As it was, the city ranked as the jewel in the King of Persia’s crown. Lose it, and he might lose everything—as the Babylonians themselves were well aware. Never lacking self-regard, they were perfectly accustomed to view their city as the fulcrum of great events. For centuries, their ambitions had shaken the Near East. Of all the many foes of Assyria, Babylon had been the most obdurate, and had led, with the Medes, the revolt that had destroyed the hated empire. Over its wreckage the Babylonians had then raised their own dominion, imposing upon their neighbors, and by the same amiable methods once employed by the Assyrians, “an iron yoke of servitude.”2 As Jeremiah, in far-off Judah, had wailed, “Their quiver is like an open tomb, they are all mighty men. They shall eat up your harvest and your food; they shall eat up your sons and your daughters; they shall eat up your flocks and your herds; they shall eat up your vines and your fig trees; your fortified cities in which you trust they shall destroy with the sword.”3 And all had come to pass just as the prophet had foreseen. In 586 BC, Jerusalem had been taken and left a blackened pile of rubble, and the hapless Judaeans hauled off into exile. There, weeping by the rivers of Babylon, they had been kept company by the transplants of other nations from across the Near East—for Mesopotamia, populous and fertile though she was, had long since left behind self-sufficiency. Only by feasting, vampire-like, on far-off lands had she been able to maintain herself, satisfying her monstrous appetites with foreign peoples as well as products. Immigrants, whether slaves and exiles or mercenaries and merchants, thronged the streets of Babylon—history’s first truly multicultural city. Even after the loss of her independence to Cyrus, she had remained the Near East’s supreme melting pot, her streets filled with a thousand different tongues, the roaring of exotic animals and the flashing of strange birds, the golds and scarlets and mother-of-pearl of the ends of the earth. What, in comparison, were the backwoods of Persia? The homeland of an empire, maybe—but hardly the heartbeat of the world.
It was scarcely surprising, then, that the Babylonians should have regarded Persian rule as merely—the gods willing—a temporary aberration. Cyrus, with his customary imperious magnanimity, had disdained to eliminate the defeated royal family; and even though the last king, Nabonidus, had been an old man when his city fell, on his death he had left no lack of thrusting heirs. One of these, taking advantage of the chaos unleashed by Bardiya’s murder, emerged in early October to proclaim himself Nebuchadnezzar III. Here, for all those who had suffered from the Babylonians’ attentions in the past, was a name of ominous portent: for the second Nebuchadnezzar had been Babylon’s greatest ruler, the conqueror of Jerusalem and much more besides, a shatterer of cities and a breaker of proud nations, his memory preserved among those he had defeated as something fabulous, golden and deadly. But if the name of the new king would have sent shivers throughout the Near East, its effect on the Babylonians themselves would surely have been to set them dreaming. Their world must have seemed to be returning to its former balance. Universal dominion, pilfered from Mesopotamia by Persian bandits, could now be restored to where it belonged. As was only right, a Nebuchadnezzar would once again reign supreme.
Darius, ever alert to the possibilities of propaganda, knew better than to take these sentiments lightly. Which was why, even though the rebellion in Elam had cut him off from his heartland, he headed not for Persia but directly for Mesopotamia. Descending at his usual breakneck speed from the mountains, he was following the same road that Cyrus had taken seventeen years previously—and, just as Cyrus had done, he found the way wide open at first. A huge phallus, raised out of stones, stood by the wayside, marking the border of the Land of the Two Rivers; ahead of him, flat and unbroken, stretched a monotony of alluvium. Only the occasional peasant, stooping to plant barley, would have intruded upon the emptiness, and every so often a broken line of palms. These, marking the courses of ditches and canals, would have been far less abundant than they were further south, around the Euphrates; for the Tigris, in contrast to its sister river, had impressively steep banks, and—inconveniently for farmers—flowed so fast that its name in Persian meant “the arrow.”
Yet what rendered it unsuitable for the purposes of irrigation made it ideal as a line of defense: easily the most formidable that Mesopotamia possessed amid the general featurelessness of the landscape. To strengthen it against the menace of invasion from Media, and to plug the open flatlands that lay between the Tigris and the Euphrates, a great stretch of fortifications had been constructed, eight meters wide and ten meters high, their crenellations proudly visible across the drear of the plains. Even sixty years after its construction, this “Median Wall” still bore witness to the monarch who had raised it, Nebuchadnezzar II, whose greatness had been the dread of the world. Nor, indeed, could a more fitting location for such a display of royal power have been imagined. Akkad, the region through which the Median Wall ran, was numinous with memories of a fateful innovation. Here, millennia before Nebuchadnezzar, an intoxicating dream had come to a man named Sargon, one never since forgotten, so that the kings of Babylon had been honored to name themselves the kings of Akkad. Such a title, in contrast to some other Mesopotamian appellations—“King of the Four Quarters of the Earth,” say, or “King of the Universe”—might have appeared modest; but it had served to link the kings of Babylon to the origins of empire. Provincial though Akkad had long become, its ancient grandeur lost to the wind, it had once been the seat of a global monarchy—for it was in Akkad, back in the 2200s BC, that the concept of world conquest had first been conceived.
Sargon, the obscure adventurer who had emerged as though from nowhere to nurture this proud ambition, to extinguish the independence of neighboring city-states and to rule supreme over the “totality of the lands under heaven,”4 had always remained the model of a Mesopotamian strongman. Almost two thousand years after his foundation of Akkad, he remained the cynosure of great kings. Indeed, in the decades before the Persian conquest, the obsession with him had become a veritable craze. At Susa, the capital of Elam, a victory memorial originally inscribed by Sargon’s grandson had been lovingly dusted down and put on prominent display; in Akkad itself, when a statue of the great man was excavated, Nabonidus had come rushing in high excitement to inspect it, and to supervise its restoration. Museums had sprung up everywhere: at Ur, for instance, the antiquities collection maintained by Nabonidus’ daughter, Princess En-nigaldi-Nanna, had been carefully labeled and put on display for the edification of the public. Meanwhile, in Babylon itself, scholars pored over great libraries of archives, tracing ancient documents, recycling archaic phrases, looking to the distant past to legitimize the needs and whims of their masters. The people of Mesopotamia, living as they did amid the lumber of millennia, had always been profoundly respectful of antiquity. Rather than feeling oppressed by it, they recycled it, cannibalized it, and turned it to their advantage.
Confronted by this menacing venerability, the Persians might have been expected to respond to it very differently: with suspicion, and even fear. It was not just that their own history, by comparison, was the merest blink of an eye. The turning of the ages of the world, scrupulously recorded in king lists and star charts, meant knowledge for those who tracked it—and knowledge meant power. Babylon was famed as a metropolis of sorcerers. Throughout Mesopotamia, a great network of observatories had been established, enabling astrologers to trace the warnings of the heavens, and speedily to dispatch news of them back to their intelligence chiefs in Babylon. This ability to read the future and to map the patterns cast on statecraft by the stars had always been a potent weapon of the Babylonian kings. When combined with the elaborate and unfathomable rituals for which their city was also famous, its myriad ziggurats and temples, and the supposedly primordial foundations on which its monuments had been raised, their layout dating back to the beginning of time, their bricks touched with the fingerprints of the gods, Babylon could hardly fail to overwhelm.