32 Facts About Nabopolassar

Nabopolassar was the founder and first king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, ruling from his coronation as king of Babylon in 626 BC to his death in 605 BC.

Subsequent campaigns were intended to hinder the possibility of an Assyrian campaign directed at Babylonia through securing the border, but the intervention of the eastern Median Empire under Cyaxares in Nabopolassar's favor shifted the goals and the possibilities of the war.

That Nabopolassar was the son of a nobody is almost certainly a lie; a person of truly obscure origins would have been unable to gather enough influence to become Babylon's king.

Regardless of his ethnic origin, Nabopolassar appears to have been strongly connected to the city of Uruk, located south of Babylon, possibly having been a member of its ruling elite prior to becoming Babylon's king.

In 2007, the Assyriologist Michael Jursa advanced the theory that Nabopolassar was a member of a prominent political family in Uruk, whose members are attested since the reign of Esarhaddon.

The name of the son whose name is unpreserved in the letter ended with either ahi, nasir or usur, and the remaining traces can fit with the name Nabu-apla-usur, meaning that Nabopolassar could be the other son mentioned in the letter and thus a son of Kudurru.

Since the Babylonians employed patronymics, it is possible that Nabopolassar would have named his son after his father.

The ancient author Berossus, a native Babylonian historian active in Hellenistic times, centuries after Nabopolassar, described Nabopolassar as a general of Sinsharishkun, who betrayed the Assyrian king.

Inscriptions that record Nabopolassar's building projects or his piety, recovered at several sites throughout Babylonia, do not mention much about geopolitical events either.

In terms of dating, several sources can be used to confidently determine the timespan in which Nabopolassar ruled as king of Babylon, chiefly the Uruk King List and the Ptolemaic Canon of Kings.

Nabopolassar might have used the political instability caused by the revolt of Sin-shumu-lishir a few months prior, as well as the unrest caused by the potentially ongoing interregnum in the south, to his advantage.

Nabopolassar began by assaulting both Babylon and Nippur, taking the cities from the garrisons left there by Sinsharishkun.

Nippur was conquered in 620 BC and Nabopolassar pushed the Assyrians out of Babylonia.

In 616 BC, Nabopolassar entered Assyrian territory for the first time, leading his armies along the Euphrates river into lands in present-day Syria.

That Nabopolassar withdrew at the same time as the Assyrians did suggests that the Babylonians were not yet ready to conduct a full invasion of Assyria and that their plans were at this time just to secure Babylonian independence, not to conquer and destroy Assyria.

Nabopolassar only arrived at Assur after the plunder had already begun and met with Cyaxares, allying with him and signing an anti-Assyrian pact.

Sinshariskun successfully rescued the tribe's besieged city of Rahilu, but Nabopolassar's army retreated before a battle could take place.

Around this time, Sinsharishkun, apparently finally recognizing the disaster that was about to befall his kingdom, sent a letter to Nabopolassar, attempting to broker peace.

Sinsharishkun pleaded with Nabopolassar to avoid any more bloodshed and wrote that he should "quiet his fiery heart".

Nabopolassar was not interested; Sinsharishkun had waited too long and there was no longer anything he could offer that the Babylonians and Medes would not be able to take for themselves in battle.

In some inscriptions, Nabopolassar was careful to attribute his victory and its aftermath to divine intervention in attempt to absolve himself of the blame, though other inscriptions were less remorseful, with one reading "I slaughtered the land of Assyria, I turned the hostile land into heaps and ruins".

Later Neo-Babylonian rulers, such as Nabonidus, blamed the destruction solely on the Medes and Cyaxares, maintaining that Nabopolassar had not destroyed any temples and described him as remorseful of the fate that befell Assyria.

In 2003, Assyriologist Stephanie Dalley wrote that two of the modern interpretations in regards to the reason for briefly "ruling" from Nineveh are that Nabopolassar either might have wanted to cement himself as the successor of the Assyrian kings, or that taking residence there was an attempt to save what remained of the city from further sacking by the Medes.

In 611 BC, Nabopolassar's army consolidated his rule throughout northern Mesopotamia, going as far as to the border of Harran itself.

For much of the period between 609 and 607 BC, Nabopolassar was occupied by a war against the northern Kingdom of Urartu, and in the meantime, the Egyptians took the city of Carchemish in Syria, which Necho established as his base of operations for the course of the campaign.

Nabopolassar was laid in a huge coffin, adorned with ornamented gold plates and fine dresses with golden beads, which was then placed within a small palace he had constructed in Babylon.

Several later texts hold that Nabopolassar was even divinely ordered by Marduk, Babylon's chief deity, to avenge Babylonia.

Nabopolassar, called Belesys or Bupolasaros by the Hellenistic-era authors, is used in some and is generally cast in a very positive light, described as a pious and just king who, partly through reverence of Marduk, managed to liberate his homeland from the rule of the Assyrian Empire.

The antagonist of the Nabopolassar epics is typically Sinsharishkun or Sin-shumu-lishir.

Some prominent Assyrian titles, such as "king of the Four Corners of the World", were dropped, whereas Nabopolassar assumed others, such as sarru dannu and the much older Sumerian "king of Sumer and Akkad".

That titulature and administration did not change much from Sinsharishkun to Nabopolassar is hardly surprising as virtually the entirety of Nabopolassar's reign was spent fighting wars, with little time to devote to other matters.

In one of his clay cylinders, Nabopolassar used the titulature presented below.