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( Nabonidus)
Nabonidus (Akkadian Nabû-na?id) was the last king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, reigning from 556-539 BCE. More than with others, our perception of Nabonidus' reign has been heavily coloured by later accounts, notably by the Persians and the Greeks, as well as in the Hebrew Bible. On the one hand, this is because the Persians and the Hebrews had strong reasons to denounce Nabonidus. On the other, it is also because these stories fitted in with a set of views on the Near East which are now known as Orientalism. Especially since the discussions on Orientalism in the 1970s and 1980s, and also because of an accumulation of evidence, opinions on Nabonidus and the events that happened during his reign have altered significantly. Nabonidus' background is not clear. He says himself in his inscriptions that he is of unimportant origins.[1] Similarly, his mother, who lived to high age and may have been connected to the temple of the moongod Sîn in Harran, in her inscriptions does not mention her descent. On the basis of repeated references to Ashurbanipal, the last great Neo-Assyrian king, in Nabonidus' royal propaganda and imagery, as well as his special interest in Harran, the last stronghold of the Neo-Assyrians after the fall of Nineveh, it has been proposed that he was an Assyrian.[2] But it has also been pointed out that Nabonidus' royal propaganda was hardly different from his predecessors, while his Persian successor, Cyrus the Great, equally referred to Ashurbanipal in the Cyrus cylinder.[3] One way or another, he certainly did not belong to the previous ruling dynasty, the Chaldeans, of whom Nebuchadnezzar II was the most famous member. He came to the throne in 556 BC by overthrowing the youthful king Labashi-Marduk. In most ancient accounts, Nabonidus is being depicted as a royal anomaly. He is supposed to have worshiped the moongod Sîn beyond all the other gods, to have paid special devotion to Sîn's temple in Harran, where his mother was a priestess, and to have neglected the Babylonian main god, Marduk. Because of the tensions that these religious reforms generated, he had to leave the capital for the rich desert oasis of Tayma in Arabia early in his reign, from which he only returned after many years. In the meantime, his son Belshazzar ruled from Babylon, supposedly in the typical fashion of an oriental despot.
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