Sykes' History of Persia - Heritage Institute

i62 HISTORY OF PERSIA chap.
Babylon, the holy city, whose gods and whose laws were
the oldest and most highly respected throughout the
known world, surrendered without a
fight
to the power of
the conquering Persians. With great diplomacy Cyrus ^
" took the hands of Bel," which gratified his new subjects
immensely. Furthermore, he restored to the cities the
gods which Nabonidus had collected at Babylon.
The Traditional Account.—There is no part of Persian
history which has suffered such remarkable vicissitudes as
the fall of Babylon. Until the discovery of the tablets,
the dramatic account given by Herodotus and supplemented
by the book of Daniel, how Cyrus diverted the
waters of the Euphrates and marched along the dry bed,
in which the gates had been left open upon the occasion
of a feast, was fully accepted.^ A massacre ensued, the
drunken Babylonian monarch, paralysed by the writing on
the wall, was slain, and the city was given over to fire and
the sword. The prophecies, moreover, were fulfilled, the
finest of them being that given in the book of Isaiah :
" Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at
thy coming : it stirreth up the dead for thee, even all the
chief ones of the earth ; it hath raised up from their
thrones all the kings of the nations. All they shall speak
and say unto thee, Art thou also become weak as we ^ art
" ^
thou become like unto us }
We now know that there was no siege of Babylon by
Cyrus, that the famous account in Herodotus is a legend,
and that the awful vengeance pronounced against Babylon in
Holy Writ did not come to pass on this occasion. Finally,
Belshazzar was neither *' Son of Nebuchadnezzar " nor
*'
King of Babylon," nor was Darius, the Mede who " re-
"
ceived the kingdom after Belshazzar's death, a historical
personage. In short, as already stated with reference to
the madness of Nebuchadnezzar, the book of Daniel possesses
little, if any, historical value.
The Latter Tears of Cyrus.—
Lydia had fallen, Babylon
had fallen, and Egypt alone, among the powers of the
^ This action has been used to show that Cyrus was not a follower of Zoroaster, and
obviously he was not a fanatical monotheist ; yet we have the modern example of
Napoleon, who posed as a Moslem in Egypt, to show to what lengths policy may lead.
2
Fi've Monarchies, iii. 513 ff.
^ Isaiah xiv. 9, 10.
I