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Without dirt, there could never have been cities or great kings. So claimed the people of Babylon, who knew full well that their civilization had been fashioned out of mud. Back in the beginning, when all the earth had been ocean, Lord Marduk, king of the gods, had built a raft of reeds, covered it with dust, mingled it with water to form a primordial slime and out of this raised a home for himself, the Esagila, the first building in the world. This could still be seen eons later, standing in the heart of Babylon—but it had needed no temple to make the Babylonians appreciate what could be done with earth and water. They knew it in their bones. “I will take blood,” Marduk had announced, in the earliest days of the world, “and I will sculpt flesh, and I will form the first man.”1 As good as his word, he had duly mixed dust with the gore of a slaughtered rival, and fashioned humanity out of the sticky compound. Here, in the primal act of man’s creation, had been set a pattern for all time. The crops in a field, the bricks in a city wall: what would these have been without mud? Hemmed in as they were by the bleakness of mountain and desert, the Babylonians could gaze at their land, and know they were the most fortunate of people, blessed not by one but by two mighty rivers, prodigious evidence of the favor of the gods. The fertility of their estates, the towering splendor of their buildings, the easy passage of their merchants to the sea; all were gifts of the Euphrates and the Tigris. Well might Greek travelers have described the mud steppes as “Mesopotamia,” the “Land Between the Rivers”; for without water all the wealth of Babylon would have been as nothing but dry dust.
As it was, the city ranked as the jewel in the King of Persia’s crown. Lose it, and he might lose everything—as the Babylonians themselves were well aware. Never lacking self-regard, they were perfectly accustomed to view their city as the fulcrum of great events. For centuries, their ambitions had shaken the Near East. Of all the many foes of Assyria, Babylon had been the most obdurate, and had led, with the Medes, the revolt that had destroyed the hated empire. Over its wreckage the Babylonians had then raised their own dominion, imposing upon their neighbors, and by the same amiable methods once employed by the Assyrians, “an iron yoke of servitude.”2 As Jeremiah, in far-off Judah, had wailed, “Their quiver is like an open tomb, they are all mighty men. They shall eat up your harvest and your food; they shall eat up your sons and your daughters; they shall eat up your flocks and your herds; they shall eat up your vines and your fig trees; your fortified cities in which you trust they shall destroy with the sword.”3 And all had come to pass just as the prophet had foreseen. In 586 BC, Jerusalem had been taken and left a blackened pile of rubble, and the hapless Judaeans hauled off into exile. There, weeping by the rivers of Babylon, they had been kept company by the transplants of other nations from across the Near East—for Mesopotamia, populous and fertile though she was, had long since left behind self-sufficiency. Only by feasting, vampire-like, on far-off lands had she been able to maintain herself, satisfying her monstrous appetites with foreign peoples as well as products. Immigrants, whether slaves and exiles or mercenaries and merchants, thronged the streets of Babylon—history’s first truly multicultural city. Even after the loss of her independence to Cyrus, she had remained the Near East’s supreme melting pot, her streets filled with a thousand different tongues, the roaring of exotic animals and the flashing of strange birds, the golds and scarlets and mother-of-pearl of the ends of the earth. What, in comparison, were the backwoods of Persia? The homeland of an empire, maybe—but hardly the heartbeat of the world.
It was scarcely surprising, then, that the Babylonians should have regarded Persian rule as merely—the gods willing—a temporary aberration. Cyrus, with his customary imperious magnanimity, had disdained to eliminate the defeated royal family; and even though the last king, Nabonidus, had been an old man when his city fell, on his death he had left no lack of thrusting heirs. One of these, taking advantage of the chaos unleashed by Bardiya’s murder, emerged in early October to proclaim himself Nebuchadnezzar III. Here, for all those who had suffered from the Babylonians’ attentions in the past, was a name of ominous portent: for the second Nebuchadnezzar had been Babylon’s greatest ruler, the conqueror of Jerusalem and much more besides, a shatterer of cities and a breaker of proud nations, his memory preserved among those he had defeated as something fabulous, golden and deadly. But if the name of the new king would have sent shivers throughout the Near East, its effect on the Babylonians themselves would surely have been to set them dreaming. Their world must have seemed to be returning to its former balance. Universal dominion, pilfered from Mesopotamia by Persian bandits, could now be restored to where it belonged. As was only right, a Nebuchadnezzar would once again reign supreme.
