The World

In 612 BC, the armies of Assyria’s enemies surrounded Nineveh, trapping the king, Ashurbanipal’s son Sinsharishkun, within the doomed city. The seven and a half miles of walls were reinforced, the broad gates narrowed, but the very size of this capital of the world made it almost impossible to defend. Attracted to the prizes of this now lame giant, new predators arrived to feast on the body.

A Babylonian potentate, Nabopolassar, had seized the throne there in 626. Determined to regain Babylon, Sinsharishkun called in Egyptian help, but in 616 Nabopolassar defeated the once invincible Assyrians.

Yet it took the Median cavalry to bring them down. The Median king, Uvaxštra (Cyaxares in Greek) – son of Fravartis, who had been killed by Ashurbanipal – was based in his mountain capital of Ecbatana, a city of seven circular walls fortified with bastions painted in bright colours. As he grew up, Scythians had taken over most of Iran. When he was ready, Uvaxštra invited the Scythian chieftains to a banquet and, when they were drunk, killed them all. He then united the Median tribes of western Iran, and allied with Nabopolassar of Babylon to carve up Assyria. In 612, ‘the King of Babylon mobilized his army and the King of the Medes joined him. They advanced along the Tigris towards Nineveh.’ The siege lasted three months, during which Scythians arrived to join the mayhem. In August, the attackers smashed the dykes, and the flooding enabled them to breach the walls. The fighting was savage – at the Halzi Gate, skeletons of men and women, even a baby, struck by arrows, lay tangled for many centuries where they fell. ‘A great slaughter was made of the people,’ recounts the Babylonian Chronicles. ‘Horsemen charging, flashing sword, and glittering spear, hosts of slain, heaps of corpses, dead without end, they stumble over the bodies.’ At the palace Sinsharishkun – last of House Tiglath-Pileser – perished in the flames.

Nabopolassar commandeered the Assyrian kingdom for his Babylonian empire; Uvaxštra, who had been little more than a horse-breeding chieftain two years earlier, ruled from northern Iran westwards into Türkiye. Uvaxštra gave his daughter Amartis to Nabopolassar’s son, Crown Prince Nebuchadnezzar. But Egypt, invited in by the Assyrians, was not yet finished.

Pharaoh Necho rode up the Levantine coast to defeat the Babylonians. On the way north, he was challenged by Josiah, king of Judah, who sensed an opportunity for glorious independence, a moment of exhilaration captured in the Bible. But Necho routed the Judeans at Megiddo – the biblical origin of Armageddon – and then conquered Syria.

In 605, Nebuchadnezzar halted the Egyptians at Carchemish and ‘inflicted such a defeat on them that none returned home’. Then, learning that his father was dying, he literally galloped home – 620 miles – to be crowned twenty-two days later.

Nebuchadnezzar spent most of his long reign suppressing rebellions, successfully on the Phoenician coast, less so in Canaan. In 586, Zedekiah of Judah defied him: Nebuchadnezzar stormed Jerusalem and destroyed the city, deporting most of the Jews to his capital: Babylon became a huge building site as he constructed eleven miles of walls with an inner royal city entered by the colossal Ishtar Gate glazed in deep blue and decorated with Ishtar’s lions, Adad’s bulls and Marduk’s dragons. This led to the Processional Way known as May the Arrogant Not Flourish and so to the temple of Esagila and a ziggurat tower known as The House That Is the Border between Heaven and Earth, the centrepiece of the city. Home to 250,000 people – Babylonians, Scythians, Greeks, Medes, Jews – Babylon was notorious for its wild pleasures. The Jews denounced the king as ‘destroyer of nations’ and wrote holy books in a distinctive monotheistic voice. Refusing to vanish like other defeated peoples, the Jews dreamed of a return to their sacred city Zion amid the sun-blistered wilderness of Judah: Jerusalem. It was a longing that defined them: religions and peoples are formed by shared experiences of suffering, lived and relived as inherited stories. ‘By the rivers of Babylon,’ they sang, ‘they sat down and remembered Zion.’

Everyone enjoyed the metropolis – except those few austere Jews who called it the Whore of Babylon.^* But in the palace the Median queen was homesick. Nebuchadnezzar supposedly built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon to comfort her.

Her father Uvaxštra advanced into Anatolia until he was stopped by a regional potentate, Alyattes, who, based in Sardis, ruled Lydia, a rich realm extending to the Aegean, trading between Babylon and Greece. Alyattes was the first to cast coins, money that gleamed with electrum, an alloy of silver and gold. The Lydians invented coins at the same time as they appeared in India and China.