In Babylonia the old ideology of the Sumerian city-states had never died out in spite of the unification of the country and the creation of a single Babylonian monarchy during the Old Babylonian period (2004-1595 bce). In contrast to Assyria, Babylonia was a conglomerate of cities with very ancient traditions, built around large and wealthy temples where gods and goddesses reigned like earthly monarchs and owners of the land. This contrast was reflected in the building programs of the two monarchies. Whereas the mammoth architectural undertakings of the NeoAssyrian period aimed at exalting the king, those of the Neo-Babylonian monarchs were devoted mainly to the care of the gods. True, they built for themselves an impressive palace in Babylon, and, if we are to believe later reports about the famed Hanging Gardens, they spared no expense to provide their residence with delightful surroundings. But we are far from Assyrian palaces which their owners intended as living cosmic centers. In Babylon this role was not filled by the royal residence, but by the city itself.
The emphasis on the cosmic role of Babylon in texts, art, and architecture was the manifestation of a dogma, well illustrated by the inscription of Nabopolassar (625605 bce) commemorating the restoration of the inner defensive wall of Babylon. Inserted in the body of the inscription was a hymn to the wall, praising it as ‘‘the solid border as ancient as time immemorial,’’ as ‘‘the staircase to heaven, the ladder to the netherworld,’’ and with many more epithets extolling its creation in primeval time and status as favorite residence of the gods (Beaulieu 2000b: 307-8). The outer aspect of the city at the time of Nebuchadnezzar II (604-562 bce), when most of the building works were carried out, must immediately have reminded the onlooker of the city’s status as the center of the cosmos, the passageway between heaven, earth, and the netherworld, with the dazzling blue-colored bricks of the ceremonial gates merging into the light brown color of the walls and buildings, like sky and sand dunes meeting at the horizon. The main decorative motif in Nebuchadnezzar’s palace was the tall, stylized palm trees of the throne room rising against the walls. Virtually nothing of the artistic display of Assyrian palaces survived into Babylonian imperial iconography, not even the colossal guardians standing at their gates. In Babylon such guardians were depicted in reliefs made of molded bricks, standing in superimposed rows at the city gates. Literally floating in the lapis-blue sky of the glazed bricks, they possessed none of the immediacy and reality of their Assyrian counterparts. They lived in the cosmic realm of the idealized city, not in the concrete world of the royal art of might and power.
Babylon was not the only city in the core of the empire. Sippar, Borsippa, Nippur, Ur, Uruk, Kutha, and several others also laid claim to very ancient traditions, and the Neo-Babylonian kings acknowledged their sanctity by lavishing great riches on their temples. Such largesse allowed them publicly to display their devotion, and thereby to secure their legitimacy. A new official discourse arose which proclaimed the correct performance of religious rituals and duties and the meticulous rebuilding of sanctuaries as the sole reason of the monarchy for being (Talon 1993). This ideology was accordingly reflected in the epithets of the kings, who contented themselves with the titles of ‘‘king of Babylon,’’ which reflected the cosmic centrality of Babylon, and ‘‘king of Sumer and Akkad,’’ which embodied their duty to provide for the sanctuaries of Babylonia. They generally refrained from using old Mesopotamian titles implying universal dominion, such as ‘‘king of the world’’ and ‘‘king of the four quarters,’’ which had formed the mainstay of Assyrian royal titles. Only with Nabonidus (555-539 bce), who looked back to the Assyrian period and seems to have been more preoccupied than his peers with the political expression of universal dominion, do we find some limited resurrection of imperial titles. From reading the inscriptions of the Neo-Babylonian kings one gains the feeling of a systematic denial of the fact of empire, contrasting with the very obvious exercise of it in practice.
The reasons for this ideological denial are open to speculation. Perhaps the Babylonians, who had never really had an empire, did not exercise universal dominion long enough to be able to create an adequate political vocabulary. Yet there were models to emulate, at least the Assyrian model, the memory of which was still fresh. But several times the official inscriptions of the Babylonian empire commented on the fall of Assyria, and almost always with the same theological explanation, that it was caused by divine retribution for the crimes committed in the past by Assyrian kings, chiefly Sennacherib, against the cult centers of Babylonia. In the inscription of Nabopolassar the theological argument was further developed into a glorification of the contemplative life of the devout king, representing the Babylonian model, contrasted to the brutality of the impious, illegitimate ruler who trusted only in feats of might and power, representing the Assyrian model (Beaulieu 2003a). And history had proven that Babylonian piety had triumphed over Assyrian hubris and savagery. The Babylonian denial of empire may well have originated in this moral condemnation of Assyria by the theologians.