Darius, ever alert to the possibilities of propaganda, knew better than to take these sentiments lightly. Which was why, even though the rebellion in Elam had cut him off from his heartland, he headed not for Persia but directly for Mesopotamia. Descending at his usual breakneck speed from the mountains, he was following the same road that Cyrus had taken seventeen years previously—and, just as Cyrus had done, he found the way wide open at first. A huge phallus, raised out of stones, stood by the wayside, marking the border of the Land of the Two Rivers; ahead of him, flat and unbroken, stretched a monotony of alluvium. Only the occasional peasant, stooping to plant barley, would have intruded upon the emptiness, and every so often a broken line of palms. These, marking the courses of ditches and canals, would have been far less abundant than they were further south, around the Euphrates; for the Tigris, in contrast to its sister river, had impressively steep banks, and—inconveniently for farmers—flowed so fast that its name in Persian meant “the arrow.”
Yet what rendered it unsuitable for the purposes of irrigation made it ideal as a line of defense: easily the most formidable that Mesopotamia possessed amid the general featurelessness of the landscape. To strengthen it against the menace of invasion from Media, and to plug the open flatlands that lay between the Tigris and the Euphrates, a great stretch of fortifications had been constructed, eight meters wide and ten meters high, their crenellations proudly visible across the drear of the plains. Even sixty years after its construction, this “Median Wall” still bore witness to the monarch who had raised it, Nebuchadnezzar II, whose greatness had been the dread of the world. Nor, indeed, could a more fitting location for such a display of royal power have been imagined. Akkad, the region through which the Median Wall ran, was numinous with memories of a fateful innovation. Here, millennia before Nebuchadnezzar, an intoxicating dream had come to a man named Sargon, one never since forgotten, so that the kings of Babylon had been honored to name themselves the kings of Akkad. Such a title, in contrast to some other Mesopotamian appellations—“King of the Four Quarters of the Earth,” say, or “King of the Universe”—might have appeared modest; but it had served to link the kings of Babylon to the origins of empire. Provincial though Akkad had long become, its ancient grandeur lost to the wind, it had once been the seat of a global monarchy—for it was in Akkad, back in the 2200s BC, that the concept of world conquest had first been conceived.
Sargon, the obscure adventurer who had emerged as though from nowhere to nurture this proud ambition, to extinguish the independence of neighboring city-states and to rule supreme over the “totality of the lands under heaven,”4 had always remained the model of a Mesopotamian strongman. Almost two thousand years after his foundation of Akkad, he remained the cynosure of great kings. Indeed, in the decades before the Persian conquest, the obsession with him had become a veritable craze. At Susa, the capital of Elam, a victory memorial originally inscribed by Sargon’s grandson had been lovingly dusted down and put on prominent display; in Akkad itself, when a statue of the great man was excavated, Nabonidus had come rushing in high excitement to inspect it, and to supervise its restoration. Museums had sprung up everywhere: at Ur, for instance, the antiquities collection maintained by Nabonidus’ daughter, Princess En-nigaldi-Nanna, had been carefully labeled and put on display for the edification of the public. Meanwhile, in Babylon itself, scholars pored over great libraries of archives, tracing ancient documents, recycling archaic phrases, looking to the distant past to legitimize the needs and whims of their masters. The people of Mesopotamia, living as they did amid the lumber of millennia, had always been profoundly respectful of antiquity. Rather than feeling oppressed by it, they recycled it, cannibalized it, and turned it to their advantage.
Confronted by this menacing venerability, the Persians might have been expected to respond to it very differently: with suspicion, and even fear. It was not just that their own history, by comparison, was the merest blink of an eye. The turning of the ages of the world, scrupulously recorded in king lists and star charts, meant knowledge for those who tracked it—and knowledge meant power. Babylon was famed as a metropolis of sorcerers. Throughout Mesopotamia, a great network of observatories had been established, enabling astrologers to trace the warnings of the heavens, and speedily to dispatch news of them back to their intelligence chiefs in Babylon. This ability to read the future and to map the patterns cast on statecraft by the stars had always been a potent weapon of the Babylonian kings. When combined with the elaborate and unfathomable rituals for which their city was also famous, its myriad ziggurats and temples, and the supposedly primordial foundations on which its monuments had been raised, their layout dating back to the beginning of time, their bricks touched with the fingerprints of the gods, Babylon could hardly fail to overwhelm.
