Cyrus & the End of the Babylonian Exile

A History of Mankind (95)

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King Cyrus II (600-530 BC), a vassal of the Medians based on the old land of Elam now called Fars/Persia by its new Indo-European overlords, had revolted around 553 BC against his master and grandfather King Astyages with the help of general Harpagus, who had actually been sent to defeat Cyrus II.

By 550 BC, the Persian revolt was triumphant and Cyrus II took the Median capital at Ecbatana, marrying Astyages’ daughter (who was his aunt) Amytis to placate Median vassals at Bactria and Parthia. Astyages was spared.

As Babylon’s Belshazzar schemed to form an alliance against him including Egypt, Lydia and the upstart Greek polis of Sparta, Cyrus II expanded his empire further by attacking Lydia around 547 BC, succeeding where the Medes had failed. Croesus, the famous ruler of Lydia, was captured and turned into Cyrus II’s advisor, while the whole of Asia Minor was gradually incorporated into the Persian domain, in a series of campaigns led by general Harpagus, to much concern among the Greek polis elsewhere. Lycia, Cilicia and Phoenicia followed up.

Nabonidus eventually returned to Babylon, to find a much-shaken geopolitical situation. The entire northern border, once safe due to friendship and alliance with the Median kings, was now exposed to a new, expansionist power under a popular, dynamic warrior-king, who had already taken lands formerly under Babylonian control. Lydia was knocked out, Sparta hadn’t provided any real support and Egypt – then ruled by Amasis II, a former general who had taken the throne in 570 BC – was cultivating the friendship of the ever richer and more powerful Greek poleis, while ignoring pleas from help from its ancient enemy Babylon.

In an era without any permanent embassies or reliable means of long-distance transport, the creation of anti-Persian coalition always was a pipe dream. So Nabonidus went for his fallback option: seeking divine favor, he accelerated the construction of a large temple in Harran, the old Assyrian shrine, as well as others in Ur, Larsa, Sippar and Akkad. He also brought statues of the gods to the capital for safety and help.

Things came to a head after Cyrus II in 540 BC took Susa, the ancient Elamite capital, and routed a Babylonian army near Opis, on the Tigris north of Babylon, in 539 BC, killing many in the aftermath, including civilians; Nabonidus’ son Belshazzar may have also died in that battle. Babylonian vassals and governors flocked to the conqueror and, in a matter of weeks, Babylon itself surrounded without a fight, giving up its independence for ever.

Cyrus II became king of Babylon, Sumer and Akkad and the four corners of the world, as he proclaimed in the Cyrus Cylinder, an inscription he deposited in the foundations of the Esagila temple. By that time, he also controlled the Iranian plateau, including the main cities on the north-eastern edges along key Central Asian oases, like Merv in Margiana, Elken Tepe in Parthia, Bactra[1] and Kunduz/Qunduz in Bactria.  

Distant Sogdiana (the region centered around the fertile Fergana/Ferghana Valley[2] with its capital in Samarkand, to the west of the valley’s entrance from Persia), Arachosia (the modern Pashtun lands of southern Afghanistan and eastern Pakistan with a capital in or around modern Kandahar) in Central Asia as well as most lands all the way to the Indus, sometimes called Ariana or “Aryan lands” by Classical-era authors, were soon incorporated to his domain. Cyrus II is also believed to have founded a Cyropolis in Sogdiana that is modern-day Juyand/Khodjent in Tajikistan, the former Leninabad.

He almost certainly started the long construction of a fancy ritual capital in Persepolis just south of the old Persian capital of Pasargadae, which wasn’t completed until a few decades after his death, but – like his successors – kept his court mostly in Susa, halfway between Babylon and Persepolis/Pasargadae and at the center of a triangle formed by those cities and the ancient Median capital at Ecbatana[3].

Cyrus II had the time to reorganize the massive empire with a series of shrewd administrative measures, including permission for the dethroned Nabonidus to see off his days as governor of a distant Persian town, and for the exiled Jews to return to their homeland and rebuild their temple at Jerusalem[4], a process that took decades[5] and ensured a friendly, grateful population in the important region connecting Egypt with Asia. By this time, it’s likely these Jews came across significant numbers of Arabs settled in Palestine for the first time, particularly around Gaza, where they may have arrived with their families as mercenaries in the service of the Persians[6].

