Together, the Medes and Persians fought with the Babylonians against the elderly empire that had dominated the world for so long. Babylonian chronicles record Assyria’s slow fall: “In the tenth year,” it begins, “Nabopolassar, in the month of Aiaru, mobilized the Babylonian army and marched up the bank of the Euphrates. The people…did not attack him, but laid their tribute before him.”16
The tenth year—ten years after Nabopolassar had crowned himself king of the Chaldeans, in the wake of Esarhaddon’s death—would have been 616/615 BC. The month of Aiaru was springtime, late April to early May; and the peoples along the Euphrates could see the writing on the wall.
After another year of fighting, Nabopolassar had reached Assur and laid siege to it. He had to retreat, after a mere month, and was forced to hole up in a nearby fortress for the summer. The Medes had apparently returned to their own land, but now they came back to aid their Babylonian ally. Rather than joining up with Nabopolassar, they made straight for the Assyrian heartland. Cyarxes crossed the Tigris and laid siege to Assur himself, and succeeded where Nabopolassar had failed. He captured the city and raided it for captives and goods; afterwards, he permitted the Median troops to massacre everyone left inside. Nabopolassar arrived, with his own army, after the city was thoroughly destroyed.17
The two kings planned, together, the final assault on Nineveh. Some months were spent in preparation; the Median army made a visit home to refurbish itself, and Nabopolassar took a few months to terrify various rebellious cities along the Euphrates into submission. But by 612, the assault troops were ready. “In the fourteenth year,” the Babylonian Chronicle says, “the king of Babylon mobilized his army, and the king of the Medes came to where the Babylonians were encamped. They went along the banks of the Tigris to Nineveh. From the month of May to the month of July they made an assault on the city. And at the beginning of August, the city was taken.”
Between May and August there was a bit of drama that the Babylonian Chronicle doesn’t record, but which is preserved by Herodotus. Cyarxes, according to the Histories, was all set to destroy Nineveh, when his siege was disrupted by “a huge Scythian army, led by their king Madius.”18 (This was probably the grandson of the original Madius the Scythian, who had dominated the Medes fifty years or so earlier.) The Scythians chose the moment for attack well—but the Median and Persian troops, trained and organized by Cyarxes, turned from the siege and wiped them up.19
Then the soldiers turned back to Nineveh. A tributary of the Tigris ran through the city beneath the walls, providing it with water and making it difficult to besiege. But it seems likely that the attackers built a dam to divert more of the Tigris into the city, carrying away the foundations of the walls and breaking them away. Diodorus of Sicily, a Greek historian writing six hundred years later, says that the Ninevites put their confidence in a “divine oracle given to their fathers, that Nineveh the city would never be taken or surrender until the stream that ran through the city became its enemy; the king supposed that this would never come to pass.” It is an after-the-fact prophecy that probably reflects an actual event.20
With the walls crumbling, the Babylonians stormed the city and sacked it. “A great slaughter was made of the people,” the Chronicle tells us, “and the nobles, and Sin-shum-ishkun, king of Assyria, fled…. They turned the city into a mound and ruin heap.”21 The Jewish prophet Nahum, celebrating the destruction of the empire that had laid waste to the northern part of his country, offers a glimpse of the horror:
The river gates are thrown open,
the palace collapses.
It is decreed: the city will be exiled, carried away….
Nineveh is like a pool,
and its water is draining away….
She is pillaged, plundered, stripped,
Hearts melt, knees give way,
bodies tremble, every face grows pale….
Many casualties, piles of dead,
bodies without number,
people stumbling over the corpses….
Nothing can heal your wound;
your injury is fatal.
Everyone who hears the news about you
claps his hands at your fall,
for who has not felt your endless cruelty?22
The Assyrians had flooded Babylon a hundred years earlier; now the Babylonians were returning the favor.
The Assyrian king fled towards the city of Haran.149 The victorious Medes claimed the eastern territory, including the land which had once belonged to the Scythians; Babylon took over the old western provinces. And somewhere between Nineveh and Haran, Sin-shum-ishkun died or was killed. Assur-uballit, an army officer and royal cousin, took his title.
