It would seem that after Tirhakah ascended the throne of Egypt in 688 B. C., he persuaded the kingdoms of Palestine to rebel. The Assyrian came west again and threatened to invade Egypt and to destroy Jerusalem. Isaiah then predicted that Jerusalem would be delivered (Isa. 31:5), a prediction which was fulfilled. Sennacherib’s army was attacked by bubonic plague and was compelled to retire.[15]
Sennacherib was assassinated in 681 and was succeeded by his son, Esarhaddon, who ruled till 668. Esarhaddon rebuilt Babylon, which his father had destroyed, and two years before his death conquered all of Lower Egypt and made it an Assyrian province. During his reign a great horde of Scythians poured into Asia through the Caucasus region from southern Russia. The Assyrian army prevented Assyria from being overwhelmed by this horde. The stream of invaders was divided, one part flowing east to Media, the other part westward to Asia Minor.
Esarhaddon’s son and successor, Ashurbanipal, ruled from 668 to 626. His reign was the Augustan age of Assyria. At the beginning he was called upon to put down a rebellion in Egypt, and as trouble there recurred several times, trouble which was fomented by emissaries from Thebes and Nubia, he finally in 661 pushed up the Nile and conquered Thebes and gave it over to plunder. (See Nahum 3:8.) Space does not permit us to follow Ashurbanipal’s wars. About the middle of his reign his brother, Shamash-shumukin, who was ruling Babylon, rebelled along with many other vassals, and although the rebels were finally put down, the seeds of the decay of Assyria’s power were sown. Manasseh, King of Judah, as long as he lived was a faithful vassal of Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal. (Cf. 2 Kings 19:37; 2 Chron. 33.)
The great work of Ashurbanipal was the collection of his library at Nineveh. He sent to all the old temples of Babylonia and had copies made of their incantations, hymns, and epics. These, together with chronicles, medical tablets, dictionaries, etc., he collected in his palace, where they were found by Layard and Rassam, and form the basis of our knowledge of the Assyrian and Babylonian language, literature, and history. With the death of Ashurbanipal, the last Assyrian period had really closed. Though the kingdom continued for twenty years more, they were but the years of a lingering death.
(6) The Neo-Babylonian Period.—In 625, the year after Ashurbanipal’s death, Nabopolassar, the viceroy of Babylon, who appears to have been a Chaldæan,[16] gained his independence, and established the Neo-Babylonian, or Chaldæan empire. Nabopolassar himself reigned till 604 B. C. During his reign the power of the city of Babylon gradually extended over all southern Babylonia, and up the Euphrates to Carchemish. During these years Assyria was gradually diminishing in territory. As Assyria had declined, Media, which had long been in greater or less degree subject to Assyria, had become free, and Median kings had little by little gained control of the country toward Assyria. Nabopolassar finally made an alliance with the Median king, and together they overthrew Nineveh in 606 B. C.
In 604 Necho of Egypt marched with an army to the Euphrates, and Nabopolassar sent his son, Nebuchadrezzar II, to meet him. Nebuchadrezzar defeated Necho at the battle of Carchemish, and hotly pursued him toward Egypt. (See Jer. 46.) The pursuit was, however, interrupted by the death of Nabopolassar, and the recall of Nebuchadrezzar to Babylon to be crowned as king. The defeat of Necho had made Judah a Babylonian vassal-state. Nebuchadrezzar ruled until 562 B. C., and raised Babylon to a height of power which rivaled that attained under the great Hammurapi. He also rebuilt the city in great magnificence. The palaces, temples, and walls of this period, unearthed by Koldewey, were most magnificent structures. Owing to rebellions, first of Jehoiakim and then of Zedekiah, kings of Judah, Nebuchadrezzar twice besieged Jerusalem, once in 597, and again in 586 B. C., on both occasions capturing the city. In 586 he destroyed it. (2 Kings 24, 25.) Following the Assyrian practice, which had prevailed since Tiglath-pileser IV, he transported considerable numbers of the more influential people of the city each time he took it. These were settled in Babylonia. One colony of them was stationed near Nippur. Among those who were transported in 597 was a young priest, who afterward became the prophet Ezekiel. The colony with which he came was settled by the Khubur canal near Nippur. (See Ezek. 1:1.) The young king, Jehoiachin, who was also taken captive at that time, remained in confinement during the rest of Nebuchadrezzar’s reign. He was only released by Amil-Marduk, Nebuchadrezzar’s son, who succeeded his father and reigned two years. (See 2 Kings 25:27-30.)
After Nebuchadrezzar the kingdom of Babylon rapidly declined through four reigns. Meantime, Cyrus, who in 553 had overthrown the kingdom of Media and erected the kingdom of Persia on its ruins, had been gradually extending his realm to the Ægean Sea on the west, and to the borders of India on the east. In 538 B. C. Cyrus captured Babylon and overthrew Nabuna’id.
(7) The Persian Period lasted from 538 to 331 B. C. During this time Babylonia was but a province of the Persian empire, though the Persian kings made it one of their capitals. Cyrus reversed the policy of transportation, which had been practised by the Assyrians and Babylonians for two hundred years, and permitted subject peoples to return to their lands and restore their institutions and worship. He sought to attach them to his government by gratitude instead of fear. It was owing to this policy that the Jewish state was once more established with Jerusalem as its capital, though still a Persian colony. Cambyses extended Persian power to Egypt in 525, and Darius I, 521-485 B. C., extended it to India and into Europe. Under Darius the temple at Jerusalem was rebuilt and the Jews there tried unsuccessfully to regain their independence. This they attempted once more under Artaxerxes III about 350 B. C., but his general, Bagoses, put down their rebellion with great severity. During the Persian period life in Babylonia went on as before. The old gods were worshiped, the old culture was continued, the same language was used, and many business documents written in it have come down to us. The earlier Persian kings employed it for their inscriptions, and in a short time the Persians made from it an alphabet of their own.
(8) The Greek and Parthian Periods.—Alexander the Great overthrew Darius III, the last of the Persian kings, in 331 B. C., when Assyria and Babylonia passed under the sway of the Macedonian. When Alexander returned from his conquest of hither India in 325 B. C., he planned to extend his empire westward to the Atlantic Ocean, and to make Babylon its capital. Plans for the enlargement and beautifying of the city, so as to make it a worthy capital for such an empire, were under way when Alexander suddenly died in June, 323 B. C. In the final division of the world among Alexander’s successors, Babylonia fell to Seleucus, together with all the territory from the Mediterranean to the borders of India. As Seleucus desired a capital on the Mediterranean, so as to watch more successfully the movements of his rivals, he built Antioch on the Orontes and made it his residence. Babylon was, however, made the capital of the eastern half of the empire, and the king’s son, as viceroy, made it his residence.
Soon after 260 B. C. Bactria and Parthia, in the eastern part of the empire of the Seleucidæ, gained their independence. In course of time Parthia absorbed Bactria and became an empire, which lasted till 230 A. D. About 150 B. C. the Parthians conquered Babylonia, which remained with little interruption under their sway till the establishment of the Sassanian kingdom of the Persians in 220 A. D. Babylonia was under the control of this last dynasty until the coming of the Mohammedans in the year 637 A. D. The old culture of the Babylonians, their religion, language, and writing were maintained well down toward the Christian era. Copies of old Sumerian hymns have been found in Babylonia which bear dates as late as 81 B. C., and business documents in Semitic are numerous.[17]