in the brief words of Daniel :-"In that night was Belshazzar, the King of the Chaldæans, slain."* His father, as we have said, submitted to Cyrus, who gave him a sort of principality in Carmania, where he seems to have ended his days in peace. Thus fell the empire of Babylon in B.C. 538. Having adhered to the Book of Daniel as the highest authority for these events, we may at this point meet the difficulty which has arisen respecting his "Darius the Median, the son of Ahasuerus," who "took the kingdom," at the age of seventy-two, immediately on the death of Belshazzar,† and who is seen exercising the royal authority, not only at Babylon, but thence over the 120 provinces of the Medo-Persian Empire; while, in another passage, he is said to have been "made king over the realm of the Chaldæans," a phrase which might be taken to imply a more limited authority.§ All scholars are now agreed in rejecting the attempt to identify Darius with a supposed Cyaxares II., who appears in the Cyropædia of Xenophon as the son of Astyages, -Astyages himself being, by all trustworthy accounts, the last king of Media, by whose dethronement the empire passed to Cyrus and the Persians. The Cyaxares of Xenophon is not an historical personage at all, but a character introduced into the romance-for such the Cyropædia really is—as a foil to the virtues attributed to Cyrus. All our knowledge of the revolution effected in the MedoPersian empire concurs to make it a violent transfer of the supremacy from the Medes under Astyages to the Persians under Cyrus. Cyrus alone effects the capture of Babylon, at the head of the Medo-Persian forces; and no place is left for the intermediate rule of Cyaxares, as a king of the Medes. But for "Darius, the son of Ahasuerus," a royal prince "of the seed of the Medes," an appropriate place may be found, as a viceroy, who "was made king over the realm of the Chaldæans" by Cyrus, after the capture of Babylon. How far he may have exercised a viceregal authority over the whole empire, while Cyrus was engaged in distant wars, is perhaps hardly worth discussing on the scanty information we possess. Nothing could be more natural than for the Jewish captives at Babylon to regard such a viceroy as a king; and hence they date the years of Cyrus from the time when this Daniel v. 30. + Daniel v. 31. Daniel vi. It scarcely follows, however, as a matter of absolute certainty, that the 120 princes imply 120 provinces; but such is the most natural sense. § Daniel ix. 1. B.C. 538.] DARIUS THE MEDIAN. 239 state of the government appears to have come to an end by the death of Darius, in B.C. 536.* The further question, whether any light can be thrown on the identity of Darius, though not essential for the solution of the difficulty, is one of no small interest. He is in fact identified, by the chronographer Syncellus, and in the apocryphal supplement to the Book of Daniel,† with the dethroned king Astyages himself. The Darius of Daniel is evidently a Median of the highest rank, and probably of royal birth. The name of his father, Ahasuerus (Achashverosh) is certainly identical with the Median name Cyaxares, which was borne by the father of Astyages. The position to which Cyrus raised him at Babylon accords with the respect which Herodotus tells us that Cyrus paid to Astyages, and with the custom of the Persians. But more than this: we can easily understand, what Herodotus was not sufficiently acquainted with Oriental usage to perceive, that Cyrus, as the grandson of Astyages, and imbued by the Persian discipline with reverence for all forms of duty and authority, may have professed, during the life of Astyages, to yield the royal state to him, though himself really governing. If so, the position of Darius was above that of a mere viceroy; and no occasion is left for wonder that the Jews viewed him as the king, and Cyrus as his successor. The Chaldæans, perhaps understanding better the real relation of Darius to Cyrus, omit him from their list of kings. The identification is not free from further difficulties, too minute to be discussed here; but it is now very generally accepted. § After the Persian conquest, Babylonia became a province of the empire, and the city was one of the royal residences, ranking as the second in the kingdom. It was from Babylon that Cyrus issued his decree for the return of the captive Jews; and his successors resided there for a great portion of the year. It was long, however, before the Chaldæans submitted finally to the new dynasty. Darius Hystaspis had twice to suppress a revolt of Babylon, under a leader who claimed to be the son of Nabonadius. This is reckoned as th first year of Cyrus, in which he issued his edict for the return of the Jews. 2 Chron. xxxvi. 22; Ezra i. 1; comp. Daniel i. 21. In the part entitled "Bel and the Dragon." This seems implied in the phrase "of the seed of the Medes." § This view was put for h by the present writer in the Biblical Review, for 1845, No. 1. It is maintained by Professor Rawlinson and other recent historians. Marcus Niebhur, in his Geschichte Assurs und Babels, while identifying Astyages with Darius, makes two conquests of Babylon-a Median and a Persian; the former by Astyages, and the latter by Cyrus; but this is altogether improbable. On the first of these occasions, two great battles were fought; and on both the city was besieged and taken.