The Babylonian king Nabopolassar (626-605) had no hesitation in recording his triumph. ‘I slaughtered the land of Assyria, he trumpeted, ‘I turned the hostile land into heaps and ruins. The Assyrian, who since distant days had ruled over all the peoples, and with his heavy yoke had brought injury to the people of the Land, his feet from Akkad I turned back, his yoke I threw off,’ Babylon enjoyed its finest period as an independent state between 625 and 539 BC. Its greatest king, Nebuchadrezzar II, who ruled from 604 to 562 and who was responsible for a final defeat of a joint army of Assyrians and Egyptians at Carchemish, won a great empire. Egypt was contained, Judah was subdued, and the major Phoenician trading city of Tyre captured after a siege of, according to legend, thirteen years.
Not much is known about the administration of this new empire but there is no doubt about the importance of Babylon as a centre of royal splendour. Massive walls and gates surrounded the city with a processional way leading from the main temple past the palace of the king and outside the city to the ceremonial building where the New Year was celebrated. Gold, silver, and lapis lazuli were used to decorate the walls. Display for its own sake replaces the more subtle propaganda of the reliefs of Assyrian palaces. Nebuchadrezzar also built to last. The bricks and other building materials are so well made that they are still reusable today. Buildings were designed to be placed on vast foundations so that they would be safe from the floods of the Euphrates that flowed through the middle of the city—the river itself was crossed by a graceful bridge.
Dominating the city was a great ziggurat to the god Marduk, whose cult centre this was, of which the foundations survive. It needed some 17 million bricks for its completion and may be the original of the Tower of Babel mentioned in the Book of Genesis. Like earlier ziggurats its purpose seems to have been to provide a link between earth and heaven, to tie the city to the world beyond. Babylonian mathematics and science flourished with ever more accurate recordings of historical and astronomical events. Even after the conquest of Babylonia by Cyrus the Great (see below, p. 104) the relatively tolerant rule of the Persians allowed this culture to survive many more centuries.
World History
