Nabonidus: The King Who Dug Up Babylon's Secret Past (556–539 BC)

[00:00:00]Nabonidus was the last king of Babylon,  ruling from 556 to 539 BC until the city fell to Cyrus II of Persia,  better known as Cyrus the Great.

[00:00:14]He's often remembered for two things: his  unusual devotion to the moon god Sin, or Suen, and the decade he spent away from Babylon  at the oasis of Tayma in northern Arabia.

[00:00:29]But Nabonidus is also notable for a  less familiar reason. Across his reign, he carried out a series of temple  restorations in which he searched for, excavated, and recorded the  foundations laid by far older kings.

[00:00:46]He documented this work in detail on clay  cylinders, several of which survive today.

[00:00:54]Those texts give us an unusually direct look at  how a Mesopotamian ruler engaged with his own deep past, and at what some historians have called  the earliest recognizable practice of archaeology.

[00:01:10]Babylonian temple restoration  followed an established convention.

[00:01:14]A king who rebuilt a sanctuary  was expected to locate the temenu, the original foundation deposit laid  by the temple's founder sometimes a thousand or 2,000 years earlier, and  to set his new walls directly upon it.

[00:01:33]Aligning the new building with the ancient  foundation demonstrated continuity with the past and affirmed that the gods still  favored the reigning ruling house.

[00:01:45]This principle is stated explicitly  in Nabonidus's account of rebuilding the Ebabbar, the temple of the sun god  Shamash at Sippar. After locating the foundation record of an earlier king  he calls the former Sargon, he writes: "Upon the foundation record which Sargon had  made, not a finger-breadth too far above, not a finger-breadth too far beyond, its  foundation I laid, and I fixed its bricks."

[00:02:21]The phrasing reads almost  as a building specification, and it recurs throughout his inscriptions  at site after site. To meet that standard, the king first had to find the older  foundation, which meant excavating for it.

[00:02:39]A clearer example comes from the ancient city of  Larsa, where Nabonidus restored a second temple of the sun god. Excavating the site, he reached the  foundation record of Burnaburiash, a Kassite king.

[00:02:54]We don't know exactly if this was  Burnaburiash I or Burnaburiash II.

[00:03:00]Regardless of which king of that name  it was, Nabonidus continued digging below it and uncovered an older foundation  still, attributed to the great Hammurabi.

[00:03:12]He then recorded an estimate  of the interval between the two. Another inscription of his tells us: "Hammurabi, a former king, my predecessor, who  700 years before Burnaburiash had made Ebarra, and the ziggurat upon the foundation  record, I beheld, and my heart was glad."

[00:03:40]Here the king is in effect interpreting the  layers of the mound and assigning a span of years to the distance between them. His  figure isn't precise by modern reckoning, but the underlying procedure,  reading stratified remains and reasoning about elapsed time, is the  procedure of a field investigator.

[00:04:02]The most detailed of these accounts concerns  the Eulmash, the temple of the goddess Ishtar at Agade, the former capital of the great  Sargon of Akkad, whose location had been lost. What distinguishes the text is that  Nabonidus doesn't simply claim success. He first sets out the repeated failures of earlier  kings who had looked for the same foundation.

[00:04:28]He records that the Kassite king Kurigalzu  searched for it without result and quotes inscriptions to that effect. Again, we  don't know which Kurigalzu, the first or the second, the original inscription  pertains to, but it goes like this: "The foundation record of Eulmash I sought  for. I expended pious toil, but attained not."

[00:04:58]Nabonidus further notes that the Assyrian  kings Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal also searched and failed, and that even one of his  more recent predecessors, Nebuchadnezzar II, had mounted a substantial  effort of his own. He tells us: "Nebuchadnezzar summoned his numerous  skilled workmen and searched for the foundation record of Eulmash. He  spent pious labor, made excavations, and went deep. But the foundation  record of Eulmash he attained not."