With a new king and a new capital, the depleted Assyrian army made one more attempt to gather itself. But Nabopolassar did not leave Haran long in peace. After putting down various Assyrian cities which had tried to take advantage of the chaos by declaring their independence from both Assyria and Babylon, Nabopolassar marched back towards Haran in 610, meeting up with Cyarxes and leading the joint force towards the city. When Assur-uballit got wind of this new front, he and his men deserted the city before the Median-Babylonian force had even shown up on the Orion. “Fear of the enemy fell upon them,” the Babylonian Chronicle says, “and they forsook the city.” Nabopolassar arrived at the defenseless city, looted it, and went back home.
But Assur-uballit was not quite done. He sent a message down south, to ask the pharaoh of Egypt for help.
The Assyrian-trained Psammetichus I of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty had died at a ripe old age, after a reign of more than fifty years. Now his son, Necho II, had assumed the throne.150 Despite his father’s fight against the Assyrians decades before, Necho II was not averse to helping out the Assyrians now. He had plans to make Egypt more important in world affairs (he was already hiring Greek mercenary sailors to strengthen his army, and one of his pet projects was the digging of a canal that would connect the Nile river to the Red Sea, improving Egyptian trade with the east by water),23 and if Egypt was going to once again throw its net outside its own borders, the logical place for expansion was the Western Semitic lands along the Mediterranean. The rise of a strong Babylonian empire would not allow for Egyptian takeover of those Mediterranean territories. Anyway, if the Assyrians fell, one more barrier against the Scythians (who had already shown up at Egypt’s borders once during Necho II’s childhood) would be gone.
And so he agreed. Assur-uballit suggested that the city of Carchemish would be a good place to meet up and organize the joint force for an attack, and Necho II set out to march north.
He did not pass by Jerusalem unnoticed. “While Josiah was king,” the writer of 2 Kings says, “Pharaoh Necho king of Egypt went up the Euphrates to help the king of Assyria.”24
Josiah of Judah had taken advantage of the Assyrian disintegration to reassert his own independence; he had led a religious revival, getting rid of all traces of Assyrian shrines and cults; and he did not want to see Assyria resurrected. Nor did he want to find Necho II replacing Assyria as lord and master of Jerusalem. So instead of letting Necho go by, he marched out to attack the Egyptians when they drew close to Megiddo.
Necho, in a hurry, hadn’t intended to take on the armies of Jerusalem quite so soon. He sent messengers to Josiah, offering a truce: “What quarrel is there between you and me? It is not you that I am attacking at this time, but the house with which I am at war.”25 Josiah ignored this. “King Josiah marched out to meet him in battle,” says 2 Kings, “but Necho faced him and killed him at Megiddo.” 2 Chron. 35 adds the detail that Josiah, in disguise, was struck by archers. His bodyguard took the wounded king away from the battlefield, but he died in his chariot on the way back to the capital city. He was thirty-nine years old.
Necho II did not pause to follow up on his victory. With the Judeans in retreat, he continued on up to meet the Assyrians under the command of Assur-uballit. Together, the joint armies tried to retake the Assyrian headquarters at Har
an, which was now occupied by a Babylonian detachment. “They defeated the garrison which Nabopolassar had stationed there,” the Babylonian Chronicle says, “but they were not able to take the city.”26
Both armies retreated. Nabopolassar was not inclined to try again; his health was poor, he was no longer a young man, and Assur-uballit was not that much of a threat. Necho II decided to go down and finish his business at Jerusalem. He sent his soldiers again against Jerusalem, and took Josiah’s son and heir Jehoahaz captive with ease. Necho II ordered Jehoahaz marched off to Egypt, where he died sometime later in exile. Then Necho picked one of Josiah’s younger sons, Eliakim, to be his puppet. He changed Eliakim’s name to Jehoiakim—a traditional act of dominance and ownership—and demanded a heavy payment of gold and silver tribute (which Jehoiakim raised by collecting a new tax, by force, from the people).27
In 605, Nabopolassar turned his attention back to the resistance. The Egyptians and Assyrians had set up camp at Carchemish, but Nabopolassar was old and increasingly wretched with sickness. Instead he sent his son Nebuchadnezzar south to Carchemish at the head of his troops, to get rid of the Assyrian remnant.28
The two armies met outside the city. In heavy fighting, the Egyptian line broke. Necho II began the retreat back down towards the Delta, deserting the Western Semitic lands—a defeat celebrated by the Judean court prophet Jeremiah:
This is the message against the army of Necho, king of Egypt
defeated at Carchemish on the Euphrates by Nebuchadnezzar….
