(645-561 B.C.)
[Footnote 1: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess.]
[Illustration: Nebuchadnezzar.]
With the death of Sardanapalus, the great monarch of Assyria, and the
taking of Nineveh, the capital city, by the Medes, the kingdom of
Assyria came to an end, and the vast domain was parcelled out among
the conquerors. At the time of the catastrophe, the district of
Babylonia, with its capital city Babylon, was ruled as a dependent
satrapy of Assyria by Nabopolassar. Aided by the Medes, he now took
possession of the province and established himself as an independent
monarch, strengthening the alliance by a marriage between the Princess
Amuhia, the daughter of the Median king, and his son Nebuchadnezzar.
In the partition of Assyria, the region stretching from Egypt to the
upper Euphrates, including Syria, Phoenicia, and Palestine, had fallen
to the share of Nabopolassar. But the tribes that peopled it were not
disposed to accept the rule of the new claimant, and looked about for
an ally to support them in their resistance. Such an ally they thought
they had found in Egypt.
Egypt was the great rival of Babylon, as she had been of Assyria. Both
desired to control the highways of traffic connecting the
Mediterranean with the farther East. Egypt had the advantage, both
from her actual position on the Mediterranean and her nearer
neighborhood to the coveted territory, and she used her advantage with
audacity and skill. No sooner, however, did Nabopolassar feel himself
firm on his throne than he resolved to check the ambition of Egypt and
secure for himself the sovereignty of the lands in dispute.
The task was not an easy one. Pharaoh Necho had been for three years
in possession of the whole strip along the Mediterranean--Palestine,
Phoenicia, and part of Syria--and was pushing victoriously on to
Assyria, when he was met at the plain of Megiddo, commanding the
principal pass in the range of Mount Carmel, by the forces of the
petty kingdom of Judah, disputing his advance. He defeated them in a
bloody engagement, in which Josiah, King of Judah, was slain, and then
continued his march to Carchemish, a stronghold built to defend one of
the few fordable passes of the upper Euphrates. This important place
having been taken after a bloody battle, Necho was master of all the
strategic points north and west of Babylonia.
Nebuchadnezzar was now put in command of an army, to force Pharaoh to
give up his prey. Marching directly upon Carchemish, he attacked the
Egyptian and defeated him with great slaughter. Following up his
victory, he wrested from Pharaoh, in engagement after engagement, all
that he had gained in Syria, Phoenicia, and Palestine, and was in the
midst of fighting in Egypt itself, when the news came of the death of
his father; and he hastened home at once by forced marches to secure
his possession of the throne. In his train were captives of all the
nations he had conquered: Syrians, Phoenicians, Jews, and Egyptians.
Among the Jewish prisoners was Daniel, the author of the book of the
Old Testament called by his name, and to whom we owe the little
personal knowledge we have of the great Babylonian monarch.
Of all the conquests of Nebuchadnezzar in this long struggle with
Egypt, that of the Jewish people is the most interesting to us. The
Jews had fought hard for independence, but if they must be conquered
and held in subjection, they preferred the rule of Egypt to that of
Babylon. Even the long slavery of their ancestors in that country and
the sufferings it had entailed, with the tragic memories of the exodus
and the wanderings in the desert, had not been potent to blot out the
traditions of the years passed in that pleasant land with its
delicious climate, its nourishing and abundant food. Alike in
prosperity and in evil days the hearts of the people of Israel yearned
after Egypt, and the denunciations of her prophets are never so bitter
as when uttered against those who turned from Jehovah to worship the
false gods of the Nile. Three times did the inhabitants of Jerusalem
rebel against the rule of Babylon, and three times did Nebuchadnezzar
come down upon them with a cruel and unrelenting vengeance, carrying
off their people into bondage, each time inflicting great damage upon
the city and leaving her less capable of resistance; yet each time her
rulers had turned to Egypt in the vain hope of finding in her a
defence against the oppressor, but in every instance Egypt had proved
a broken reed.
Of the three successive kings of Judah whom Nebuchadnezzar had left to
rule the city as his servants, and who had all in turn rebelled
against him, one had been condemned to perpetual imprisonment in
Babylon; a second had been carried there in chains and probably
killed, while the third, captured in a vain attempt to escape after
the taking of the city, had first been made to see his sons killed
before his eyes, had then been cruelly blinded, and afterward carried
in chains to Babylon, and cast into prison. The last siege of the
city lasted eighteen months, and when it was finally taken by assault,
its ruin was complete. By previous deportations Jerusalem had been
deprived of her princes, her warriors, her craftsmen, and her smiths,
with all the treasure laid up in the palace of her kings, and all the
vessels of gold and silver consecrated to the worship of Jehovah.
Little then was left for her to suffer, when the punishment of her
latest rebellion came. Her walls were thrown down, her temple, her
chief glory, was destroyed, the greater part of the inhabitants who
had survived the prolonged siege were carried off to swell the crowd
of exiles already in Babylon, and only a few of the humbler sort of
folk, the vine-dressers and the small farmers, were left behind.
