Harran Stela

The Harran Stela is a cuneiform text that Nabonidus, king of Babylonia, commissioned in order to relate his restoration of the Ehulhul Temple of the moon-god Sin. There are two copies extant; probably many more copies were made, but after the fall of Babylon the Persians obliterated records like this that were favorable to Nabonidus, replacing them with texts such as the Nabonidus Chronicle the Dream Text of Nabonidus that pretended to be from Nabonidus, but were rewritten in such a way to disparage Nabonidus and glorify Cyrus. The importance of the Stela therefore is that it narrates events from a perspective different from the Persian narrative of events related to the final years of the Neo-Babylonian kingdom.

Background of the Stela

The Harran Stela was composed in the fourteenth or fifteenth year of Nabonidus, King of Babylon, i.e. 542 to 540 BC, commemorating his restoration of the temple at Ehulhul. Nabonidus relates how hostile kings were trying to be reconciled with him. The kings are named as "the king of Egypt, the Medes and the land of the Arabs, all the hostile kings". The significance of this lies in its date of composition, just one to three years before Nabonidus lost his kingdom to the Medes and Persians. It was also some 13 or 14 years after Cyrus had supposedly subjugated the Medes and became ruler of the combined empire of the Persians and Medes in 559 B.C. according to Herodotus and the consensus of modern historians who follow him. Nabonidus, however, makes no mention of the Persians who soon would be the leaders of those who captured his capital. This is consistent with Xenophon’s picture of the Persians still being the subordinate partner in the Medo-Persian confederacy at the time, with Cyrus the junior sovereign under his uncle, Cyaxares II king of Media. Nowhere in any surviving inscription is Cyrus called the king of Media, unless it is maintained that the present inscription is interpreted that way; this would be in contradiction to other sources where Cyrus is referred to "king of Anshan", "king of Persia", "the great king" and similar titles. The Harran Stela therefore is evidence that just shortly before the fall of Babylon the king of the Medes, whose name is not given, not only existed, but was considered a more important enemy of the Babylonians than Cyrus and the Persians. All this is consistent with Xenophon’s history of Cyrus in the Cyropaedia, but in contradiction to the accounts in Herodotus, followed by many modern historians, which portray the Persians, with the Medes subjugated under them, as the dominant force challenging Nabonidus for several years before the capture of Babylon.

Importance of the Stela

The Stela, coming as it does from a source independent of the Persian takeover of Babylon, and hence not influenced by the Persian view of history, is an important and independent witness bearing on the question of whether the Medes played an important, even dominant, role in the capture of Babylon in 539 BC. When the other cuneiform texts from the time or not long after, namely the Cyrus Cylinder, the Verse Account of Nabonidus, and the Dream Text of Nabonidus, were deciphered starting in the late 19th century, it became apparent that these texts omitted virtually all references to the Medes as responsible for the demise of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. The general picture they presented, starting with the Cyrus Cylinder, was that Cyrus, a Persian, was Marduk’s choice to take over the city rather peacefully, and with the approbation of the people in the city, because Nabonidus had forsaken the worship of Marduk. It was necessary in this propaganda to minimize the role of the Medes because, as the Harran Stela shows, the Medes were a primary hated enemy in the years immediately preceding the fall of Babylon. Therefore the Persian rewrite of history minimized and even omitted any mention of the Medes, contrary to the express statement of Nabonidus that he counted the Medes as a principal enemy in the years immediately preceding the end of his kingship. As king, he surely would have known who were his principal enemies, and the fact that he mentions the Medes, not the Persians, shows that at that time the Persians were still under the suzerainty of the Medes. This is in keeping with Xenophon’s portrayal of affairs in the Cyropaedia. When the other cuneiform texts that presented the Persian rewrite were first deciphered, this was taken as “proof” that Xenophon’s portrayal of the situation was wrong and that of Herodotus (which followed the Persian narrative) was correct. Since the Persian narrative minimized or eliminated the role of the Medians in the fall of Babylon, it was also necessary to omit references to the king of the Medes who had authority over Cyrus when the troops of Cyrus took the city. This is similar to the omission of Belshazzar in the Persian propaganda texts, so that his name was lost for many centuries, skeptics of the Bible claiming there was no such person, until some texts were found with his name in the 1860s and later.

More recent scholarship on the Persian cuneiform texts

Some recent scholarship has recognized the propagandistic nature of the cuneiform texts that originated in the time of Cyrus and his successors. Thus Steven Hirsch wrote: “The real Cyrus was a master of propaganda, as can be seen from the Cyrus Cylinder, the Babylonian verse chronicle of Nabonidus’ fall, and the stories of Cyrus’ merciful treatment of conquered kings, all no doubt propagated with Cyrus’ encouragement or active participation.” Similarly, R. J. van der Spek: “Cyrus was very successful in his propaganda and modern historiography is still influenced by it.” That Cyrus was a master of propaganda should not be surprising to anyone reading the Cyropaedia, where Xenophon portrays Cyrus’s father Cambyses advising his son that, if he is to succeed as a general and statesman, he “must be designing and cunning, wily and deceitful, a thief and a robber . . .” (1.6.27).

Unfortunately, that deceit has worked only too well in expunging from history the part that the Medes, and their king Cyaxares II, played in the campaigns that led to the fall of Babylon in 539 BC to the combined forces of the Medes, Persians, and their allies. For many years the propaganda caused Belshazzar, as portrayed in the Book of Daniel, to be considered unhistorical. Some modern scholars are now pointing out that apparently the same fate has happened to the last king of the Medians, Cyrus’s uncle known in Xenophon as Cyaxares II and in the book of Daniel as “Darius the Mede.”

Resources

• [1]Steven D. Anderson, Darius the Mede: A Reappraisal (Steven D. Anderson: Grand Rapids, 2014).
• [2]Xenophon, Cyropaedia: the education of Cyrus, translated by Henry Graham Dakyns and revised by F.M. Stawell.
• [3]Translation of the Cyrus Cylinder.
• J. B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (3rd ed.; Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969).
• [4] Paul-Alain Beaulieu, The Reign of Nabonidus, King of Babylon 556–539 B.C. (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1989).