What do I see?
They are terrified, they are retreating, their warriors are defeated.29
There is no mention of Assyrian fugitives in any ancient records of this battle; apparently the Assyrian forces were wiped out with no survivors. Assur-uballit fell, somewhere on the field, but must have been trampled into an unrecognizable corpse.
Nebuchadnezzar himself followed the trail of the retreating Necho II, apparently intending to catch and kill the pharaoh. But his pursuing army was caught by faster messengers who carried news: Nabopolassar had died while Nebuchadnezzar fought at Carchemish. At this, Nebuchadnezzar immediately gave up the chase and and turned back towards Babylon. The throne of Babylon was a ball that needed to be caught at once before someone else snatched it away.
Meanwhile, Necho II subsided back down south. He made no further attempt to assert Egyptian power over the Mediterranean coast. Instead, he concentrated his efforts on fortifying himself against further attacks from any claimants to the old Twenty-fifth Dynasty crown.30
And so two of the greatest ancient empires ceased to be world powers. Egypt was caged, and Assyria no longer existed. The Babylonian crown had become the most powerful in the world.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
A Brief Empire
Between 605 and 580 BC,
Egypt builds an army,
Babylon destroys Jerusalem,
and Nebuchadnezzar II goes mad
BACK IN BABYLON, the crown prince Nebuchadnezzar took the throne as Nebuchadnezzar II151 and set out to take over the world which had once been Assyrian.
For several years, he had no serious opponents. Necho II, weakened by his defeat at Carchemish, had been driven back behind his own borders. The Lydians of Asia Minor were too small to be a threat; the wandering, belligerent Scythians were disorganized; the Greek cities were occupied with their own internal convulsions. The strongest possible challenger to Babylonian power was the Medes, who commanded the Persian army as well as their own. But Cyarxes, king of the Medes, was also Nebuchadnezzar’s father-in-law; his daughter Amytis (whose husband had been on constant campaign since the match was made outside the walls of Nineveh) now lived in the palace at Babylon.
Nebuchadnezzar’s conquests began in the Western Semitic lands. He posted a garrison outside the walls of Jerusalem, upon which Jehoiakim of Israel swapped alliances, away from Necho II (who had placed him on the throne), to Babylon. “For three years,” says 2 Kings 24:1, “Jehoiakim became the vassal of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon.” And Josephus adds, “The king of Babylon passed over the Euphrates and took all of Syria, except for Judea…and Jehoiakim, affrighted at his threatening, bought his peace with money.”1
Jehoiakim’s payment was merely a stalling tactic until he could reestablish an alliance with some other king. Despite the conquest at Carchemish, Babylon was still not regarded as a world power. But his court prophet Jeremiah warned him that Nebuchadnezzar’s takeover was not only inevitable, but divinely ordained: “The king of Babylon will certainly come and destroy this land, and cut off both men and animals from it.”
It was the same kind of warning that Isaiah had delivered about Sennacherib of Assyria, a hundred years earlier. Jehoiakim didn’t want to hear it; when the scroll containing Jeremiah’s warning was read to him, he chopped it up bit by bit with his knife and pitched it into the firepot that burned next to his throne.2 He had begun to carry on plans for revolt with his old master, Necho II, behind Nebuchadnezzar’s back. This didn’t please Jeremiah either: “The pharaoh and his people will drink of the same cup of destruction,” he promised, and added that Jehoiakim’s body would be “thrown out and exposed to the heat by day and the frost by night.”152
Unimpressed by this dire warning, Jehoiakim formally rebelled against Babylon as soon as Necho II was ready to attack. He stopped sending tribute to Babylon; Necho marched out of Egypt; and Nebuchadnezzar headed down to meet the threat.
In 602, Necho II and Nebuchadnezzar met in battle—and the two armies fought each other to a draw. The Babylonian Chronicle (which is in bits for this part of Nebuchadnezzar’s reign) tells us that another battle was fought the following year, in 601: “They fought one another in the battlefield,” reads the 601 entry, “and both sides suffered severe losses….[Nebuchadnezzar] and his army turned and [went back] to Babylon.”3
But Nebuchadnezzar was not the only loser. Necho II had spent too many men to keep hold of his Western Semitic lands. “The king of Egypt did not march out from his own country again,” 2 Kings 24 says, “because the king of Babylon had taken all his territory, from the Wadi of Egypt to the Euphrates River.”
