When did Cyrus take Babylon?

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Accepted Answer

On 12 October 539 BC, by the Babylonian chronicle's own dating: on the sixteenth day of the month Tishri Ugbaru, governor of Gutium, and the army of Cyrus entered Babylon without a battle, and Cyrus himself came into the city seventeen days later, on 29 October. The map stands at Babylon in 539 BC. Babylon lies about 870 km east of Jerusalem in a straight line. Daniel sets the fall in a single night. Belshazzar “made a great feast to a thousand of his lords”, drank from the vessels of the Temple, and saw the hand write on the wall: “PERES; Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.” “In that night was Belshazzar the king of the Chaldeans slain. And Darius the Median took the kingdom.” The cuneiform records bear out the frame: Belshazzar was the son of Nabonidus, the last king, who left him in charge of Babylon for the ten years he spent at Tema in Arabia, which is why Belshazzar could offer Daniel only the third place in the kingdom; Herodotus and Xenophon did not know his name. “Darius the Median”, who is in no other record, is taken by some for Gubaru the governor, by others for Cyrus himself under another name, and by many critics for a confusion with the later Darius I; the question is open. The Nabonidus Chronicle says that Cyrus beat the Babylonians at Opis on the Tigris, took Sippar without fighting on the fourteenth of Tishri, that Nabonidus fled, and that two days later Ugbaru's troops entered Babylon; Nabonidus was captured on his return, and the Cyrus Cylinder claims that Marduk himself let the king in without battle. Herodotus and Xenophon add that the Persians came in along the bed of the diverted Euphrates during a festival, a story many doubt. Isaiah had named Cyrus as the Lord's “shepherd” and “his anointed” who would be given “the treasures of darkness” and before whom the Lord would “break in pieces the gates of brass”; Jeremiah foretold that “the LORD hath raised up the spirit of the kings of the Medes” against Babylon. Cyrus's first year as king of Babylon began in the spring of 538 BC: that is the “first year of Cyrus” of Ezra's decree freeing the exiles.