Nebuchadnezzar II: The Builder We Remember as a Destroyer

The Nebuchadnezzar most of us carry around in our heads was not written by Babylonians. He is the king who burned Jerusalem, carried Judah into exile, threw three young men into a furnace, dreamed of a statue with feet of clay, and finally lost his mind and ate grass in a field for seven seasons. That is a real figure with a real literary history, but it is a figure assembled in Hebrew and Aramaic, mostly by people who had every reason to remember him as an instrument of catastrophe. If you go instead to what Nebuchadnezzar said about himself — and he said a great deal, on stone, on clay cylinders, on millions of stamped bricks — you meet a different man. He hardly mentions armies. He barely mentions Jerusalem. What he wants you to know is that he built: walls, gates, temples, canals, a processional street glazed the colour of lapis, and a tower whose head, he says, he raised to rival the heavens. My reading is that the destroyer is a later overlay, and that even the madness may have been borrowed from a different king altogether.

Two archives, two kings

Start with the plain fact of the sources. Nebuchadnezzar II ruled Babylon for forty-three years, from 605 to 562 BCE, longer than any other king of his dynasty and long enough to leave the largest body of royal inscriptions the Neo-Babylonian empire produced.¹ Those inscriptions survive in enormous quantity because of a habit peculiar to Babylonian kingship: a king stamped his name and titles into the bricks of whatever he built, so that the building itself became the record. Nebuchadnezzar's bricks turn up at Babylon, at Borsippa, at Ur, at Sippar, at Kish, and at a dozen lesser sites, and their message is monotonous in a way that is itself the evidence. The standard formula, in my paraphrase of Da Riva and Langdon: he is the one who keeps Esagila and Ezida supplied, the temples of Marduk at Babylon and of Nabu at Borsippa; he is the eldest son of Nabopolassar; he is a king who cared for the sanctuaries. That is nearly the whole of it.²

The Hebrew archive is a different instrument. It was written by the people on the receiving end of the one thing Nebuchadnezzar did that the Babylonian record barely bothers to note. Second Kings and Jeremiah give us the sieges of Jerusalem, the deportation of King Jehoiachin, the blinding of Zedekiah, the burning of the Temple. Ezekiel gives us the long siege of Tyre. And Daniel — a book whose final form most scholars place in the second century BCE, four hundred years after the events it narrates — gives us the interior Nebuchadnezzar: the dreamer, the persecutor, the tyrant humbled by God into the shape of a beast.³

It is worth noticing where the two archives actually touch. There is a Babylonian chronicle tablet, one of the sequence Grayson published as the Babylonian Chronicles, that covers Nebuchadnezzar's early years and records, under his seventh year — Grayson's translation, in my own words — that he marched to the land of Hatti, laid siege to the city of Judah, took it on the second day of Adar, captured its king, and appointed a king of his own choosing.⁴ That is the capture of Jerusalem in 597 and the deportation of Jehoiachin, and it is the closest thing to a Babylonian account of the fall of Judah that we have. It is one line among many lines about many cities. The chronicle series breaks off a few years later, and there is no surviving Babylonian narrative of the destruction of 587 or 586 at all. From the palace's point of view, Jerusalem was one rebellious town on the road to Egypt.

I do not say this to shrink what happened to Judah. Exile is exile whether or not the exiler noticed. I say it because it tells us what Nebuchadnezzar thought a king was for. In the same decades that the prophets were narrating him as the rod of God's anger, he was narrating himself as a mason.

What the builder said he built

The reader who wants Nebuchadnezzar in his own words has one text above all: the long inscription on a stone slab that came to London in the early nineteenth century through the East India Company and has been known ever since as the East India House Inscription.² It is a catalogue. After the opening titles and a hymn of humility before Marduk, the king lists what he has done for the god's city: he finished the great double wall of Babylon, Imgur-Enlil and Nemetti-Enlil, that his father had begun; he dug and lined the moat; he built an outer wall to the east; he rebuilt Esagila, Marduk's temple, and clad its chambers in gold; he raised Etemenanki, the temple-tower, using, in my paraphrase, bitumen and kiln-fired brick; he restored the shrines of a whole roll-call of gods at Babylon and Borsippa; and he built himself a palace, quickly, so as not to disturb the sacred precinct, on foundations he says he laid at the level of the water table. Every item is presented as service. The verbs are those of a caretaker — restore, complete, make firm, make shine — and the beneficiary is always the god.

The archaeology matches the boast to a degree that is unusual for royal rhetoric. When Robert Koldewey's German expedition dug at Babylon from 1899 to 1917 they found the double wall, the moat, the palace on its deep foundations, the ruined platform of Etemenanki, and, most famously, the Ishtar Gate and the street that ran through it, faced with moulded and glazed brick.⁵ The Berlin reconstruction of the gate is a stitched-together thing, and only the smaller of the two gate structures could be assembled from the recovered fragments, but the fragments themselves are not in doubt. Blue glaze, yellow and white relief bulls and dragons on the gate, striding lions along the processional street. The lions belong to Ishtar; the bulls to Adad; the mušhuššu dragon, the serpent-headed animal, is the creature of Marduk himself. A visitor entering Babylon by its ceremonial road walked between the emblems of the gods to reach the god's house.