Instead, Necho II turned back to his own country. He worked on his canal until it ran from the eastern Nile river through to the Red Sea. It was an enormous undertaking: “The length of the canal is such that it takes four days to sail it,” Herodotus writes, “and it has been dug wide enough for two triremes to be rowed abreast.”4 A trireme was only fifteen feet wide, but a thirty-foot canal extending all the way to the Red Sea was nevertheless an enormous undertaking.153 To guard its entrance to the Nile, he built a fortress: Pelusium.
58.1 The Babylonian Empire
He had hired two sets of mercenaries to come down and help him train a navy: Greek sailors from the Ionian cities around the Aegean Sea,5 and also, according to Herodotus, Phoenician seamen, probably from one of the Phoenician cities (Tyre or Sidon, or perhaps the Phoenician-built city of Carthage on the North African coast, founded by Jezebel’s great-niece Elissa, and rapidly growing). These helped him to build a fleet, which consisted largely of a primitive kind of trireme: a galley warship constructed so that it could ram other boats. These were anchored along the coast of the Red Sea.6 Herodotus even insists that one crew of Phoenician sailors, told off to explore the Red Sea by Necho II, sailed down south and kept on sailing. Much to everyone’s surprise, they showed up at the Pillars of Hercules—the mouth of the Mediterranean Sea—three years later, and sailed through the Mediterranean all the way back to the Nile Delta. They had, in fact, gone all the way around Africa.7 All of this was an enormous break with tradition for the sea-hating Egyptians, but Necho II, forwards looking, could see that commerce was a better bet than warfare if he wanted to build an empire.
While all this exciting exploration was going on in Egypt, Judah was cut off. Jehoiakim had counted on Egyptian support; now he was alone. “He was disappointed of his hope,” Josephus remarks, “for Egypt dared not fight at
this time.”8
But Jehoiakim, poised uneasily for Babylon’s retaliation, had to wait four more years while Nebuchadnezzar rebuilt his army and then dealt with other business (fighting nomads in the northern deserts of Arabia, according to the Babylonian Chronicle).9 What was going on in the city at this time, we do not know. But possibly some of Jerusalem’s officials agreed with Jeremiah about the folly of opposing Babylon; Jehoiakim died in 597, at the relatively young age of thirty-six, and at once Nebuchadnezzar headed towards the city.
In Jerusalem, Jehoiakim’s teenage son Jehoiachin was set on the throne. But as soon as Nebuchadnezzar reached Jerusalem’s walls—mere weeks after Jehoiakim’s death—the king, his mother, his court, the noblemen, and all the officials surrendered. Perhaps they had been offered some sort of immunity, in exchange for services rendered. Although they were taken into captivity, they were treated well; Babylonian records show that Jehoiachin spent the next forty years living in Babylon at the king’s expense, provided for from the Babylonian treasury.10
The army was taken away into Babylon, but not scattered; the treasury and the Temple of Solomon were raided for gold, but the buildings were not razed or burned. Nebuchadnezzar didn’t even take away all of the royal family. He assigned Jehoachin’s uncle Mattaniah, brother of the dead king, the new, subject-name of Zedekiah, and put him on the throne; Josephus gives this arrangement the pleasant name “league of mutual assistance,”11 but in fact Zedekiah was no more than a Babylonian governor. Nevertheless, Jerusalem had gotten off relatively easily.
Nebuchadnezzar did have concerns other than the control of a third-rate power to his west. He had his own position as great king to establish and maintain, and he set out to do this as Mesopotamian kings had done for two thousand years: he started to build. His own inscriptions record the restoration and addition of temple after temple in Babylon itself. Babylon was the home of the god Marduk, and Nebuchadnezzar’s devotion to Marduk was also a celebration of Babylonian triumph. “O Marduk, my lord,” reads one of Nebuchadnezzar’s inscriptions, commemorating an effective campaign to put down rebellion to his west, “may I remain always your legitimate governor; may I pull your yoke until I am sated with progeny…may my offspring rule forever.”12
The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome Page 45
