Nebuchadnezzar II

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.

The same king wears an opposite face in the Bible. Judah rebelled twice against Babylonian vassalage, and Nebuchadnezzar answered as empires did: in 597 BCE he took Jerusalem and deported its king and elite, and in 587 or 586, after a second revolt, his army burned the city and Solomon's temple and carried a great part of the population to Babylonia. The deportations, remembered as the Babylonian Exile, remade Israelite religion; the exiles' longing, argument and editing of their traditions by the rivers of Babylon stand behind much of the Hebrew Bible as it exists, and the event is recorded in this atlas as a hinge of religious history.

Scripture repaid him with an afterlife stranger than any inscription. Jeremiah calls him the servant of the Lord, the rod of a judgment Judah earned; the Book of Daniel, written centuries later, makes him the archetype of imperial pride, the dreamer of the statue with feet of clay, the builder of the golden image, the king driven from among men to eat grass like an ox until he learned that Heaven rules. That last tale, unknown to Babylonian sources and possibly transferred from his successor Nabonidus, fixed the image of the mad king of Babylon in Jewish, Christian and Muslim imagination. Between the bricks and the book stand two Nebuchadnezzars, and the historical king, richly documented in his own voice, is fully visible behind both.