Fall of Nineveh and the Neo-Babylonian Empire

In 612 BCE a Babylonian army under King Nabopolassar and a force of Medes from the Iranian plateau stormed Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire, and burned it. A rump Assyrian state held out at Harran until about 609 BCE. The Babylonians, who had been Assyrian subjects for generations, now ruled most of the Fertile Crescent. Their dynasty, founded by Nabopolassar in 626 BCE, is called Neo-Babylonian or Chaldean, and it lasted only 87 years but left a deep mark.¹²

Assyria had grown by terror and deportations, and its rule left it hated by conquered peoples. After the death of its last great king, Ashurbanipal, civil war weakened it. Nabopolassar, a Chaldean leader from southern Mesopotamia, seized Babylon in 626 BCE and then allied with the Medes, whose own kingdom was growing in the east. Babylon was an ancient and prestigious city, remembered for Hammurabi and for its scholars, and the new rulers presented themselves as restorers of its glory.¹

Nabopolassar's son Nebuchadnezzar II (ruled 605 to 562 BCE) defeated Egypt at Carchemish in 605 BCE and took control of Syria and the Levant. He crushed rebellion in Judah, capturing Jerusalem in 597 BCE and destroying it in 587 BCE, an event that began the Babylonian exile of many Judeans. At home he spent his wealth on rebuilding Babylon, with huge walls, a processional street and the Ishtar Gate, faced with blue glazed brick and decorated with lions, bulls and dragons. The city, along the Euphrates, was probably the largest in the world in its day. The empire collapsed fast after Nebuchadnezzar's death in a series of palace coups, and in 539 BCE Cyrus of Persia took Babylon with little fighting.³¹⁵