The last king of Assyria was Esar-haddon II, called Sarakos by the Greek writers. He has left us a few records, which were written when his enemies were gathering about him, and when his people were vainly calling upon their gods for help. The Medes, the Minni, the Kimmerians or Gomer, had all banded themselves [pg 133] together, and were steadily approaching Nineveh. The frontier cities had been stormed, and the enemy was spreading like an inundation over the whole country. In their despair the Assyrian rulers ordained a solemn fast of 100 days and 100 nights, and besought the Sun-god to pardon their sin. But all was in vain. The measure of the iniquities of Assyria was filled up; the time had come when the desolater should himself be desolate, and Nineveh, as God's prophets had threatened, was laid utterly waste.[11]
Chapter VII. Nebuchadrezzar and Cyrus.
Rise of the Babylonian empire.—Media.—Pharaoh-Necho.—The battle of Carchemish.—Nebuchadrezzar ascends the throne.—The splendour of Babylon.—No monuments yet discovered recording Nebuchadrezzar's Jewish and Syrian campaigns.—Evil-Merodach.—Clay documents recently discovered in Babylonia.—New light thrown on the empire of Cyrus.—The cylinder of Cyrus.—Cyrus not a monotheist.—The Babylonian King of Isaiah xiv.—Cyrus not a King of Persia at all.—Babylon not besieged by Cyrus.—How Cyrus came to let the Jews return.—Correspondence between the language of Cyrus and of Scripture.—“The god who raises the dead to life.”—Prayer after a bad dream.—Babylonian penitential psalms.—A translation of one of them.—Chronological table of the events of the chapter.
The empire of Babylonia arose out of the ashes of the empire of Assyria. While the bands of the enemy were gathering round the doomed city of Nineveh, Nabopolassar, the viceroy of Babylonia, seized the opportunity for revolt. There were no armies now, as in former days, that could pour out of the gates of the Assyrian capital to punish the rebel, and Nabopolassar was allowed to establish his new monarchy undisturbed. But the fall of the imperial city left the other provinces of the Assyrian empire without a master or a defence. Its latest conquest, Elam, seems to have recovered its independence for a short time—at all events, Jeremiah (xxv. 25) in the year 606 b.c. speaks of “the kings of Elam”—but elsewhere its possessions became the battle-ground of the three rival powers of Babylon, of Media, and of Egypt.
Media was the name given by Persian and Greek writers to the kingdom of Ekbatana, a city now represented by Hamadan. Its native name, at all events in the time of Sargon, was Ellip, and the title of Media applied to it in later history seems to have been due to a confusion between the Assyrian words Madâ “Medes,” and Manda, “barbarian.” As we shall see, Astyages, the king of Ekbatana, is called “the king of the people of Manda,” or “barbarians,” by the Babylonian king Nabonidos. The tablets which describe the approach of the last enemies of Nineveh draw a careful distinction between Kaztarit, or Kyaxares, “lord of the city of Car-Cassi,” and Mamiti-arsu, “lord of the city of the Medes.” For the Assyrians, the Medes were only the small tribes which inhabited the regions eastward of Kurdistan. The error, however, which turned the kingdom of Ekbatana into a kingdom of Media has fixed itself in literature, and the Old Testament also has adopted in regard to it the current language of the day. It is now too late to disturb the time-honoured title, and we shall therefore continue to speak of a Median empire and a Median kingdom, even though we now know that the terms rest on an ancient mistake.