And yet Cyrus, back in 539 BC, when he had first arrived in the city as its conqueror, had not been remotely intimidated. Indeed, he had shown himself far more sensitive to the alien and complex traditions of Mesopotamia, and to the potential they might offer his regime, than Nabonidus had ever done. The last king of Babylon, fascinated though he was by antiquity, had eventually pushed his researches too far. Not content with hero-worshipping Sargon, he had also extolled the kings of Assyria, naming them his “royal ancestors”5 and adopting their ancient titles. This, in a city which one Assyrian king had sought to obliterate from the face of the earth, had been tactless, to say the least. Even more offensive to Babylonian sensibilities, however, and ultimately fatal to Nabonidus’ cause, had been his putting Marduk’s nose out of joint.
For a god more prickly with regard to his dignity it would have been hard to imagine. No mortal, not even the greatest monarch, could afford to offend him. This was why, every new year, the king was expected to visit the Esagila, the city’s greatest temple, to have his cheeks slapped and his ears yanked in a grand ritual of humiliation before the admonitory gaze of Marduk’s golden statue. If tears were brought to the king’s eyes, then so much the better, for that would indicate that the god was well pleased; if, however, the king did not turn up at all, then it would presage certain disaster for his realm. Nabonidus’ behavior, to the Babylonians’ way of thinking, had been particularly egregious. Not only had he absented himself from Babylon, and therefore the Esagila, for ten whole years, but he had rubbed salt in the wounds by promoting the cult of a venerable moon god, Sin, in Marduk’s place. Admittedly, he had unearthed good antiquarian reasons for doing so—for just as Babylon, far from being the most ancient city in the world, as her citizens liked to boast, had in fact been a relatively late foundation, so Marduk, its patron, had been an equally late promotion to the throne of the gods. By sponsoring the worship of Sin, Nabonidus had hoped to provide for his far-flung empire a less obviously chauvinistic focus of loyalty than the domineering Marduk. By doing so, however, he had laid himself fatally open to Cyrus’ propaganda. “Marduk,” it was claimed, “scanned all the countries of the world, looking for a righteous ruler,”6 and he had found one in the King of Persia. Cyrus, welcomed into Babylon by his new subjects, had duly damned Nabonidus as a heretic, while cheerfully promoting himself as Marduk’s chosen one. The city’s ancient rituals had been permitted to continue undisturbed; cult statues, appropriated by Nabonidus for safe-keeping, had been returned to their proper shrines; in the first months of Persian rule, Cambyses, acting as proxy for his father, had even reported to the Esagila for the ritual New Year slapping.
And Marduk had been gratified. Order had been maintained in the Land of the Two Rivers. Yes, the Persians were upstarts, and yes, it was disconcerting for the citizens of the world’s greatest city to be ruled as though they were mere provincials; but Cyrus and Cambyses had given the Babylonians peace. No greater virtue could be ascribed to a king. The priests of Marduk, confirmed in both their primacy and in their extensive property-holdings across Mesopotamia, were not the only natives to have collaborated enthusiastically with foreign rule. Big business had also flourished. Inflation, galloping out of control under Nabonidus, had been stabilized; trade routes, no longer blocked by Persian sanctions, had filled with caravans again. For merchants and financiers, the absorption of Mesopotamia into a world empire had opened up unprecedented opportunities. Sentimental notions of loyalty to the old regime could hardly be expected to stand in the way of profit. The Egibis, for instance, a dynasty of bankers who had been operating as agents to the native kings of Babylon for decades, had no sooner witnessed the downfall of Nabonidus than they were smoothly accommodating themselves to the new order, dating their commercial documents from the accession year of Cyrus, and looking to expand into Iran. Within a couple of years, they had opened offices in Ecbatana and throughout Persia, diversifying enthusiastically into fields as varied as the slave trade and the hawking of marriage contracts. Then, suddenly, caught short by the revolt in Mesopotamia, the Egibis found themselves facing meltdown. By the late autumn of 522 BC, their headquarters in Babylon had lost contact with the regional branches. Two of the family’s brothers were cut off in Persia. The bank’s debts began to mount. As far as the Egibis were concerned, their city’s rebellion promised not liberation but disaster. The sooner it was quelled, and stability restored to the markets, the better.
