Nebuchadrezzar, himself, attached the greatest importance to the restoration of the temples of E-sagila and E-zida, as being the most ancient sanctuaries of Babylon, and in his briefest inscriptions, the stamp-marks on bricks, whether used for the building of these two temples or any other edifice, always had added to his title of king, that of restorer of the temples of E-sagila and E-zida. Of greater interest to us, however, since we can still admire the ruins of it, is a temple which is only briefly referred to in a few words in the long inscription, but of which we have a detailed account in another, shorter inscription, namely, the Temple of the Seven Spheres of Heaven and Earth, which was built in seven stories near (or as a ziggurat of) E-zida at Borsippa.
But although Nebuchadrezzar devoted most thought to his beloved Babylon (and to Borsippa) he in nowise neglected other seats of worship of the country. The temple of the Sun, at Sippar, the temple of a god as yet unidentified, in the city of Baz (Paszitu), the temple of Idi-Anu (the Eye of Anu), at Dilbat, the temple of Lugal-Amarda (Marad), E-Anna, the temple of Ishtar, at Erech, the temple of the Sun, at Larsa, and the temple of the Moon, at Erech, are enumerated one after another as having been rebuilt by Nebuchadrezzar. With better right than his father he calls himself on one of the Abu-Habba cylinders “the ruler of Sumer and Accad, who laid the foundation of the land” (or as Winckler translates it, “made fast the foundations of the land”), for in truth his new creations extended over the whole territory that had been Sumer and Accad as we are familiar with it in ancient Babylonian history, from the reigns of Ur-Ba’u of Ur onward. Under him, after a long sleep (lasting in places for a thousand years) among her ruins, the whole of Babylonia kept the festival of her resurrection, and joyous sacrificial hymns resounded through the length and breadth of the land during Nebuchadrezzar’s long and prosperous reign, as in the days of her distant prime.
To complete the picture of Nebuchadrezzar’s capital, we must in conclusion cast a glance at the vast fortifications with which this king girdled the city he had created, and so insured it against the most formidable assault. Nebuchadrezzar did not rest satisfied with completely restoring and enlarging these fortifications (a work that his father had begun, since they had again been impaired); he included a strip of arable land some four thousand cubits (about two to three kilometres) in breadth, on the farther side of the rampart Nimitti-Bel, within another “mountain high” wall, and made it a part of the outworks, thus casting a gigantic threefold girdle of ramparts (or walls) and moats about the city. Nor was that enough: “To quell the countenance of the enemy that he should not harass the (threefold) encompassment of Babylon, I surrounded the land with mighty streams, comparable unto the waters of the sea; to cross them was as it were to cross the ocean. To render an inundation from their midst (the midst of these artificial courses) impossible, I heaped up masses of earth, I set up brick dams round about them.”
And herewith we must take leave of this truly great ruler, and turn to his successors, who, unhappily, did not resemble him, and of whom the last, Nabonidus by name, could alone be compared to him in his zeal for the restoration and adornment of the various temples of the country, though in all other respects he fell far below the greatness of his mighty ancestor. This inferiority is the reason that the New Babylonian Kingdom hurried so swiftly to its unexpected end.
THE FOLLOWERS OF NEBUCHADREZZAR
[560-555 B.C.]
We know from the Ptolemaic canon, Hommel goes on, that after Nebuchadrezzar’s death (562) Illoarudamos (probably a clerical error for Illoarudakos, i.e. Amil-Marduk), the biblical Evil-Merodach, ascended the throne and died in the second year of his reign (560). Berosus calls him a son of Nebuchadrezzar, and describes his short reign as unjust and licentious, this being the reason why he was murdered by Neriglissor (Nergal-shar-usur), his sister’s husband, and thus son-in-law to Nebuchadrezzar. As a matter of fact, in direct confirmation of the chronological statements of the Ptolemaic canon, the only contract tablets that have been discovered of the reign of this king, date from his accession, about July 22, 560 B.C. He is mentioned in the Old Testament, in the last four verses of the 2nd Book of Kings; “And it came to pass in the seven and thirtieth year of the captivity of Jehoiachin, king of Judah, in the twelfth month, on the seven and twentieth day of the month, that Evil-Merodach, king of Babylon, in the year that he began to reign, did lift up the head of Jehoiachin, king of Judah, out of prison. And he spake kindly to him and set his throne above the throne of the kings that were with him in Babylon; and changed his prison garments, and he did eat bread continually before him all the days of his life. And his allowance was a continual allowance given him of the king, a daily rate for every day, all the days of his life.” It is evident that the Bible here refers to Amil-Marduk, for on the twenty-seventh Adar 560 this king was still upon the throne (see the above date, 4th Abu), whilst the first well-authenticated date of Neriglissor is 25th Marsheshwan, i.e. about 10th November of that same year.
From the reign of Amil-Marduk we have no inscription, but we are in better case as regards his successor, Nergal-shar-usur (the Nergal-sharezer of the Bible; Berosus, Neriglissor, Ptolemaic canon, Neriga-solasar). He reigned from 559-556, for there are two inscriptions on cylinders and a brief inscription on brick which we may assign to this reign. The subject appears to be some restoration in the shrine of E-zida at Babylon. Where the inscription again becomes legible, the king gives an account of the construction of a canal, the waters of which had gone away and withdrawn, and of palace building.
The following questions are suggested by these inscriptions. Firstly, who was his father, the Bel-shum-ishkum twice mentioned in them? Let it suffice here to note the possibility that he may be identical with a former king of Assyria, the son of Asshurbanapal, who certainly did not reign more than a few months. The chronology presents no obstacle to the acceptance of this hypothesis. Let us then assume that Bel-shum-ishkum was born about 645; he would then be about twenty years of age at the death of Asshurbanapal, and about forty at the fall of Nineveh, after which he probably found a refuge at the Babylonian court. By that time (606) his son Nergal-shar-usur might very well be about eighteen years old; if we take this for granted, then the latter was thirty-seven in the year 587, in which two persons of the same name (Nergal-sharezer, Jeremiah xxxix. 3) are mentioned among Nebuchadrezzar’s nobles (one among the “princes” in general, the other amongst the officials of highest rank), sixty-four at his accession in 560 B.C. and not quite seventy when he died, which gives a great show of probability to his identity with one or other of these two Nergal-sharezers. Another question to which it would be very interesting to find an answer is that of the wars of Nergal-shar-usur, for, short as his reign was, it is evident from the two cylinder inscriptions that he did wage wars. Unfortunately we have no more exact information on the subject; but if we consider that as early as the year 555, that is, only a year after Nergal-shar-usur’s death, disorders of such magnitude had broken out in Mesopotamia, due to the “Manda warriors” under the leadership of their king Ishtuvegu (Astyages), that is to say, to Median hordes, that the Babylonians appealed to Kurush (Cyrus), king of Anshan, who did, in fact, succeed in driving the Medes back, we may be sure that the earliest incursions of the Manda into Babylonian territory (of which Mesopotamia had formed a part since the fall of Nineveh) took place in the reign of Neriglissor. This hypothesis is directly confirmed by the tenor of Nabonidus’ account of the invasion. In that case Neriglissor’s warlike enterprises were not crowned with brilliant success, or at all events did not expel the Manda from Mesopotamia altogether.