Nebuchadnezzar II

Anyone asking who was Nebuchadnezzar II must begin with his father. Nabopolassar, a Chaldean official of uncertain origin, seized the Babylonian throne in 626 BCE after the death of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal left a power vacuum across Mesopotamia ^[1]. Nebuchadnezzar, whose Akkadian name Nabu-kudurri-usur means roughly "O Nabu, protect my heir", grew up during his father's long war against Assyria. Later tradition placed his birth around 642 BCE, in the closing years of Assyrian dominance, though no contemporary record fixes the date ^[2].

The family's rise was rapid. Between 626 and 612 BCE Nabopolassar pushed Assyrian forces out of Babylonia, allied with the Medes under Cyaxares, and joined in the sack of Nineveh, the Assyrian capital, in 612 BCE ^[1]. The young prince received both military training and a scribal education, and royal inscriptions later presented him as a devoted servant of Marduk, the chief god of Babylon, and of Nabu, the god of writing ^[3].

By his early twenties Nebuchadnezzar was commanding armies in his own right. His father, aging and unwell, entrusted him with the campaign against the last remnants of Assyrian resistance and their Egyptian backers in northern Syria, a decision that would define the succession ^[2].

The battle that made him king was fought at Carchemish on the upper Euphrates in 605 BCE. Egyptian forces under Pharaoh Necho II had moved north to prop up the dying Assyrian state and to claim Syria for Egypt. Nebuchadnezzar, leading the Babylonian army as crown prince, stormed the city, destroyed the Egyptian garrison, and pursued the survivors south toward Hamath, where a second engagement finished them ^[4]. The Babylonian Chronicle, a contemporary cuneiform record now in the British Museum, describes the campaign in unusually vivid terms ^[4].

While still in Syria he learned that Nabopolassar had died in Babylon on 8 Abu (August) 605 BCE. Nebuchadnezzar crossed the desert at speed, reached the capital within weeks, and was crowned without opposition on 1 Elul of the same year ^[1]. Few transfers of power in the ancient Near East went so smoothly, a mark of how completely the victory at Carchemish had secured his standing.

The first decade of the reign was spent consolidating the west. Babylonian armies marched almost every year into Syria and the Levant, collecting tribute from Damascus, Tyre, Sidon, and the kingdom of Judah ^[2]. A costly clash with Egypt on the frontier in 601 BCE ended without a clear winner and forced Nebuchadnezzar to spend a year rebuilding his chariot forces, a rare setback that the Chronicle records with notable candor ^[4].

Among Nebuchadnezzar II achievements, two dominate the record: conquest and construction. The conquest most remembered is the destruction of Jerusalem. When King Jehoiakim of Judah withheld tribute, Babylonian forces besieged the city, and in 597 BCE his successor Jehoiachin surrendered. Nebuchadnezzar deported the young king, his court, and thousands of craftsmen to Babylonia, installing Zedekiah as a vassal ^[5]. When Zedekiah in turn rebelled with Egyptian encouragement, the Babylonians returned. After a siege of about eighteen months Jerusalem fell in 587 BCE. The temple of Solomon was burned, the walls were torn down, and a further wave of Judeans was deported, beginning the period known as the Babylonian Exile ^[5].

Other campaigns receive less attention but consumed comparable effort. Tyre, the island city of the Phoenicians, resisted a Babylonian siege that ancient sources say lasted thirteen years before reaching a negotiated settlement ^[2]. Texts also record operations in Cilicia, against Arab tribes of the desert, and a late expedition toward Egypt itself around 568 BCE, though the outcome of that final march is unclear ^[1].

At home the king rebuilt Babylon on a scale no Mesopotamian ruler had attempted. He completed the double city walls his father had begun, raised the great ziggurat Etemenanki dedicated to Marduk, enlarged the Esagila temple complex, and built the Processional Way leading to the Ishtar Gate, faced with glazed blue bricks and reliefs of bulls and dragons ^[3]. Excavations led by Robert Koldewey between 1899 and 1917 recovered the gate, which was reconstructed in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin ^[6]. Millions of baked bricks stamped with Nebuchadnezzar's name and titles still litter the site in modern Iraq, a builder's signature repeated on an industrial scale ^[3].

