Archaeology and The Babylonian and Persian Empires

ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE BABYLONIAN AND PERSIAN EMPIRES

STEPHEN HUGHES

THE BABYLONIAN and Persian Empires dominated the Middle East around 2,500 years ago, and feature prominently in Scripture. Over the last one hundred years or so a vast amount of archaeological material has been unearthed, shedding light on these two empires. In this article (as in other articles of this Special Issue) we hope to show how archaeological evidence verifies the historical accuracy of the Bible. Absolute dates (that is, so many years B.C.) allow us to verify prophetic time periods, which may be used as evidence that the Bible is the Word of God. Of course, a certain margin of error has to be accepted when dealing with dates from so long ago. The dates used in this article have generally come from The Times Atlas of the Bible.(Footnote 1)

At its height the Babylonian Empire stretched from the Taurus mountains (in southern

Turkey

) in the west to the top of the Persian Gulf in the east, and from Nineveh in the north down to Medina in Arabia in the south. The ruins of the Babylonian Empire have been discovered in modern-day

Iraq

; for instance, the remains of the city of Babylon have been found sixty miles directly south of Baghdad.

The Babylonian Empire began with the fall of Assyria. In 612 B.C. Nabopolassar (625-605 B.C.), the first king of the Chaldean (Babylonian) dynasty, conquered Nineveh, the capital city of Assyria, a conquest which is the subject of Nahum’s prophecy. However, the embers of the Assyrian Empire were not finally extinguished until 609 B.C. After the destruction of Nineveh in 612 the Assyrian Empire continued in Haran until 610, and the last Assyrian king, Assur-Uballit (611-609), died the following year. From 609 to 539 B.C. Babylon ruled the world.

Nebuchadnezzar (605-561 B.C.) was the son of Nabopolassar. During the first year of his reign he invaded Palestine, as mentioned in Daniel 1:1,2. Since it is generally accepted that Nebuchadnezzar commenced his reign in 605 B.C. we are able to date the beginning of Jehoiakim’s reign as about 609 B.C. Nebuchadnezzar invaded again in 597, and besieged Jerusalem. Jehoiachin (called Jeconiah in 1 Chronicles 3:16), who reigned for only three months, was taken and carried off to Babylon.

A tablet (now in the British Museum) containing the Babylonian Chronicle for the years 605-595 B.C. includes an account of Nebuchadnezzar’s invasion of Palestine in 597 B.C. It reads: “In the seventh year, the month of Kislev, the king of Akkad mustered his troops, marched to the Hatti-land [

Syria

and Palestine], and encamped against [that is, besieged] the city of

Judah

and on the second day of the month Adar he seized the city and captured the king. He appointed a king of his own choice [literally, heart], received its heavy tribute and sent [them] to Babylon”.(Footnote 2)

This account parallels 2 Kings 24:10-17: “At that time the servants of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came up against Jerusalem, and the city was besieged. And Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came against the city, and his servants did besiege it ... And he carried out thence all the treasures of the house of the LORD, and the treasures of the king’s house ... And the king of Babylon made Mattaniah his father’s brother king in his stead, and changed his name to Zedekiah”.

The seventh year of Nebuchadnezzar corresponds with 598 B.C., the year that Nebuchadnezzar started out for Palestine. Jerusalem fell on 16 March 597.(Footnote 3)

A tablet found near Babylon even records rations given to Jehoiachin and his family in Babylon,(Footnote 4) which supports what we read in 2 Kings 25:30: “And his allowance was a continual allowance given him of the king, a daily rate for every day, all the days of his life” (see also Jer. 52:31-34).

Nebuchadnezzar again invaded Palestine ten years later and destroyed the temple: “And they burnt the house of God, and brake down the wall of Jerusalem, and burnt all the palaces thereof with fire, and destroyed all the goodly vessels thereof” (2 Chron. 36:19).

Until the end of the last century the name of Nebuchadnezzar was unknown outside the Bible. This was because of the complete fulfilment of the prophecy in Isaiah 13 that Babylon would become a desolate ruin. As a result Babylon was more or less lost from the second to the seventeenth centuries A.D., and even then Babylon was not properly excavated until the twentieth century. A German archaeologist, Robert Koldewey, excavated the site between 1899 and 1917. His team was forced to stop in 1917 because the British Expeditionary Force was approaching Babylon. This was at the time of the First World War.(Footnote 5)

In 1913 several bricks were found inscribed with the name of Nebuchadnezzar, proving beyond reasonable doubt that Nebuchadnezzar existed as a real king of Babylon. The excavators of Babylon were able to tell who commissioned a particular building by looking at the name of the king stamped on the bricks. One of the many ‘Nebuchadnezzar’ bricks is on display in the British Museum (Figure 1). The text(Footnote 6) on this particular brick reads:

Esagila was the temple of Marduk in Babylon, and Ezida the temple of the god Nabu in the nearby town of Borsippa.

