Babylon falls to Cyrus the Great
The great Mesopotamian city comes under Persian control
Babylon! For millennia the name had the ring of wealth, splendour and power: the city of Hammurabi, Nebuchadnezzar, the Ishtar Gate and the Hanging Gardens.
But in the autumn of 539 BC, Babylon was at bay. After years of retreat, the Babylonians had been pushed back by the Persian king Cyrus the Great, and at the battle of Opis, on the banks of the Tigris, Cyrus won an overwhelming victory. Now, Babylon lay open before him. What happened next, however, remains mysterious.
According to the evidence of local inscriptions, Cyrus’s army entered Babylon on 12 October without a fight, let alone a siege, probably because the city’s rulers reckoned the war was lost and it was better to appease their new master. But the Greek historian Herodotus tells a much more exciting story. The city, he explained, was guarded by impassable walls, which crossed the river Euphrates. Cyrus ordered his sappers to drain oʘ the river into a nearby lake, so that its level fell “about to the middle of a man’s thigh”. Then he sent his army along the river bed, into the heart of the city. As luck would have it, *erodotus added, the Babylonians were celebrating a religious festival. So even as the Persians crept towards them, “they went on dancing and rejoicing during this time until they learnt the truth only too wellq.
Either way, the result was the same: Cyrus was the master of Babylon. It belonged to his descendants for the next 200 years.
Dominic Sandbrook is a historian, author and broadcaster. His latest book, Who Dares Wins: Britain, 1979–1982, will be published by Allen Lane on 26 September