The private man is far harder to reach than the public king. Later Greek writers, drawing on the Babylonian priest Berossus, reported that Nebuchadnezzar married Amytis, a Median princess, to seal the alliance between Babylon and the Medes ^[7]. The same tradition claims he built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon to console her longing for the mountains of her homeland. No Babylonian text mentions the gardens, and some scholars, notably Stephanie Dalley of Oxford, have argued the famous gardens actually stood in Nineveh under the Assyrian king Sennacherib ^[7].

His heir was Amel-Marduk, called Evil-merodach in the Hebrew Bible, who succeeded him in 562 BCE and is credited in the Book of Kings with releasing the captive Jehoiachin from prison ^[5]. Administrative tablets from Babylon confirm that Jehoiachin and his sons received rations of oil from the royal stores, one of the rare points where the biblical account and the cuneiform record meet directly ^[5].

The king's inscriptions reveal a ruler intensely concerned with piety. Unlike Assyrian royal texts, which catalogue battles and flayed enemies, Nebuchadnezzar's building inscriptions dwell on temples restored, offerings endowed, and prayers for long life addressed to Marduk and Nabu ^[3]. Whether this reflects personal devotion or the conventions of Babylonian kingship, it shaped how he wished to be remembered.

Records thin out in the final third of the reign. The Babylonian Chronicle series breaks off after 594 BCE, so historians reconstruct the later decades from scattered administrative texts, building inscriptions, and foreign sources ^[1]. A fragmentary tablet suggests a campaign against Pharaoh Amasis of Egypt in the king's thirty-seventh year, around 568 BCE, but the text is too damaged to show whether Babylon gained anything from it ^[2].

One curious fragment, published in the twentieth century, hints at trouble inside the palace: it appears to describe erratic behavior by the king and a conflict involving his son. Some scholars connect it to the later biblical story in the Book of Daniel, in which Nebuchadnezzar loses his reason and lives like an animal for seven years, though most now read the Daniel narrative as a tradition originally attached to the last Babylonian king, Nabonidus ^[8].

Nebuchadnezzar died in Babylon in early October 562 BCE, after ruling for forty-three years, one of the longest reigns in Mesopotamian history ^[1]. The empire he left behind looked secure but proved brittle. Amel-Marduk was murdered within two years, two further short reigns followed, and in 539 BCE Cyrus the Great of Persia took Babylon without a major battle, ending the dynasty barely a generation after its greatest king ^[2].

Few ancient rulers have lived so many afterlives. In Jewish memory Nebuchadnezzar became the destroyer of the First Temple and the archetype of imperial arrogance, the king who exiled a nation. The books of Kings, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel return to him repeatedly, and the Daniel stories, with their fiery furnace and dream of a great statue, carried his name into Christian and Islamic tradition ^[5]. Greek writers, by contrast, remembered him chiefly as a builder, and by the Hellenistic period the Hanging Gardens attributed to him were listed among the seven wonders of the world ^[7].

Modern archaeology restored the historical figure behind the legends. Koldewey's excavations exposed the Processional Way, the palace quarter, and the foundations of Etemenanki, while decipherment of the Babylonian Chronicle in the twentieth century gave scholars a dated, contemporary narrative of the early reign, including the first cuneiform confirmation of the 597 BCE capture of Jerusalem ^[4]. Any modern Nebuchadnezzar II biography rests on this combination of brick, tablet, and biblical text.

His name has never quite left public life. Saddam Hussein invoked him during the reconstruction of Babylon in the 1980s, stamping new bricks with his own name in imitation of the ancient king, and the basic Nebuchadnezzar II facts, the dates 605 to 562 BCE, the fall of Jerusalem, the Ishtar Gate, remain fixtures of world history teaching ^[6]. Twenty-six centuries on, he is still the Babylonian king most people can name.