Another tablet, also in the British Museum, records Nebuchadnezzar’s building exploits, including the building of the walls of Babylon and the famous hanging gardens of Babylon— hence the boast of Nebuchadnezzar recorded in Daniel 4:30: “The king spake, and said, Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for the house of the kingdom by the might of my power, and for the honour of my majesty?”.

It appears from the record in Daniel 1 that Daniel and his three friends were carried off to Babylon as a result of Nebuchadnezzar’s first invasion of Palestine (605-604 B.C.). What kind of world did Daniel and his friends enter? We read that Daniel and his friends were to be taught “the learning and the tongue of the Chaldeans” (Dan. 1:4). The Hebrew word translated as “learning” is cepher (5612),(Footnote 7) which is usually translated as ‘book’, but which also means the ability to read, as in Isaiah 29:12: “ . . . and the book [cepher] is delivered to him that is not learned [cepher], saying, Read this, I pray thee: and he saith, I am not learned [cepher]”. So Daniel and his friends were taught to read, write and speak Chaldean.

Many Babylonian (Chaldean) texts have been found. The Babylonians wrote in the cuneiform script (wedge-shaped writing; the word ‘cuneiform’ comes from the Latin cuneus, meaning a wedge).

A school of writing, the edubba or ‘tablet house’, existed in Babylon.(Footnote 8) Although the primary purpose of the edubba was to educate scribes, it was also a major centre of learning for the empire. We might consider the edubba to be the University of Babylon. Daniel and his friends probably took the equivalent of a degree course; Daniel 1:5 suggests that it ran for three years, the same length as most modern-day degrees.

The wise men of Babylon were skilled in mathematics.(Footnote 9) The Babylonians used the sexagesimal numbering system (base 60), which has come through today in the measurement of time and angles (for example, sixty minutes per hour and per degree of angle). In fact the Babylonians had the equivalent of Pythagoras’s triangle theorem (in a rightangled triangle the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides) more than a thousand years before Pythagoras (c. 582-500 B.C.). The Babylonian mathematicians produced tables of square roots; an example may be seen in the British Museum. Another tablet in the British Museum contains a collection of mathematical problems (Figure 2).

The Babylonians made extensive astronomical observations;(Footnote 10) for instance, they recorded the 164-B.C. appearance of Halley’s Comet. The Babylonians divided the stars along the line of the ecliptic into twelve groups, the twelve signs of the zodiac. One of the main purposes of Babylonian astronomy was to predict disasters, which verifies Jeremiah 10:2: “Thus saith the LORD, Learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them”.

The spirit of the Babylonian astrologers is alive and well today. Modern-day horoscope writers attempt to predict people’s emotional crises, etc., according to the disposition of the stars. Jeremiah 10:2 indicates that astrology is of no value. (The distinction between astronomy and astrology should be noted. Astronomy is the scientific study of the universe beyond the earth, including the observation of the movements of the stars and planets. Astrology is the false application of these observations in attempting to predict the future.)

Inspecting livers was another technique used by the Babylonians to predict the future. Figure 3 shows a clay sheep’s liver containing fifty-five magical omens. It was used for teaching student astrologers. Apparently different parts of the liver had a special significance; a diseased liver would be a bad omen. The astrologers predicted the future on the basis of which part of the liver was infected with parasites. This confirms Ezekiel 21:21: “For the king of Babylon stood at the parting of the way, at the head of the two ways, to use divination: he made his arrows bright, he consulted with images, he looked in the liver”.

In the book of Daniel the wisdom of man is shown to be foolishness in comparison with the wisdom of God. Only God can tell the future; looking into livers does not work.

The Babylonian Empire was brought to an end when Cyrus the Persian conquered the city of Babylon in 539 B.C. This great event is recorded on a cylinder, the famous Cyrus Cylinder (Figure 4). A translation(Footnote 11) reads: “[The god Marduk] sought out a righteous ‘prince, a man after his own heart, whom he might take by the hand; and he called his name Cyrus, king of Anshan, and he proclaimed his name for sovereignty over the whole world. The hordes of the land of Kutu he forced into submission at his feet, and the men whom [the gods] had delivered into his hands he justly and righteously cared for. And Marduk, the great lord, the protector of his people, beheld his good deeds and his righteous heart with great joy.