Of course, the fact that the rule of the Persians had collapsed into murder and factionalism was, for most Babylonians, a justification in itself for their revolt. Just as Marduk had been offended by Nabonidus, so now, self-evidently, he was bending his frown upon the warring house of Cyrus. Yet this assumption, even though it threatened Darius’ claim to the throne, also presented him with a dazzling opportunity. The chosen one of Ahura Mazda, why should he not prove himself the favorite of the supreme god of Babylon, too? Was it likely, after all, that Marduk, having overthrown the heretical Nabonidus, should now bless his son? What better chance for Darius to establish his credentials as monarch of the world than to crush a revolt in Babylon? No wonder that he drove so hard toward the city. Already, by early December, Persian outriders had reached the Median Wall. Next, turning its flank, Darius led his army over the Tigris, his soldiers clinging to horses, camels and inflated animal skins. On December 13, 522 BC he met the army of Nebuchadnezzar III in battle, and routed it. Six days later, with a second victory, Darius completed his annihilation of the Babylonian forces. Nebuchadnezzar, turning tail with what was left of his cavalry, fled back to his capital. Not one of those who stayed behind to surrender was spared. The road to Babylon stood wide open.
Darius, not hesitating, took it. Ahead of him, blotting out the horizon, was a monstrous haze of smoke and dust, the exhalation of a metropolis without rival on the planet. An unprecedented quarter of a million people lived in Babylon, crowded into the narrow, twisting streets; yet, cramped though the city was, a dense agglomeration of brick, bodies and dung, it had still required the longest urban fortifications ever built to enclose just a portion of its sprawl. Stupendous, like everything else in Babylon, the walls enclosed three full square miles, had eight colossal decorated gates, and were protected, where the Euphrates did not provide a natural barrier, by moats, “great floods of destroying waters like the great waves of the sea.” A fittingly grand enceinte for the theater of the world’s fantasies: “Babylon, the city of opulence; Babylon, the city whose people are glutted with wealth; Babylon, the city of celebrations, rejoicing and endless dance.”7 Even through the darkest back alleys, it was said, Ishtar, the goddess of love, might be seen gliding, visiting her favorites in taverns and on the open streets, so that all the city, mingling festival with erotic adventure, appeared to glimmer with desire. Well might Babylon, to the Judaean exiles, have appeared a stew of licentiousness, and to those in distant countries, it was a superhuman and magical place. The city walls, it was confidently asserted, stretched for fifty-six miles, and had a hundred gates of bronze. In its streets, so it was whispered, prostitution was regarded as a sacred duty, and daughters would be joyously pimped by their own fathers. Not so much a city, Babylon was rather a veritable world unto itself. Indeed, “such was the immensity of her scale that Cyrus,” it was claimed, “had been able to seize control of the outskirts without anyone in the center even being aware of his arrival, so that the Babylonians, who were celebrating a festival, had continued dancing, and indulging themselves. And so it was that the city had fallen for the first time.”8
But the second? The stories that told of Cyrus’ capture of Babylon, for all their implausibilities, still hinted at a certain strategic truth: any army breaking into the city might indeed find itself swallowed up by the vastness. Darius’ soldiers, as they saw the walls of Babylon looming toward them through the smog, must have felt a quickening of their hearts; for nothing, not even the temples of Egypt, would have prepared them for the gargantuan scale of such a place. But it is doubtful that their general felt any lurch of doubt. Darius knew, for his intelligence agents would have told him as much, that Babylon was ripe for the plucking. The city, impregnable though it might have appeared, was in truth far too riven by division to be defended. If it was, as those who marveled at it claimed, a mirror of the world, then the reflection that it offered was one of social and ethnic hatred. It was not only priests and businessmen who were eager to collaborate with the Persian king. Babylon was also filled with the descendants of deportees, scattered throughout the suburbs. Few of these were willing to die in the cause of a Nebuchadnezzar. The cosmopolitanism of the great city, once the mark and buttress of its imperial might, now threatened it with anarchy. The Babylonians were bound to shrink from such a prospect, even at the cost of surrender to an alien master. Chaos, in Mesopotamia, had always been the ultimate nightmare. Men knew that in the beginning all the world had been under the sway of demons, uncontrollable and savage, until the gods, taking pity on mankind, had established order by giving them a king. Without a monarch, civilization itself would cease to hold; the demons would surely return. “To have authority, and possession, and strength, these are princely divine properties.” So it had been anciently asserted, in a remote age when even Sargon and his empire lay in the future. “You should submit to the strong man; you should humble yourself before the man who wields power.”9 Not, perhaps, the most heroic of maxims, but practical, and sanctified by the habits of millennia. The Babylonians, seeing the Persian king ride victorious toward them, duly scrambled to prostrate themselves. Once again, as they had done to Cyrus, they opened up their gates.