The trauma of the Babylonian exile was never forgotten, and it marked a watershed in Jewish history in several ways. One of the leaders during the return from Babylon, the scribe Ezra, is believed to have been the first to write down the books of the Torah, the first five books of the later Bible and first part of the Tanakh, the so-called Hebrew Bible, soon after his arrival on the Promised Land. He did so in a new script, a form of the Aramaic alphabet adopted by scholars in exile that replaced the Hebrew script previously used[7].

FROM THE ARCHIVES:

Post-exile Judaism laid greater emphasis on adherence to strict monotheism, Zoroastrian-style, but in many senses the Torah is a compilation of earlier Jewish creation myths, including the familiar story of Adam and Eve, who disobeyed God to secure knowledge and, like Prometheus and Tityos among the Greeks, were punished for their impertinence. The Torah is also a sui-generis retelling of the complex history of the Aamu in Egypt, and the frequent and not always happy interactions between the pharaohs and their Jewish subjects.

Some of these materials previously belonged to the oral tradition, while others were written on the basis of earlier chronicles. Nevi’im and Ketuvim, the second and third of the three books of the Tanakh, name sources from which they drew information for the popular biblical books of Kings and Chronicles, including the “Book of the history of the days of the kings of Judah” and the “Book of the history of the days of the kings of Israel,” lost compilations that may have been heavily influenced by Babylonian annalistic.

Other briefer materials cited in Chronicles, such the “Visions of Iddo the seer about Jeroboam” and “Vision concerning Hezekiah” as well as “History of Uzziah,” were traditionally attributed to Isaiah, the Eighth Century BC prophet, and extensively reworked before being included in the canon – for example, to have Isaiah predict that the great King Cyrus II would save the Jews from an exile that was still in the distant future when Isaiah died, since it was all in God’s plan.

The Books of Judges may date to the Sixth Century, as they again hinge on the idea of an evidently successful god’s plan for the wayward Israelites despite their lapses into idolatry. Its extreme jingoism gave us the wonderful word “shibboleth,” an ancient agrarian Hebrew term that gained great importance, as Chapter 12 states, when the pious inhabitants of Gilead had to find out Ephraimite refugees escaping into their lands: as people were found crossing the River Jordan border, they were asked to pronounce the word, since they knew that the Ephraimite dialect resulted in a pronunciation that, to Gileadites, sounded like “sibboleth.” Those caught with such pronunciation were killed to a man[8].    

It was also in the Sixth Century that the hugely influential “Book of Job” was completed. Possibly influenced by the Babylonian Thirteenth Century BC “Poem of the righteous sufferer,” as I discussed previously, this book would be much quoted and discussed for centuries; its acceptance as a canonical work was indeed described by the Nineteenth Century AD theologian G.K. Chesterton as a momentous decision that saved the Jews “from an enormous collapse and decay."[9]

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[1] Balkh in modern Afghanistan.

[2] Shared in modern times, thanks to the machinations of early Soviet Communists who devised the borders of Central Asian republics, by Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. The valley owes much of its fertility to the fact that the Naryn and Kara Darya rivers come together there, to form the Syr Darya river – together with the Amu Darya to the south, the most important Central Asian rivers, running northwest towards the Aral Sea, which they used to fill until the Twentieth Century AD Soviet Communists had another brilliant idea.

[3] Cyrus II was still buried in Pasargadae, in a tomb that remains a tourist draw to this day, adorned with an inscription that appears to have read (there’s some disagreement on the precise wording): “Passer-by, I am Cyrus, who gave the Persians an empire, and was king of Asia/Grudge me not therefore this monument.” Persepolis eventually became a mish-mash of ceremonial monuments and courtyards with iconography and designs from all corners of the empire, a bit of an Imperial theme park, as described by Chana Algarvio in her 2021 paper “Egyptian acculturation in Achaemenid Persia: the Iconographic Evidence.”

