Nebuchadnezzar II came to the throne of Babylon in 605 BCE, in the same year he crushed the Egyptian army at Carchemish as crown prince, and reigned forty three years over the empire his father Nabopolassar had carved from the ruin of Assyria. His own inscriptions, of which hundreds survive stamped into the bricks of his buildings, present him not as a conqueror but as a pious builder, the provider for Esagila and Ezida, beloved of Marduk. The city he built to match the title was the wonder of its age: the double walls, the Processional Way and the Ishtar Gate glazed in blue and gold beasts, the restored temple of Marduk, Esagila, and beside it the seven staged ziggurat Etemenanki, the House of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth, whose scale echoes through the tower of Babel narrative. Through his works the New Year festival, the akitu, in which the king took the hand of Marduk's statue and the gods of the land processed into Babylon, reached its imperial height. D. J. Wiseman's Schweich Lectures remain the standard portrait drawn from the cuneiform sources: a ruler whose statecraft and piety were a single program, the kingship of Babylon performed as service to its god.
The bricks themselves keep his name current: stamped by the hundred thousand with his royal titles, they surface wherever Babylon's ruins are opened, and museums across the world display them, the most widely traveled signature of any ancient king.