All eyes high or low, near and far, were on him.
So, let’s look more closely at what happened in Babylon.
Read my lips
“... on the 3rd day of the month of Arahsamnu, Ku-ra-aš entered TIN.TIRki.
There was peace in the city when Ku-ra-aš spoke greetings to all of Bâb-ilim...”
“... on the 29th day of the month of October, in the year seventeenth of Nabű-nâ’id, Kuruš entered Babylon.
The king’s peace was placed upon the city. The proclamation of Kuruš was read to all of Babylon..."
No doubt all of Babylon, free, captive, or slave, waited anxiously to witness the victorious king enter Babylon amidst royal pomp and to hear the proclamation of the new master of Babylon. While Babylon had fallen to the Assyrians before and reclaimed, this was the first time in their ancient history that Babylon had fallen to a foreign king worshipping ‘other gods’.
“What will happen to me? To my wife? To my husband? To my children? To my family?
To my city? To my land? To my property? To my position?
To my gods?”
“Will Babylon be sacked and razed?”
“Will there be mass deportations?”
“Will great gods of Babylon be taken away?”
“Will Babylonian warriors be massacred?”
“Will the women be raped and enslaved?”
“What will happen to the children?”
“Will the lands be burned and properties looted?”
“Will head of Nabu-na’id be cut off and hung from a post?”
“will I have to learn a new language?”
“Will I be forced to worship a new god?”
...
But none of these fears materialized.
After the royal proclamation, a new governor was appointed to administer Babylon as a privileged part of a bigger empire; statues of the great gods that had been brought to Babylon by Nabű-nâ’id to safeguard both Babylon and the great gods from falling into the hands of the Persians were returned to their temples.
The calendar of Babylon was changed to show the year as the first regnal year of Kuruš and the new king started to rebuild Babylon.
According to the Verse Account of Nabű-nâ’id, “[Cyrus tool up the earth] basket and completed the wall of Babylon in order to execute [the original plan of] Nebuchadnezzar of his own consent.”
So it seems that the Persian 'conquest' did not cause any interruption or disruption in the life of Babylon.
Life went on more or less as usual.
So what did Kuruš the King say?
No one knows. No records have been found to-date that proclaims: “Kuruš the King says...” in the manner of the traditional Persian imperial declarations that have survived from the later Achaemenid Great Kings.
We might simply never know beyond the shadow of the doubt what was proclaimed and what was understood by such verbal imperial proclamation by the Babylonians, Judeans, Hellenes and other subjects of the empire.
But there are some scattered clues.
Whatever was so communicated led to the release of the Judeans from their Babylonian captivity and paved the way for them to return to their own lands, taking with them sacred objects of their faith that was taken as punishment by the Babylonians before the destruction of the First Temple. The Hebrew Bible records the “Decree of Cyrus” as not only the imperial permission allowing the Judeans to return to Jerusalem, but also the permission to rebuild their temple with imperial funds.
According to 2 Chronicles 36:22-23:
“Now in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah be fulfilled,
the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia, so that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom,
and also put it in writing: saying, Thus says Cyrus King of Persia: All the kingdoms of the earth the Lord God of Heaven has given me. And he has commanded me to build Him a house at Jerusalem which is in Judah.
Who is among you of all His people? May the Lord his God be with him, and let him go up!”
Since the language of the imperial decree in the 2 Chronicles is closer to the typical Imperial Achaemenid proclamations: Thus says Kuruš, King of Persia..., it gives a ray of hope that the true imperial proclamation of Kuruš, a Persian cross between the Akkadian foundation tablet and the Judean Biblical records could still be found.
The release of the Judeans and provision of royal funds was an Achaemenid policy that was later confirmed by King Dâriuš I, when a copy of the imperial decree was found in Hagmâtâna [Ecbatana] and additional royal funds were provided during his reign for the completion of the Second Temple around 515 BCE.