When Nebuchadnezzar rested after his conquests, secure in the
subjugation of his rivals, and in the possession of his vast kingdom,
he gave himself up to the material improvement of Babylon and the
surrounding country. The city as he left it, at the end of his reign
of forty-three years, was built on both sides of the Euphrates, and
covered a space of four hundred square miles, equal to five times the
size of London. It was surrounded by a triple wall of brick; the
innermost, over three hundred feet high, and eighty-five feet broad at
the top, with room for four chariots to drive abreast. The walls were
pierced by one hundred gate-ways framed in brass and with brazen
gates, and at the points where the Euphrates entered and left the city
the walls also turned and followed the course of the river, thus
dividing the city into two fortified parts. These two districts were
connected by a bridge of stone piers, guarded by portcullises, and
ferries also plied between the quays that lined the river-banks, to
which access was given by gates in the walls.
Nebuchadnezzar's palace was a splendid structure covering a large
space at one end of the bridge. In the central court were the Hanging
Gardens, the chief glory of the city, and reckoned one of the wonders
of the world. No clear idea can be formed of these gardens from any
description that has come down to us, but it would appear that arches
eighty feet high supported terraces of earth planted with all the
skill for which the gardeners of the East were famous. We are told
that they were built for the pleasure of Queen Amuhia, who, as a
Median princess, missed her native mountains, but a more commonplace
explanation is that they were carried so high to escape the mosquitoes
that swarmed on the lower level.
Various splendid edifices, chiefly religious, adorned the great
squares of the city: the temple of the god Bel, enriched by the spoils
of Tyre and Jerusalem, was the especial pride of Nebuchadnezzar. It
rose in a succession of eight lofty stages, and supported on the top a
golden statue of the god, forty feet high. Still another temple of Bel
was built in seven stages, each faced with enamelled brick of one of
the planetary colors; the topmost one of blue, the color dedicated to
Mercury or Nebo, the patron god of Nabopolassar.
But the most important of the civic undertakings of Nebuchadnezzar was
the extension of the great system of canalization by which the barren
wastes of the Babylonian plain were made to rival the valley of the
Nile in fertility, and become the granary of the East. The whole
territory was covered with a network of canals fed by the Tigris and
Euphrates, and used for both irrigation and navigation. One branch had
already connected Nineveh with Babylon, and another constructed by
Nebuchadnezzar united Babylon to the Persian Gulf, running a distance
of four hundred miles. This is still to be traced in a portion of its
length.
The fate of Nebuchadnezzar is one of the most tragic in the long list
of calamities that have overtaken the great and powerful of the earth.
According to Daniel, it was just after the king had spoken those words
of exulting pride as he walked in the palace of the Kingdom of
Babylon: "Is not this great Babylon that I have built," when he was
attacked by that dreadful form of madness, called by the Greeks,
lycanthropy (wolf-man), in which the victim fancies himself a beast:
in its fiercer manifestations a beast of the forest, or in milder
visitations a beast of the field. Nebuchadnezzar's madness became so
violent that for four years he was exiled from his throne and from the
company of men, and wandered in the fields, eating grass like oxen,
"and his body was wet with the dews of heaven, and his hairs were
grown like eagles' feathers, and his nails like birds' claws."
Although no mention is made of this strange malady in any writing but
the book of Daniel, yet it has a pathetic confirmation in one of the
rock-cut inscriptions that record the acts of Nebuchadnezzar's reign.
"For four years the seat of my kingdom did not rejoice my heart. In
all my dominions I built no high place of power, nor did I lay up the
precious treasure of my kingdom. In Babylon I erected no buildings for
myself nor for the glory of my empire. In the worship of Bel-Merodach,
my Lord, the joy of my heart, in Babylon the city of his worship and
the seat of my empire, I did not sing his praise, nor did I furnish
his altar with victims"--and then, as if returning to the thing that
lay nearest him--"In four years I did not dig out the canals."
[Illustration: "And he was driven from men, and did eat grass as
oxen."]
In time, the black cloud of the king's madness passed away and health
and reason were restored to him. And if the words that Daniel puts
into the king's mouth on his recovery are really his, we must
recognize in this Eastern Despot a decided strain of religious
sensibility, a trait that appears beside in his almost passionate
expressions of affection for his god Merodach, and in his sympathy
with Daniel and the youths who were his companions, in their own
religious devotion. Although Daniel and the other youths whom the king
had caused to be called out from the mass of the Jewish captives for
his own particular service--boys distinguished from the rest by their
personal beauty, their intelligence and aptitude--were too earnest in
their religious convictions and too high-spirited to conform to the
Babylonian religion or to conceal their sentiments under the cloak of
policy, yet the king tolerated their adherence to their ritual and
yielded only in part to the persistence of the Jew-baiters, who saw
with angry eyes the promotion of the hated captives to places of power
and authority over the heads of their captors. In spite of his enemies
Daniel was allowed to exercise his own religion in peace; and the
persecutors of his companions, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, were
themselves destroyed in the furnace they had heated for their innocent
victims, which the youths themselves were rescued from by the personal
interposition of the king, who pretended to see--or in his religious
exaltation did really see--the god himself standing guard over the
victims in the midst of the flames.
Of Nebuchadnezzar after the recovery of his reason we learn but
little. The chronicle of Daniel passes abruptly from Nebuchadnezzar to
Belshazzar, and the great king is not mentioned again. History, too,
is silent. It tells us only that he left the throne to a son, whose
name, Evil-Merodach, records the devotion of his father to the god of
his people.
[Signature of the author.]