He commanded him to go to Babylon, and he caused him to set out on the road to that city, and like a friend and ally marched by his side; and their troops with their weapons girt about them, marched in countless numbers like a flood. Without battle and without fighting Marduk made him to enter into his city of Babylon; he spared Babylon tribulation, and Nabonidus, the king who feared him not, he delivered into his hand”.

An important point to note is that Cyrus says that Babylon was taken without fighting. This is exactly what we read in Jeremiah 51:30-32: “The mighty men of Babylon have forborn to fight, they have remained in their holds: their might hath failed; they became as women: they have burned her dwellingplaces; her bars are broken. One post shall run to meet another, and one messenger to meet another, to shew the king of Babylon that his city is taken at one end, and that the passages are stopped, and the reeds they have burned with fire, and the men of war are affrighted”.

Herodotus, the Greek historian (c. 484-424 B.C.), records that Cyrus diverted the river Euphrates, enabling his men to enter Babylon underneath the city gates: “For having diverted the river, by means of a canal, into the lake, which was before a swamp, he made the ancient channel fordable by the sinking of the river. When this took place, the Persians who were appointed to that purpose close to the streams of the river, which had now subsided to the middle of a man’s thigh, entered Babylon by this passage.”(Footnote 12)

There appears to be a reference to this diversion of the Euphrates in Jeremiah 51:36: “Therefore thus saith the LORD . . . I will dry up her sea, and make her springs dry”. The word for “sea” in this verse is yam (3220), which in this case refers to the River Euphrates. That yam can mean a river is proved by Isaiah 19:5, Ezekiel 32:2 and Nahum 3:8, where yam obviously refers to the River Nile. Further support that the reference in Jeremiah refers to the diversion of the Euphrates is found in Isaiah 44:27,28: “ . . . that saith to the deep, Be dry, and I will dry up thy rivers: that saith of Cyrus, He is My shepherd, and shall perform all My pleasure”. Why should the drying of a river be mentioned in conjunction with the name of Cyrus? It seems that this expression is a prophetic reference to the way Cyrus conquered Babylon (or, to be more accurate, how God conquered Babylon using Cyrus).

Cyrus’s troops took the city of Babylon on 13 October 539 B.C. Cyrus himself made a triumphant entry into Babylon through the bronze Ishtar gates sixteen days later,(Footnote 13) as predicted in Isaiah 45:1: “Thus saith the LORD to His anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden, to subdue nations before him; and I will loose the loins of kings, to open before him the two leaved gates; and the gates shall not be shut”. In the next verse we find that the gates were made of brass. The Hebrew word for “brass” in this verse is nechuwshah (5154), meaning to be ‘made of copper’, based on the word nechosheth (5178), meaning ‘copper’.

In the ancient world copper was usually alloyed with tin to produce bronze; therefore we may take the Hebrew word for copper as referring to any copper-based metal. A reconstruction of the city gates of Balawat (on the Tigris) in the British Museum gives us some idea of what the gates of Babylon were like. The gates were made from vertical planks of wood held together with horizontal bands of bronze.

Herodotus gives the reason why Babylon was taken without fighting: “It is related by the people who inhabited this city, that by reason of its great extent, when they who were at the extremities were taken, those of the Babylonians who inhabited the centre knew nothing of the capture; (for it happened to be a festival;) but they were dancing at the time, and enjoying themselves, till they received certain information of the truth: and thus Babylon was taken for the first time”.(Footnote 14)

This account verifies Daniel 5:1: “Belshazzar the king made a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and drank wine before the thousand”, as prophesied in Jeremiah 51:57: “And I will make drunk her princes, and her wise men, her captains, and her rulers, and her mighty men”.