[00:05:36]Nabonidus then describes his  own attempt. By his account, he excavated for three years in the  trenches Nebuchadnezzar had dug, without finding the foundation, until a heavy  rain exposed it. His inscription continues: "Three years in the trenches of Nebuchadnezzar,  king of Babylon, I dug, right and left, in front and behind, I searched and found not.  Thus they said to me: 'This foundation record we searched for and discovered not. A torrent  of rain there has been, a crevasse it has made, and this we saw.' Thus I commanded them as  follows: 'Make excavations in that crevasse until you discover the foundation record.'  They found the foundation record of Eulmash, the dwelling of Ishtar of Agade. And they  told me. My heart was glad, my face shone."

[00:06:46]The foundation he reached had been laid by  Naram-Sin, the grandson of Sargon of Akkad, more than 15 centuries before Nabonidus's own reign.  The method he describes, comparing the records of earlier kings, reading surface features,  and excavating systematically through earlier trenches, corresponds closely to the procedures  associated with later archaeological practice.

[00:07:14]Nabonidus's interests extended beyond  locating foundations to reading and preserving what he uncovered. At Sippar,  he found a statue bearing the inscription of Shagarakti-Shuriash, a Kassite king who  had reigned centuries earlier. He tells us: "I excavated the foundation of that Eulmash,  and the statue with the inscription of the name of Shagarakti-Shuriash, king of Babylon,  a former king, in that trench I read."

[00:07:50]He had the older inscription copied onto his own  monument, which is the reason the contents of this text survive. In it, Shagarakti-Shuriash  describes his own restoration work: "Their shrines I preserved. Their  plans I retained perfect. I filled in their foundations with earth. The supporting  walls I restored. Their walls in their places I embellished. Their appearance I  rendered more excellent than before."

[00:08:28]According to later accounts, Nabonidus also  recovered a damaged image of Sargon of Akkad, had it repaired, and returned it to its original  setting. In addition, his excavators working in Babylon's northern palace recovered objects  ranging in date from the 3rd millennium BC down to Nabonidus's own period, a collection  of antiquities of various ages kept together, which some scholars believe may have  been his own personal palace museum.

[00:09:02]Nabonidus is sometimes described as  the first documented archaeologist, and this has some support. The art  historian Irene Winter has noted that many of the criteria by which we recognize modern  archaeology, such as organized field campaigns, the deliberate exposure of architectural  remains, and the recording of finds, were established by the kings of the  Neo-Babylonian period, including Nabonidus.

[00:09:32]At the same time, his efforts differed from  those of a modern researcher. Nabonidus excavated not necessarily to study the past  for its own sake, but to legitimize his rule, to connect his dynasty to earlier  kings and to honor the moon god Sin.

[00:09:51]His chronology was also often inaccurate,  and the dates he assigned to ancient kings tend to exaggerate their antiquity. The  purpose of his work is stated directly in the prayer he repeats at each  restored temple. It goes like this: "As for me, Nabonidus, king of Babylon,  worshipper of your mighty divinities, may I enjoy the fullness of life, and  lengthen ye the days of Belshazzar, the first son, offspring of my  loins. May he not have any sin."

[00:10:35]Perhaps a more precise description, then,  is that Nabonidus was an antiquarian working toward religious and political ends. His  reign coincided with a broader interest in Babylonia's past during a period of political  uncertainty, and his inscriptions document that interest more fully than those of any  earlier king, including a firsthand account of excavating the remains of kings who had  lived more than a thousand years before him.

[00:11:07]Within a few years of completing these  restorations, Nabonidus lost Babylon to Cyrus the Great of Persia in the year  539 BC, and he was removed from power.

[00:11:20]Several of the temples he rebuilt and  the foundations he had excavated were themselves later uncovered by archaeologists  in the 19th and 20th centuries, who recovered and translated the inscriptions  on his cylinders in the process.

[00:11:36]Nabonidus closed his account of this  work by stating why he had recorded it, a statement that also explains  why we're able to read it today: "The deeds of Sin, Lord of the gods, and of  Ishtar, dwellers in heaven and upon earth, which upon inscriptions of  cylindrical shape I have written, that the peoples of distant times may hear."

[00:12:07]Whatever his motives, Nabonidus left one  of the earliest detailed records of a ruler deliberately investigating and documenting the  physical remains of his own civilization's past.

[00:12:21]So, I hope that you find stories like  this to be interesting. I've got a lot more on ancient Mesopotamia on the way,  so stay tuned, and thanks for watching.

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