Even the gate carries his signature. A dedicatory inscription on the Ishtar Gate, in the same archaising script the king favoured for his monuments, says in substance, and the paraphrase is mine, that he rebuilt the gate's foundations, and faced it with bricks glazed in blue and set with bulls and dragons, so that people would look on it in wonder.⁶ There is nothing about victory on it. The gate is not a triumphal arch. It is a piece of piety with a wow-factor, and the king says as much.

The gate is not a triumphal arch. It is a piece of piety with a wow-factor, and the king says as much.

Then there is the tower. Etemenanki, a Sumerian name meaning roughly the house that founds heaven and earth, was the ziggurat of Marduk beside Esagila. Nabopolassar had begun to rebuild it and Nebuchadnezzar claims to have finished it, raising its top, as the inscription boasts, to make it rival heaven.² That phrase, or something like it, is almost certainly the seed of the Genesis story of a tower whose builders mean its top to reach the sky, and which God comes down to inspect. What is left today is a square hollow in the ground where the mudbrick core was quarried away in antiquity and after. It was real; it was his; and the people who wrote Genesis 11 knew of it. But notice how the Hebrew story turns the boast inside out. To Nebuchadnezzar, raising Etemenanki was the fulfilment of a religious duty. To the writer of Genesis, a tower reaching the heavens is the archetype of human presumption. The same brick, two opposite morals.

Piety as a political programme

Why did a king who had, after all, won the battle of Carchemish and broken Egyptian power in Syria choose to present himself as a temple-restorer rather than a conqueror? Part of the answer is that his father had come to power by rebelling against Assyria and helping the Medes destroy Nineveh in 612, and Assyrian kings had been the great boasters of battle. The Babylonian style Nebuchadnezzar inherited was consciously the opposite. Its models were the pious kings of the Old Babylonian past — he wrote his monumental texts in an archaising script that imitated the age of Hammurabi — and its ideal ruler was the shepherd who feeds the gods and repairs their houses.⁷ Part of the answer is also, I think, that building was the technology of legitimacy in Babylon in a way that war was not. The Marduk priesthood at Esagila had made and unmade kings before, and would help make Cyrus. A king who rebuilt Esagila in gold was investing in the constituency that mattered.

And there is a third possibility, harder to prove but tempting: Nebuchadnezzar may simply have meant it. The self-abasing tone of the inscriptions, the repeated insistence, to paraphrase, that he is Marduk's humble servant who never let the temples go untended, is conventional, but conventions are chosen. Assyrian convention was different. Whether or not the man was privately devout, the king was constructed as a builder, and the building was the record he wanted read.

The Hanging Gardens, which may not have hung in Babylon

The one Babylonian marvel everyone knows is the one no Babylonian text mentions. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon appear only in Greek and Latin authors writing centuries later: Berossus, the Babylonian priest who wrote in Greek under the Seleucids and whose account survives only in quotations by Josephus; Diodorus Siculus; Strabo; Quintus Curtius Rufus.⁸ Herodotus, who visited Babylon or claims to have, describes the walls and the temple tower at length and never mentions a garden. Nebuchadnezzar's own inscriptions, which itemise the palace down to its foundations, do not mention one either. Koldewey believed he had found the gardens in a vaulted building in the Southern Palace; the identification is now generally abandoned, and the vaults are usually read as storerooms — the same building, as it happens, that yielded the ration tablets recording oil issued to a man the scribes call Ya'ukin, king of the land of Judah, which is Jehoiachin, exiled and fed at the Babylonian court exactly as Second Kings says.⁵

Into this silence Stephanie Dalley advanced a bold argument in The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon (2013): that the garden was real but was not in Babylon at all. It was, she proposes, the palace garden that Sennacherib built at Nineveh a century earlier, watered by aqueducts and by a bronze water-raising screw that his inscriptions describe, and shown on Assyrian palace reliefs; the tradition later slid from Nineveh to Babylon because Greek writers routinely confused the two cities and their kings.⁹ The thesis is genuinely contested. Some Assyriologists find the Nineveh evidence compelling and the Babylonian silence damning; others point out that Berossus, who was a Babylonian and knew the local record, attributes the garden specifically to Nebuchadnezzar and gives it a motive — homesickness of a Median queen for her mountains — that has the ring of a court story rather than a Greek muddle. I do not know who is right, and neither, I think, does anyone else. What matters for the argument here is narrower. The Hanging Gardens are the one item in Nebuchadnezzar's popular reputation as a builder that he did not himself claim, and they may not be his. The things he did claim are the things we can still dig up.

Whose madness?