As the power of Assyria had dwindled, the power of Egypt had increased. The Egyptian kings began to dream again of an Asiatic empire, such as they had once held in days long gone by, and their first efforts were directed towards securing afresh the cities of the Philistines. Gaza and Ashdod were captured after a long siege;[12] Cyprus became an Egyptian province, and Pharaoh Necho, whose Phœnician fleet had circumnavigated Africa, set about the task of conquering Asia. [pg 137] Josiah was now on the throne of Judah. He still called himself a vassal of Assyria, and could not but see with alarm the rise of a new enemy, just as the old one had ceased to be formidable. In the name of his suzerain, therefore, he attempted to bar the advance of Necho; the two armies of Egypt and Judah met on the plain of Megiddo, where the battle ended in the death of the Jewish king and the slaughter of the flower of the Jewish soldiery. The death of Josiah proved an irremediable disaster to the Jewish state. He left behind him a family torn by jealousies and supported by rival factions, a people hostile to the religious reforms he had carried through, and an army which had lost both its leader and its veterans. From henceforth Judah was no longer able to defend itself from an invader, whether Egyptian or Babylonian; and even the strong walls of Jerusalem no longer proved a defence in days when the method of warfare had changed, and a victorious army was content to sit down for years before a fortress until its defenders had been starved out.
Necho's triumph, however, was short-lived. Three years after the battle of Megiddo (b.c. 606), he had to meet the Babylonian army, under its young general Nebuchadrezzar, the son of Nabopolassar, at the ford of the Euphrates, which was protected by the old Hittite city of Carchemish. Nabopolassar was now independent king of Babylonia, and his son had given evidence of great military capacities. He had disputed with the Median kingdom of Ekbatana the possession of Mesopotamia; and though the ruins of Nineveh and other Assyrian cities on the eastern bank of the Tigris continued to remain in the hands of the Median ruler, as well as the high road which led across Northern [pg 138] Mesopotamia into Asia Minor, and passed through the patriarchal city of Haran, he had secured for his father the southern regions enclosed between the Tigris and the Euphrates. The battle of Carchemish finally decided who should be the master of Western Asia. The Egyptian forces were completely shattered, and Necho retreated with the wreck of his army to his ancestral kingdom. Judah and the countries which adjoined it passed under the yoke of Babylonia.
Two years later, in b.c. 604, Nabopolassar died, and Nebuchadrezzar succeeded to the throne. His name is written Nabu-kudur-uzur, “O Nebo, defend the crown,” in the cuneiform, so that the form Nebuchadrezzar, which is found in the Book of Jeremiah, is the only correct one, Nebuchadnezzar being a corruption of it, like Asnapper for Assur-bani-pal. Nebuchadrezzar was not only a great general, he was also a great builder and an able administrator. Under him, Babylon, which had been little more than a provincial town, became one of the most splendid cities in the ancient world. In the middle of it rose the gigantic temple of Bel or Baal, in eight stages, now represented by a mound of ruins, which goes under the name of Babil. A winding road led from the foot of it to the shrine on the summit, wherein was a golden image of the god, forty feet high, and a golden table in front of it for the showbread. Nebuchadrezzar's palace, now called the Kasr mound, was on a scale equally vast, though the wall that surrounded it, according to the king's own statement, had been built in fifteen days; within were the famous hanging gardens, raised on lofty arcades, and watered by means of a screw. In the suburb of Borsippa, on the western side of the Euphrates, stood another temple, [pg 139] the modern Birs-i-Nimrud. This was dedicated to Nebo, and had been begun by an earlier king. But it was completed by Nebuchadrezzar, who called it “the temple of the seven lights of the earth,” and built it in seven stages, each coloured according to the supposed colours of the seven planets. The upper stages were artificially vitrified, wood having been piled up against the surfaces of the bricks of which they were composed, and then set on fire. Both Borsippa and Babylon were surrounded by a single line of fortification, consisting of a double wall. It was pierced by a hundred gates, all of bronze. So broad were the walls, that two chariots could pass one another upon them. Walls were also built on either side of the river, which flowed through the centre of the city, and was furnished with handsome quays. There were gates in these walls at the end of each of the wide and straight streets by which the city was intersected, and between every gate a ferry-boat plied. Besides the ferry-boats there was also a drawbridge, which was drawn up every night. Such was “great Babylon,” which Nebuchadrezzar boasted he had built “for the house of the kingdom, by the might of his power, and for the honour of his majesty.”