Darius, passing through the brilliant glazed blue of the main gateway, took easy possession of the city. No getting sucked into the urban labyrinth for him. Symmetry as well as chaos were to be found in Babylon. Just as the gods had structured the formlessness of human society by gifting it the sacred institution of monarchy, so, across the seething ferment of the world’s largest city, there had been laid an imperious grid of boulevards. Now, down the grandest of these, the Processional Way, Darius made his entry into Babylon.
“May-The-Arrogant-Not-Flourish,” the Babylonians called the street, in memory of past triumphs; and to ride down its length as its master was to lay claim to the city’s very proudest dreams. Display, in Babylon, was the essence of kingship. Far from empty pomp, it was seen as the blazing of a god-given order, one which could be imagined as rippling like a lightning charge throughout the city, suffusing mortal flesh and bone, and dust and limestone and brick. The architecture of the Processional Way gave stirring illustration to this metaphor. At the boulevard’s far end, abutting it, and placing even the Esagila in shadow, was the most staggering of all Babylon’s monuments, an immense stepped tower, formed out of seventeen million bricks, and looming almost a hundred meters high: the Etemenanki, or “House that is the Frontier between the Heavens and the Earth.” Here, as the name of the temple implied, there dwelt a profound mystery, located, with portentous symbolism, in the precise center of the city. But the Etemenanki was not its only incarnation. So too, in the opinion of the Babylonians, was the mortal person of their king; for he, according to the age-old traditions of Mesopotamia, was both the beating heart of society and a man set utterly apart. That this was no paradox could be illustrated by a simple visit to the Processional Way. Beside the city’s main gates, open to the gaze of all who entered Babylon, there stood an immense palace, as visible, in its own way, as the Etemenanki at the opposite end of the boulevard; and yet such was the polychrome gorgeousness of its brickwork, inlaid as it was with gold and silver, and lapis lazuli, and ivory, and cedar, that those who viewed it could hardly help but lower their eyes to the ground. Opulence of such an order was not merely an expression of royal power, but was calculated, very precisely, to reinforce it. All were to feel submission and prostration in their souls.
Mesopotamia, by virtue of its glamor, had always exerted a powerful influence over its neighbors, and the kings of Anshan, among many others, had long looked to Babylon as a model of how best to be royal. Darius, settling himself into the great royal palace on the Processional Way, was laying claim to the same rich inheritance: King of Persia, he would rule as King of Babylon; and, yes, as King of Akkad too. Proud of his background though he was, “an Achaemenid, and a Persian, the son of a Persian,”10Darius did not scorn to adorn himself in the plundered robes of a Mesopotamian “King of Lands.” Far more than Cyrus or Cambyses, he had good cause to try them on for size. As a usurper, he needed every scrap of legitimacy that he could find.
Having won Babylon, Darius was alert to all the city could teach. For a man of his penetrating intelligence, the city must have appeared as an immense illustration of what kingship might truly be, enshrined within ritual, and luxury, and stone. The lessons that he was absorbing in Babylon promised to be valuable, and they would need to be—for as Darius lingered in the city, grim news began to reach him. His victory in Mesopotamia had failed to deliver a knockout blow to his other enemies. Rebellion was rife, and growing, throughout the dominions he aspired to master. Insurrection and war were reported everywhere.
For Darius, all the world was still at stake.