Word: nebuchadnezzar
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Babylon reached its greatest heights in the early 6th century B.C. under the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II, who endowed his capital with unequaled architectural splendor. Cuneiform sources offer little evidence of what the city looked like, but classical accounts - in particular, by the 5th century Greek historian Herodotus - describe a city that extended for 14 miles (23 km) in each direction, divided in the middle by the mighty Euphrates, and fortified by five sun-dried mud-brick walls, each up to 23 ft. (7 m) thick. The walls guarded a spectacular inner city, whose grand streets ran parallel...
...Nebuchadnezzar's magnificent city required abundant cheap labor, much of it provided by Jewish captives. In 601 B.C., Jehoiakim, King of Judah, forged an alliance with Egypt, which was embroiled in ongoing skirmishes with Babylon; as retribution, Nebuchadnezzar laid siege to Jerusalem, raiding Solomon's Temple and seizing 10,000 Jews to help build his city. This brutal history would later color the portrayal of Babylon in the Bible. "In Christian culture, Babylon was quite deliberately developed as a broad symbol of the city of sin," says Michael Seymour, a curator of the British Museum's Middle Eastern collection. Indeed...
...world-class find." What makes the ancient but seemingly mundane receipt significant is that the book of Jeremiah in the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament) mentions the exact same official - though under a different transliteration, Nebo-Sarsekim, and a different title, chief officer, as accompanying the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar when he marched against Jerusalem...
...However, Robert Coote, an Old Testament professor at the more liberal San Francisco Theological Seminary, disagrees. Most academics who regard Jeremiah as a polemic, he claims, would concede that it makes use of materials originally written in Nebuchadnezzar's age, so there is no reason for it not to include the name of a minor figure in his court. "The logical fallacy," says Coote, "is to say that this one corroboration makes the whole narrative true and accurate...
...native Tikrit, his military and political networks had been dismantled, his ubiquitous statues and portraits had disappeared. His ruthless sons Uday and Qusay had been killed. The republic of fear had been destroyed. And Saddam's prospects of becoming one of history's greats--hero or villain--were dashed. Nebuchadnezzar, Hammurabi and Saladin had never cowered in a spider hole...