Fall of Babylon

In October 539 BC the Persian king Cyrus the Great took Babylon, the capital of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, and deposed its last king, Nabonidus. The conquest ended the last native dynasty to rule Mesopotamia and placed the whole Fertile Crescent under the Achaemenid Empire. How exactly the city fell, peacefully or by surprise assault, is still debated, because the main accounts were written by the victors or by Greek authors long afterwards.

Nabonidus seized the throne in 556 BC by overthrowing Labashi-Marduk. He soon alienated important groups in Babylonia. The priests of Marduk, the city's chief god, resented his promotion of the moon god Sin, and he spent long years away from the capital, rebuilding temples at Harran and living at a desert base in Arabia. In his absence his son and crown prince, Belshazzar, ran the government and the army; he was considered a capable soldier but a poor politician.

Meanwhile Cyrus, king of Anshan, rebelled against his overlord Astyages around 550 BC, took the Median capital Ecbatana and built a rapidly growing empire. Persian raids along the Babylonian frontier eventually brought Nabonidus back to Babylon. By 540 BC Cyrus had begun an offensive against the Babylonian kingdom, and in 539 BC he invaded its heartland, winning a decisive victory at Opis on the Tigris.

According to the Babylonian Chronicle, Persian troops entered Babylon on 16 Tashritu, which corresponds to 12 October 539 BC in the Julian calendar. Nabonidus surrendered and was sent into exile. Cyrus himself made his entry about seventeen days later; in the meantime his general Gobryas had acted for him, and was then made governor of the province. Guards were posted at the great temple of Bel, where worship carried on without a break.

The sources disagree on what happened. The Babylonian Chronicle and the Cyrus Cylinder say the city was taken without a fight, while Herodotus and Xenophon describe a siege, with the Persians diverting the Euphrates and slipping in along the riverbed while the inhabitants celebrated a festival. Modern historians generally treat the Cyrus Cylinder as propaganda meant to discredit Nabonidus, and doubt that such a city could have fallen with no resistance at all. One recent reconstruction, based on a record of repairs to the Enlil Gate, suggests a forced entry on the western side of the river. The Book of Daniel and Xenophon both say that Belshazzar was killed on the night the city fell, though Xenophon's account is not widely trusted.

Cyrus presented himself as the rightful heir of the old Babylonian kings, chosen by Marduk to restore order, and took the title King of Babylon. One of his early measures was to let peoples deported by the Babylonians go home with the images of their gods. According to the Bible, this included the Jewish exiles, ending the Babylonian captivity. Babylon became a province of the Persian empire.

Babylonia did not accept Persian rule quietly. Under Darius I it twice revolted, in 522 and 521 BC, behind rulers who both called themselves Nebuchadnezzar, and after the second rising part of the city walls was torn down. Alexander the Great captured Babylon in 331 BC and died there in 323 BC; the region then passed to the Seleucid Empire.

Our 700 BCE map shows Babylonia under the Assyrians, and our 500 BCE map shows it absorbed into the Achaemenid Empire. The site of Babylon lies in modern Iraq.