[4] Many, perhaps most, exiled Jews remained in Mesopotamia, however, which contributed to the slow erosion of the Jewish demographic majority in Palestine, which had never been all that dominant to start with. These communities flourished and were prominent during the Parthian and Sasanian period; Flavius Josephus, in the First Century BC, wrote that, while many returned to Jerusalem with Persian authorization, “the Israelite nation as a whole remained in the country” and that in his time, “countless myriads whose number cannot be ascertained” lived east of the Euphrates (Antiquities XI 133). Babylonian archives attest to the business dealings of Jews like Ahi-qam, a tax farmer who collected produce tax owed by his fellow Jewish landholders in the Sixth Century BC, and also owned a brewery and a shop in Babylon, while working substantial parcels of land himself; his cousin Ahi-qar traded fish in large quantities and, as a moneylender, gave credit to other landholders to help them meet their dues. Ahi-qam’s five sons had devout Jewish names, all first attested in business records between 508 and 504 BC. There’s also the complex issue of Mesopotamian Jewish converts with no familiar connection to Palestine, who appear to have been not an irrelevant number, judging by references in the Bible, for example in Jonah 3. And the issue of those who went back and forth: there’s evidence for several waves of returnees to Palestine during at least 80 years.

[5] Almost a century later, Nehemiah – central figure in the Biblical Book of Nehemiah, and a former cupbearer of Artaxerxes I – was forcing people from other cities to settle in the capital to boost Jerusalem’s population, before he himself returned to the Persian court in Susa.

[6] Palestine Arabs are remarked upon the next century by Herodotus. They may have also arrived a bit later, under Cyrus II’s successor, Cambyses, as Herodotus notes that, without the Arabs’ help, Cambyses’ invasion of Egypt “would have been impracticable” (Histories, III). Gaza Arabs, as loyal subjects of the Persian emperor, defended their land from Alexander the Great in the late Fourth Century BC, under the leadership of one Batis. In Transjordan, Arabs appear to have become a majority of the population starting in this era, as Arab migration from ever-drier lands of Arabia continued apace; that effectively turned Transjordan, the modern country of Jordan, into a dangerous borderland that remained out of the effective control of Hellenistic rulers despite Alexander’s invasions.

[7] Paleo-Hebrew, the older alphabet, fell in disuse after the Babylonian exile.

[8] Similar verbal shibboleths were used in later history. To this day, French-speaking Haitian migrants into the Spanish-speaking Dominican Republic often are identified by border patrol when asked to say Spanish words with the hard “r” that the average French speaker can’t pronounce properly. The French language again proved troublesome in the 1282 Sicilian vespers, when suspected Frenchmen were asked to pronounce the word “ciciri,” chickpeas, which they struggle to handle. Dutch migrants unable to say “bread and cheese” properly were murdered during the 1381 Peasant’s Revolt in England. After the 2022 Russian invasion of the Ukraine, suspected Russian infiltrators were asked to say the Ukrainian word “palyanytsya,” a type of bread, which Russians find hard to pronounce.

[9]    “Introduction to the Book of Job,” G.K. Chesterton. Towards the end of the book, Job complains to God about his unjustified sufferings, and God speaks to him from a whirlwind. His speeches neither explain Job's suffering, nor defend divine justice, nor enter into the courtroom confrontation that Job has demanded; God simply contrasts Job's weakness with His own divine wisdom and omnipotence: "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?" Job makes a brief response, but God's monologue resumes, never addressing Job directly. Chesterton comments: “Here in this book the question is really asked whether God invariably punishes vice with terrestrial punishment and rewards virtue with terrestrial prosperity. If the Jews had answered that question wrongly they might have lost all their later influence in human history. They might have sunk even down to the level of modern well-educated society. For when once people have begun to believe that prosperity is the reward of virtue, their next calamity is obvious. If prosperity is regarded as the reward of virtue it will be regarded as the symptom of virtue. Men will leave off the heavy task of making good men successful. The will adopt the easier task of making successful men good.” Of course, the Catholic Chesterton is staging a deadly assault against Protestantism here.