But there was indeed an empire. Yet, how it was administered and how much it coopted the former provincial system of the Assyrians remain open questions. The evidence from Dur-Katlimmu in northeast Syria seems to suggest that Babylonians just stepped in and reused the former Assyrian administrative structure, but we lack texts to substantiate this (Kuhne 1997). Apart from a few documents, no provincial archive from the western part of the empire has been discovered. The texts found in the royal palace in Babylon are still mostly unpublished, and official inscriptions give no information on military conquests. If it were not for the Babylonian Chronicle Series, only partly preserved for that period (Grayson 1975: 87-113), and the Bible, we would know almost nothing about the growth of the empire.
By and large, however, it seems that Babylonian policies were modeled on Assyrian practices, in particular regarding the restructuring of the conquered regions. Mass deportations continued. The case of Jerusalem and Judah is well known from the Bible, yet not unique. Several small towns in Babylonia were named after Levantine cities, suggesting that they had been peopled by deportees from the west. Although some of these settlements may have originated in the Neo-Assyrian period, others were established under Babylonian rule. This is certain for Surru (Tyre), which appears in the cuneiform documentation soon after the capture of its famed Phoenician namesake by Nebuchadnezzar (Joannes 1982). As in imperial Assyria, the influx of foreigners must have increased the diversity of the already composite population of Babylonia. Babylon must have become a real cosmopolitan Babel, if we are only to judge from the few published texts from the palace of Nebuchadnezzar. These record mostly allocations of rations to various deportees and other foreigners stationed in the capital. Among the various people listed we find Philistines from Ashkelon, Phoenicians from Tyre, Byblos, and Arwad, Elamites, Medes, Persians, Egyptians, Greeks (here called lonians), and Lydians (Weidner 1939).
In some respects Babylonian methods of government surpassed the Assyrians in brutality. The Palestinian policy of Nebuchadnezzar is a case in point. The year 604 saw the annihilation of Ashkelon in the wake of Nebuchadnezzar’s campaign to secure the Levant against the ambitions of Egypt (Stager 1996). In the following years Ekron was similarly destroyed. The evidence for planned destruction is massive, and the sites remained deserted until the reign of Cyrus (538-530 bce), when the Persians allowed activities to resume. Judah and its capital were similarly devastated. It is possible that Babylon did not have the resources to integrate and develop the area in the same manner as the Assyrians had done in the previous century, and therefore a policy of burnt earth may have been instituted in order to prevent the Egyptians from gaining a foothold in the areas. One sector where the Babylonians enjoyed greater success than their predecessors was northern Arabia. The last Babylonian king Nabonidus was able to secure the entire area for the empire down to the modern city of Medina. According to Babylonian sources he built a palace in the oasis of Teima, where he took up residence for about ten years, and destroyed the herds and means of subsistence of the nomadic population, probably with the intention of forcing them to settle in areas under imperial control (Beaulieu 1989:169-85). In this respect the Babylonian empire again followed the same methods as the Assyrians, in spite of the official tenor of royal inscriptions which recorded only the pious and pacific deeds of the rulers.
Unlike what happened in Assyria, the end of the Babylonian empire did not cause the demise of the Babylonian urban core. Babylonian cities had prospered before the empire and continued to do so under the Persian and Hellenistic monarchies. The empire had brought an influx of riches to Babylon and the old cities of Sumer and Akkad, allowing unprecedented architectural activity to be sponsored by the kings. Yet the spoils of conquest and tribute were certainly not the main source of wealth for imperial Babylonia, if we are only to judge from the fact that under the Persian rulers, well after the loss of political independence, Babylonia contributed the largest amount of precious metal in taxes to the treasury. With such natural riches it is hardly surprising that the Babylonians never looked beyond Babylonia in the elaboration of their ideology of power and of their geographic conception of the world.
World History
