In 626, on the twenty-sixth day of Araḫsamna (VIII), Nabopolassar, a man from a prominent family in the southern Babylonian city of Uruk, ascended the throne in Babylon.[[1]] Four months later, in Nisannu (I), he took the hand of that city's tutelary deity (Marduk) during an akītu-festival[[2]] and officially became the king of Babylon, thereby ending Assyria's centuries-long direct and indirect control of the Babylonian throne. The birth of this new empire was not easily won, as it took Nabopolassar over a year to be in a position to declare himself king, another six years to permanently remove Assyrian troops from his land, and a further eight years to defeat his chief rival Sîn-šarra-iškun (r. 626–612), the penultimate ruler of Assyria.[[3]] Although he brought the once-great and powerful Assyrian Empire to an end in 609, Nabopolassar, together with his trusted and reliable heir designate Nebuchadnezzar II, did not rest on his laurels and made every effort to secure his kingdom's position as the pre-eminent military and diplomatic power of the day and to transform his capital city into an world-class imperial megacity, just as the seventh-century Assyrian king Sennacherib (r. 704–681) and his successors had done with Nineveh.[[4]]
When Nabopolassar died in 605, his son Nebuchadnezzar II became king, just as planned. The new king, over the course of his long forty-three-year reign, continued the work started by his father, both at home and abroad. Nebuchadnezzar cemented Babylon's greatness. Babylon, both in terms of its size and grandeur of its architectural features (palaces, temples, and walls), reached its apex during this time. The city was truly a "wonder to behold." Its greatness, however, did not last. During the first six years that followed Nebuchadnezzar's death in 562, there were four kings on the throne: his son Amēl-Marduk (r. 561–560), his brother-in-law Neriglissar (r. 559–556), Neriglissar's young and inexperienced son Lâbâši-Marduk (556), and Nabonidus (555–539), a man who did not have any direct family ties to his immediate predecessors, although he had been an important member of the royal court.[[5]] Twenty-four years after Nebuchadnezzar's death (539), the Persian king Cyrus II (r. 559–530) took control of Babylon and its territorial holdings, thereby bringing the once-great Babylonian Empire founded by Nabopolassar, as well as native rule of Babylonia, to an end.
1 Chronicle Concerning the Early Years of Nabopolassar lines 14–15a; see the Chronicles section below for a translation of that passage.
2 This event is not mentioned in the Chronicle Concerning the Early Years of Nabopolassar, but it is clear that the New Year's festival did take place since its cancellation is not recorded in the Akītu Chronicle. See the Chronicles section below for translations of these texts.
3 For an overview of this period, see the Formation of the Neo-Babylonian Empire and Later Military Campaigns section below and Novotny, Jeffers, and Frame, RINAP 5/3 pp. 35–37 (with references to previous studies).
4 For an overview of Assyrian building activities at Nineveh, see, for example, Grayson and Novotny, RINAP 3/1 pp. 16–22; Grayson and Novotny, RINAP 3/2 p. 18; Leichty, RINAP 4 p. 3; and Jeffers and Novotny, RINAP 5/2 pp. 13–18.
5 For a recent overview of this period, see, for example, Weiershäuser and Novotny, RINBE 2 pp. 1–13; and Jursa, OHANE 5 pp. 96–108.
Jamie Novotny & Frauke Weiershäuser
Jamie Novotny & Frauke Weiershäuser, ' Introduction ', RIBo, Babylon 7: The Inscriptions of the Neo-Babylonian Dynasty, The RIBo Project, a sub-project of MOCCI, 2024 [/ribo/babylon7/RINBE11Introduction/]