Cyrus the Great Takes Babylon
Cyrus the Great took Babylon in October 539 BC, and the Babylonian priesthood welcomed him. The Neo-Babylonian empire under Nabonidus had made itself unpopular in its own capital. The king had spent a decade at the oasis of Tayma in Arabia for reasons still argued about, leaving his son Belshazzar as regent, and had promoted the moon god Sin at the expense of Marduk, whose priesthood ran the city's temples and its enormous economy. Cyrus had already absorbed Media, Lydia and most of Anatolia, and he beat the Babylonian field army at Opis on the Tigris. Babylon itself, with walls that Herodotus said a chariot could turn on, fell without a fight days later — the Persians diverting the river and entering along its bed in one account, the gates simply opened in another, and the Babylonian chronicle recording that the army entered without battle. His propaganda was carefully aimed. The Cyrus Cylinder, written in Akkadian in the conventional style of a Babylonian king, has Marduk searching the world for a righteous ruler and choosing Cyrus, and records the return of exiled peoples and their gods to their sanctuaries. The biblical books of Ezra and Isaiah name him as the one who let the Jews return from exile and rebuild the temple, and Isaiah calls him the anointed — the only foreigner given that word. The cylinder is sometimes called the first charter of human rights, which reads a modern idea into a restoration decree. His empire was the largest yet. What is genuinely unusual is the method of rule that followed. The Persians governed by satrapies that left local law, language and religion in place, and that tolerance is a large part of why the empire held together for two centuries across an enormous and various territory.
- Year: 539 BCE
- Category: Political