* Another revolt, under Xerxes, involved another siege and capture. The whole interest of Persian history, from Darius to Alexander, being centred in its external relations to the West, we hear nothing more of Babylon till it fell, as Daniel had predicted, under the power of the Macedonian. It was at Babylon that Alexander held his court after his return from India (B.c. 324); and the importance still maintained there by the priestly caste of the Chaldæans is indicated by those unheeded warnings which his own imprudence so soon verified. His death was hastened by his schemes for making Babylon the capital of his empire, and restoring to the country its natural advantages. Intending to repair the system of canals, he visited the lower course of the Euphrates, and in its marshes he caught the fever which his excess rendered fatal (B.C. 323). His plans perished with him. The Seleucida, who succeeded to the eastern part of his empire, fixed their capital at Antioch in Syria; while the population of Babylon removed, in great part, to the new city of Seleucia on the Tigris. The great river, once the pride and ornament of the city, no longer restrained and regulated by embankments and canals, wandered over the plain, from which the houses fast disappeared, and created pestiferous marshes. The brick palaces and temples, crumbling into decay, literally "became heaps, a dwelling-place for dragons," † and the haunt of wild beasts. The desolation has been ever increasing down to our own age, under the conjoint influence of misgovernment and neglect. By a strange recurrence in the cycle of history, the land in which the Chaldæans first planted civilization amidst rude Turanian races, and defended it against the Arabs of the desert, has long since fallen under the nominal government of the Turanian Turks, and become the real possession of the wandering Arabs. All the primeval cities, of which we have spoken, shared the fate of Babylon; but her site is marked by a preeminence of desolation. When the traveller has exhausted his powers of language in expressing the sadness of gloom inspired by the scene, he has but re-echoed the exact descriptions of the Hebrew prophets. Let but the following examples be placed side by side:-" And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldee's excellency, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah. It shall never be inhabited, neither shall it be dwelt * We learn this from the statement of Darius himself, in the inscription of Behistun. + Jer. li. 37. THE DESOLATION OF BABYLON. 241 in from generation to generation; neither shall the Arabian pitch tent there; neither shall the shepherds make their fold there. But wild beasts of the desert shall lie there; and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there. And the wild beasts of the islands shall cry in their desolate houses, and dragons in their pleasant palaces: and her time is near to come, and her days shall not be prolonged."* Thus far the Hebrew prophet; now let us hear the modern traveller: "Besides the great mound, other shapeless heaps of rubbish cover for many an acre the face of the land. The lofty banks of ancient canals fret the country like natural ridges of hills. Some have been long choked with sand; others still carry the waters of the river to distant villages and palm-groves. On all sides fragments of glass, marble, pottery, and inscribed brick, are mingled with that peculiar nitrous and blanched soil, which, bred from the remains of ancient habitations, checks or destroys vegetation, and renders the site of Babylon a naked and hideous waste. Owls start from the scanty thickets, and the foul jackal skulks through the furrows." t "Various ranges of smaller mounds fill up the intervening space to the eastern angle of the walls. The pyramidal mass of El-Heimar, far distant in the same direction, and the still more extraordinary pile of the Birs-Nimrud in the south-west, across the Euphrates, rise from the surrounding plain like two mighty tumuli, designed to mark the end of departed greatness. Midway between them the river Euphrates, wending her silent course towards the sea, is lost amid the extensive date-groves which conceal from sight the little Arab town of Hillah. All else around is a blank waste, recalling the words of Jeremiah: 'Her cities are a desolation, a dry land and a wilderness, a land wherein no man dwelleth, neither doth any son of man pass thereby.""‡ To these descriptions we may well add the poetic view of the same scene, not merely for its vivid beauty, but for its insight into one of the most striking lessons of Divine Providence : "Slumber is there, but not of rest; The famish'd hawk has found; VOL. I. * Isaiah xiii. 19-22: comp. Jer. 1. and li. R "What shapeless form, half lost on high,* And watch, from Babel's crumbling heap "With half-closed eye a lion there "But where are now his eagle wings, From half the nations, till they own "Quench'd is the golden statue's ray; + "Divided thence, through every age, Mount up their heaven-assailing cries In the frustration of the plans of the Babel builders, in the fall of Nineveh, in the desolation of Babylon, we may see more even than the fulfilment of prophecy. They are lasting witnesses to the great plans of Divine Providence in reference to the empires of the world. Raised up by the desires of men who aimed at godlike power upon earth, and permitted to tyrannize over the nations which had forsaken the King of Heaven,-chastizing by self-will and brute force the self-willed weakness of a race that had forgotten God, they fell successively under the sentence, which the handwriting on the wall passed upon Belshazzar, and which history repeats against every despotism to the end of time: "Thou art weighed in the balances and found wanting:"-wanting in fulfilling * The allusion is to a group of lions seen by Sir R. K. Porter on the summit of the Birs-Nimrud. + Daniel vii. 4. Daniel ii., iii. $ Keble, Christian Year. |