Archaeology has solved an apparent problem in the book of Daniel. Until the excavations of Ur (by Sir Leonard Woolley between 1922 and 1934) Nabonidus (555-539 B.C.) was known to be the last king of Babylon. So why does Daniel say that Belshazzar was the last king of Babylon? The reason has been found on a clay tablet(Footnote 15) (now in the British Museum) discovered at Ur of the Chaldees which contains an inscription of Nabonidus. The relevant part reads: “And as for me, Nabonidus, the king of Babylon, protect thou me from sinning against thine exalted godhead, and grant thou me graciously a long life: and in the heart of Belshazzar, my firstborn son, the offspring of my loins, set the fear of thine exalted godhead, so that he may commit no sin and that he may be satisfied with the fulness of life”.(Footnote 16)

It is now known that for some unknown reason Nabonidus, king of Babylon, went off to Tema, an oasis in northwest Arabia (about 200 miles north of Medina). An inscription found at Haran records: “But I hied myself afar from my city of Babylon... ten years to my city Babylon I went not in”.(Footnote 17)

Nabonidus was away from Babylon from about 552 to 542 B.C. Belshazzar was the king of Babylon while his father was away. It seems that Belshazzar carried on as vice-king after his father returned from Tema. This explains why Belshazzar made Daniel number three in the kingdom (Dan. 5:29); Belshazzar himself was only number two.

Each year the Babylonians celebrated a New Year festival. The Babylonians had a rule that this feast could only be celebrated if the king of Babylon was actually present in Babylon.

While Nabonidus was away in Tema there were no celebrations. After his return the celebrations could recommence, but for some reason the first was delayed until 539 B.C. It is possible that this feast was being celebrated during the fall of Babylon—that it was the feast of Daniel 5. A tablet has been found which records the death of Belshazzar in Babylon the night that the Persian army entered the city, which verifies Daniel 5:30: “In that night was Belshazzar the king of the Chaldeans slain”.(Footnote 18)

The book of Daniel contains a remarkably accurate and clear prediction of the world empires that followed Babylon. In order to explain such accurate predictions critics have assumed that the book of Daniel was written much later than the time of the Babylonian Empire (for instance, about 150 B.C.(Footnotes 19,20)).

However, Herodotus, writing at about 450 B.C., seems to know very little concerning the Babylonian kings; for instance, Nebuchadnezzar, Nabonidus and Belshazzar are not mentioned. Since Herodotus writes at length about many other kings (Cyrus, for instance) he would be unlikely to omit the names of Babylonian kings if he knew of them. If someone was writing a history of the Victorian era would they fail to mention the name of Queen Victoria if they knew of her name? Obviously not. If the book of Daniel was written in 150 B.C. how is it that the author gives the names of two Babylonian kings unknown to Herodotus(Footnote 21) writing in about 450 B.C.? Herodotus was not the only one who did not have this information, as the names of Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar remained unknown outside the Bible until the beginning of this century. This is substantial evidence that the book of Daniel was written during the fifth century B.C. as indicated by the book itself.

Jeremiah accurately predicted details of the conquest of Babylon in advance. If we believe Jeremiah was not inspired we have difficulty in explaining how he could make such accurate predictions. From a natural point of view how could Jeremiah know that Babylon was to be destroyed at a given time in the future, and that this would lead to the return of the Jews to their homeland?

Jeremiah predicted that the captivity of the Jews in Babylon would last for seventy years, and that at the end of this time the Babylonian Empire would come to an end. At the time he wrote (c. 626-592 B.C.) the Babylonian Empire ruled the world, and the city of Babylon itself seemed invincible. Herodotus(Footnote 22) gives a description of the extent and size of the walls of Babylon. Each of the four walls were 120 stadia (13.8 miles) in length. (One stadium, a unit of distance used by the ancient Greeks, is equivalent to 606 feet and nine inches.) The walls were 200 royal cubits high and fifty wide. The exact length of the royal cubit is not known, but it is probably about twenty inches, the length of a normal cubit (eighteen inches) plus a bit extra. If we take the royal cubit as this length then the walls were 333 feet high and eightythree feet wide. Herodotus says that there was enough room on top of the walls to turn a fourhorse chariot, indicating that the walls must have been about eighty feet wide. The River Euphrates ran right through the middle of the city, and channels irrigated fields inside the city. Babylon could hold out against a siege indefinitely.

With the fall of Babylon in 539 B.C. the Persian (Achaemenid) Empire took up the mantle of world rulership. The Persian Empire extended from

Turkey

in the west across to the River Indus (

Pakistan

) in the east, and from the Caucasus mountains (southern

Russia

) in the north down to Aswan (

Egypt

) in the south. The Persian Empire came to an end 207 years later in 332 B.C. at the hands of Alexander the Great.

Until the time of the Persian Empire, communication throughout the Middle East was difficult. Cyrus began to improve the existing routes so that the provinces of the Persian Empire could communicate more effectively with one another. These sections, or ‘satrapies’, of the Persian Empire, are mentioned in Daniel 6:1 and Esther 1:1. Cyrus made use of the existing network during his first year as king: “Now in the first year of Cyrus king of

Persia

... he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom” (Ezra 1:1).

