Fragments of the History of Assyria. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.Fragments of the History of Assyria

Conventionally imagined as the last native king of Babylonia before its fall to Cyrus and the burgeoning Persian empire was Nabû-na’id, known to the Greek historian Herodotus as Labynetus, conflated in the Bible with Belshazzar and commonly called Nabonidus in English. Nabû-na’id was an eccentric man with an eccentric family – a self-described son of nobody, and yet with a mother about whom we know quite a lot, including that she was a religious exile from a destroyed city who served in numerous royal courts and lived to be over 100. From the perspective of the Babylonian establishment, Nabû-na’id was, perhaps like his mother, a heretic insisting almost monotheistically on the ascendancy of the Moon god Sîn, to whom he even dedicated his daughter as priestess. He was also a scholarly antiquarian who ruminated about rediscovered ancient statues and long-lost religious rites and whose daughter followed in his footsteps and established what has sometimes been called the world’s first museum. Uncharacteristically for the kings of that age, he may have known how to read and to write, as perhaps his mother, wife and daughter also did. This book endeavors to tell some of the tales of Nabû-na’id, of his wife whom Herodotus called Nitocris, of his son known in the Bible as Belshazzar, of his daughter En-nigaldi-Nanna, and of his mother Adad-guppi, as well as of myriad other characters of whom ancient Greek and Mesopotamian sources as well as the Bible afford glimpses. But, as Herodotus may also have learned, to tell such tales and excavate such tells is to tremble within the labyrinthine emptinesses of writing.