Nabonidus
c. 556 BCE · Babylon
Nabonidus (r. 556–539 BCE) was the last king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. He is remembered for his unusual devotion to the moon-god Sîn, whom he promoted at the expense of Babylon's traditional chief god Marduk — a policy that drew the resentment of Marduk's priesthood — and for a long absence of about ten years at the oasis of Tayma in Arabia, during which his son Belshazzar governed in Babylon. His reign ended in 539 BCE when Cyrus the Great of Persia captured Babylon, bringing the Neo-Babylonian Empire to a close.
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He revived a priesthood last held 1,700 years earlier
Around 550 BCE, the Babylonian king Nabonidus installed his own daughter as high priestess of the moon god at Ur, reviving an ancient office that had long fallen into disuse — one whose most famous early holder, Enheduanna, had served some 1,700 years earlier. To reconstruct the lapsed rites, his scribes consulted monuments left by far older ages.
Meet Enheduanna →How we know
Enheduanna served as en/entu-priestess of the moon god Nanna at Ur c. 2285 BCE (reign of Sargon of Akkad); Nabonidus (r. 556–539 BCE) revived the entu office of Sin at Ur and installed his daughter Ennigaldi-Nanna, dated c. 547 BCE (vacant since Nebuchadnezzar I, 12th c. BCE). Gap ~1,735 years (~1,700). Middle Chronology.
A king who dug for antiquities — and tried to date them
Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon (who came to the throne around 556 BCE), had an antiquarian's passion: his inscriptions record excavating the buried foundations of ancient temples to recover older kings' foundation stones, and even estimating their age. In one case, his own inscription put a foundation deposit at 3,200 years old — an ancient ruler attempting his own chronology of the deep past, more than 2,500 years before modern archaeology.
How we know
Nabonidus reigned 556–539 BCE (Middle Chronology); his Sippar inscription records excavating and dating a Naram-Sin (r. c.2254–2218 BCE) foundation stone at 3,200 years — a documented overestimate.
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Babylon
We know they were here, but the specifics of what they did at this stop aren’t recorded yet in our corpus.
About Babylon
The great city on the Euphrates that gave its name to Babylonia, capital under Hammurabi and again under the Neo-Babylonian kings. The pin marks the findspot of the excavated tablet.
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Nabonidus’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Works
No works attributed in the corpus yet.