Now the harder transfer. Daniel 4 tells how Nebuchadnezzar, walking on the roof of his palace, looks out and says, in effect, is not this great Babylon that I have built by my power for my glory — and is at once struck down, driven from men, made to eat grass like an ox for seven seasons until he acknowledges the God of heaven.³ It is a great story, and it has a target: exactly the builder-king of the inscriptions, the man whose whole public self was I built. Daniel's author knew the type. But no Babylonian source records any such episode in Nebuchadnezzar's reign, and there are years of his reign that are simply blank in the record, which cuts both ways.

The Babylonian record does, however, know a king who left Babylon for a long time under strange circumstances, whose behaviour puzzled and offended his own capital, and whose absence became the subject of a hostile literary tradition. That king is Nabonidus, the last ruler of the dynasty, who came to the throne in 556, some six years after Nebuchadnezzar's death, and lost it to Cyrus in 539. The Nabonidus Chronicle records that for year after year the king was in Tema, an oasis in northern Arabia, that the New Year festival of Marduk was not celebrated because the king was not present, and that his son Belshazzar was left in charge at Babylon.¹⁰ Nabonidus's own inscriptions confirm the decade at Tema and show a king unusually devoted to the moon god Sin of Harran, whom he tried to raise above Marduk. After the Persian conquest a piece of Babylonian propaganda known as the Verse Account of Nabonidus portrayed him as a deranged blasphemer who built abominations and worshipped a god no one recognised.¹⁰

Then, in 1956, a fragmentary Aramaic text was published from Cave 4 at Qumran. It is now called the Prayer of Nabonidus (4Q242). In it Nabonidus, king of Babylon, says that he was afflicted with a severe disease by decree of God for seven years in Tema, that he prayed to idols of silver and gold and wood and stone, and that a Jewish diviner or exorciser from among the exiles interpreted for him and directed him to give glory to the Most High.¹¹ Seven years, a king removed from Babylon, idols confessed to be nothing, healing through a Jewish interpreter, praise given to the God of heaven. That is the skeleton of Daniel 4 with a different name on it.

The inference is hard to resist, and most commentators on Daniel — John Collins in the Hermeneia commentary is the standard statement — have found it hard to resist: an older Jewish legend about the strange last king of Babylon was, somewhere in the transmission of these court tales, reattached to the famous first one.³ Nabonidus was obscure; Nebuchadnezzar was the king every Jewish reader knew, the destroyer of the Temple, and a story about the humbling of Babylon's king simply worked better with him in it. Daniel's own text preserves a trace of the seam: it makes Belshazzar the "son" of Nebuchadnezzar, which he was not; he was the son of Nabonidus. The tradition had already collapsed the dynasty into a single figure.

Nabonidus was obscure; Nebuchadnezzar was the king every Jewish reader knew, and a story about the humbling of Babylon's king simply worked better with him in it.

I want to be careful about what this does and does not show. It does not prove that Nebuchadnezzar was never ill; it proves nothing about his mind. It shows that the specific tradition of his madness has a plausible earlier home in Nabonidus, and that the migration is exactly the sort of thing that happens when a story about a lesser king meets a greater name. It also shows the strength of the biblical archive as literature. The reason we all know the mad king in the field is that Daniel 4 is a better story than any building inscription. But better is not the same as earlier, and it is certainly not the same as Babylonian.

Reading the bricks

None of this makes Nebuchadnezzar gentle. He deported populations as a matter of policy, as the Assyrians had before him; he burned a temple that a nation regarded as the house of God; he besieged Tyre for years; his inscriptions from the cedar forests of Lebanon record him cutting timber in a land he had made his own. The Hebrew archive is not lying. It is doing what an archive of the defeated does, which is to remember the one act that mattered to them, and to make the man who did it into a type. Jeremiah, interestingly, does something more complicated: he casts Nebuchadnezzar as God's own servant, the instrument by which Judah is punished, which is a kind of grudging recognition that the king had a role in a larger order.³ Even that is a Judahite reading. It is not what he said about himself.

What he said about himself was that he built. And there is a peculiar quality to a reputation constructed out of buildings, which is that it can be checked. A conqueror's boasts die with the empire; a builder's are still standing, or lying in identifiable heaps, or fired into brick that can be picked up and turned over and read. The Babylonians of the next century, the ones who kept the astronomical diaries and learned to predict the sky, worked in the temples he had rebuilt. Herodotus, who did not know his name and attributed the great works of Babylon to a pair of legendary queens, was nonetheless describing his walls.¹² The Ishtar Gate is in Berlin because he glazed it in a colour that survives burial. Whatever else Nebuchadnezzar was, he was the king who bet his memory on masonry, and it turned out to be a sound bet: the masonry is still here, and it says what he wanted it to say.

There is a lesson in that about how reputations get made, and it is not flattering to any of us. We remember the version of a man that comes with the better story, and the ancient world's best storytellers were rarely the people who did the building. Delphi is a case in point — an institution that ran, as I have argued elsewhere, as an information network, and which we remember instead through the tales its clients told about it. Nebuchadnezzar's fate is the same in reverse. He left the record; someone else left the story; and the story won. I think it is worth going back to the record, not to rehabilitate a king who does not need our sympathy, but because the record is the thing he made with his own hands, and it is still legible if you are willing to read a brick.