Judeans remained the loyal subjects of the Persian Empire until the time of Alexander’s invasion, some two hundred years later and the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah attest to Judeans rising to high ranks within the administration of the Achaemenids.
But while Dâriuš I, the Great, the other Achaemenid Great King who succeeded to the throne of Kuruš after the death of Kambujiya, has left us with his own royal words eternally carved in stone at Behistun and other places, all that has been recovered so far from the Great Kuruš, in his own words, has been a few foundation tablets from ancient Babylonia, modern Iraq and Syria.
One such foundation tablet, written in 539 BCE by the Babylonian scribes in Akkadian cuneiform language, was recovered in 1879 by Hormuzd Rassam, an Assyrian-British excavator, was actually in the shape of a clay cylinder, and became commonly known as ‘Cyrus Cylinder’ once the cuneiform inscription was deciphered by the British Museum as belonging to the Great Kuruš.
One fragment of the Cyrus Cylinder, known as Fragment A, was acquired by the British Museum in 1880, and later another fragment became the property of the Yale University. Both fragments of the Cyrus Cylinder were united in 1971 when the Yale fragment, known as Fragment B (lines 36 to 45), joined Fragment A (lines 1-35) in British Museum, where it is housed today.
It was the translation of Fragment B that became available in 1975 which positively identified the Cyrus Cylinder as a dedicatory foundation tablet written in traditional Akkadian composition for the future kings who were to recover it later, intended to last forever as a memorial to the king who dedicated it and the gods to whom they were dedicated.
According to the Book of Ezra, 1:7-11:
“King Cyrus also brought out the articles of the House of the Lord, which Nebuchadnezzar had taken from Jerusalem and put in the temple of his gods; and Cyrus the King of Persia brought them out by the hand of Mithredath the treasurer,
and counted them out to Sheshbazzar the Prince of Judah.
This is the number of them: thirty gold platters, one thousand silver platters, twenty nine knives, thirty gold basins,
four hundred and ten silver basins of a similar kind, and one thousand other articles.
All the articles of gold and silver were five thousand four hundred.
All these Sheshbazzar took with the captives who were brought from Babylon to Jerusalem.”
Leaving the interpretation of the Biblical records to Biblical scholars, let’s have a closer look at the Cyrus Cylinder.
But before looking at the inscription of the Cyrus Cylinder for more clues about the character of the Great Kuruš, a few words on the clay object itself is in order.
Raiders of cuneiform tablets
The excavation of ancient sites was not always motivated by intense desire to study the ancient cultures in their own terms and glean from their experiences to learn about the history and cultures of mankind, but by the desire of the world-class museums to add to their collections of antiquities.
The code of the Akkadian language was cracked in 1860s following the decipherment of the tri-lingual royal inscription of Dâriuš I at Behistun, less than just two decades prior to the recovery of Cyrus Cylinder, and the western museums were in a race to add to their cuneiform collections.
The recovery of the Cyrus Cylinder was not the result of a controlled scientific archaeological excavation and sadly the priceless cylinder is a historical object without archaeological context that could tie it to its proper time and place in history and give it its ‘story’.
We simply do not know where, when and how Cyrus Cylinder was found. All we know with some degree of certainty is that the historical clay cylinder was damaged during the excavation and a chunk of it was unknowingly broken off, conjuring up images of poor native workers working under hot Babylonian sun, digging up ancient sites with sharp shovels, tossing whatever they found into a crate and shipping it off to western museums, unknowingly handing over the splendid symbols of their own ancient cultural identity to be put on display, forever removing such objects from the reach of their rightful cultural owners.
Even today, boxes and boxes full of ancient cuneiform writings and artifacts are turning into dust in the basements of western museums, waiting to be read and deciphered, catalogued and published.
With the fate of the Persepolis Fortification Archive hanging in balance due to a private lawsuit brought against the Islamic Republic of Iran, it is highly unlikely that the world museums would be eager to bring unwanted legal attention to their unpublished ancient Persian holdings any time soon.
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