One of the most prominent of the Persian kings was Darius I (522-486 B.C.), often referred to as Darius the Great. A royal seal, inscribed “Darius the Great King”, is on display in the British Museum and most probably belongs to this king. (This Darius, mentioned in Ezra, Haggai and Zechariah, is not Darius the Mede of the book of Daniel.) Darius completed the work begun by Cyrus in developing the road system of the empire.

The main road of the empire, called the Royal Road, ran all the way from Susa at the centre of the empire right across to Sardis in western

Turkey

, a distance of 2,736 kilometres (1,675 miles), about the same as the distance between New York and Dallas. Along the Royal Road 111 inns were stationed at 25-kilometre intervals, and Darius introduced a relay system with horses and riders stationed at these inns. When a royal courier arrived at one of the inns he passed his pouch across to another rider ready to go on another horse.(Footnote 23) This system would enable messages to be transmitted very rapidly from one part of the empire to another, as we read in Ezra 6:12: “I Darius have made a decree; let it be done with speed”.

The Persian Empire had four capitals: Persepolis, Susa, Parsagadae and Ecbatana. Susa was the main seat of government; Parsagadae was a ceremonial city known for its gardens. (The Persians were the first to cultivate tulips, and the word ‘paradise’ is derived from the Persian word for a walled garden: pairidaeza.(Footnote 24)) Darius I had Persepolis built from scratch as his own capital, and every year vassal kings brought gifts to Darius there.

During the summer the central Persian plain, the site of Susa, burns with the heat. To avoid the summer heat the royal court moved to Ecbatana in the north. The itinerant nature of the Persian court helps to explain Ezra 6:1,2: “Then Darius the king made a decree, and search was made in the house of the rolls, where the treasures were laid up in Babylon. And there was found at Achmetha [Ecbatana], in the palace that is in the province of the Medes, a roll, and therein was a record thus written ...”.

A huge retinue travelled with the king as he moved between the four capitals of the empire: civil servants, members of the royal family, Magi priests, a food taster, a thousand bodyguards and a ceremonial cupbearer. Nehemiah was such a cupbearer: “And it came to pass in the month Nisan, in the twentieth year of Artaxerxes [Artaxerxes I, 464-423 B.C.] the king, that wine was before him: and I took up the wine, and gave it unto the king” (Neh. 2:1).

Darius had six wives and 360 concubines with attendant eunuchs, as in Esther 2:3: “and let the king appoint officers in all the provinces of his kingdom, that they may gather together all the fair young virgins unto Shushan the palace, to the house of the women, unto the custody of Hege the king’s chamberlain, keeper of the women”. (The Hebrew word for “chamberlain” is caric (5631), from a root meaning ‘to castrate’—hence a eunuch.) Darius introduced a standardised monetary system based on silver coins, and a system of weights and measures. Other innovations followed, including banking, and the assessment of taxes in silver. These developments led to a common market throughout the Persian Empire; Persian carpets could be bought from

Greece

India

The use of silver reminds us of the silver part of Nebuchadnezzar’s image. Figure 5 shows a silver ram’s head, which is interesting because it brings together two symbols of

Persia

used in the book of Daniel: the silver of Daniel 2 and the ram of Daniel 8. This ram, made from a bitumen core overlaid with silver, was a military mascot of the Persians.

The Persian kings had an elite force of a thousand bowmen. When one of these fell in battle there was always a replacement; hence they became known as the Immortals. A frieze of Immortals has been found at the site of the palace at Susa (Figure 6) dating from about 490 B.C. It is quite possible that Queeri Esther saw this frieze on many occasions. Silver tableware has also been found at the site of Susa, and some pieces are on display in the British Museum. Perhaps some of these were used in Esther’s banquets.

Figure 6. Depiction of one of the Persian kings’ bowmen, known as the Immortals. British Museum.

2. Illustrations of Old Testament History, R. D. Barnett. British Museum Publications, 1977, p. 80.

7. Numbers in brackets after Hebrew words refer to the numbers in Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance. Baker Book House, 1985.

11. The Bible and the British Museum, A. R. Habershon. Pickering and Inglis, p. 77.

12. Herodotus, The Histories, translated by H. Cary. H. G. Bohn, 1848,1.191.

15. The Bible in the British Museum, T. C. Mitchell. British Museum Publications, 1988, p. 80.

20. The Pelican History of the World, J. M. Roberts. Penguin Books, 1980, p. 129.

THE TESTIMONY

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