The Medo-Persian Empire.
By Alonzo T. Jones
“WITHDRAWING the greater part of his army from the vicinity of the city, and leaving behind him only certain corps of observation, Cyrus marched away up the course of the Euphrates for a certain distance, and there proceeded to make a vigorous use of the spade. His soldiers could now appreciate the value of the experience which they had gained by dispersing the Gyndes, and perceive that the summer and autumn of the preceding year had not been wasted. They dug a channel or channels from the Euphrates, by means of which a great portion of its water would be drawn off, and hoped in this way to render the natural course of the river fordable. [“A drought is upon her waters; and they shall be dried up.” “And I will dry up her sea, and make her springs dry.” Jer. 50 : 38; 51 : 36.] “When all was prepared, Cyrus determined to wait for the arrival of a certain festival during which the whole population were wont to engage in drinking and reveling [“Prepare the table, watch in the watchtower, eat, drink.” Isa. 21 : 5], and then silently in the dead of night to turn the water of the river and make his attack. [“Arise, ye princes, and anoint the shield.” Isa. 21 : 5.] All fell out as he hoped and wished. The festival was held with even greater pomp and splendor than usual; for Belshazzar, with the natural insolence of youth, to mark his contempt of the besieging army, abandoned himself wholly to the delights of the season, and himself entertained a thousand lords in his palace. [“Belshazzar the king made a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and drank wine before the thousand. Belshazzar, whiles he tasted the wine, commanded to bring the golden and silver vessels which his father [grandfather, margin] Nebuchadnezzar had taken out of the temple which was in Jerusalem; that the king and his princes, his wives and his concubines, might drink therein. . . . They drank wine, and praised the gods of gold, and of silver, of brass, of iron, of wood, and of stone.” Dan. 5 : 1-4. “For it is the land of graven images . . . and they are mad upon their idols.” Jer. 50 : 38. But, “The night of my pleasure hath he turned into fear unto me.” Isa. 21 : 4. “In the same hour came forth fingers of a man’s hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaster of the wall of the king’s palace; and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote.” Dan. 5 : 5. “My heart panted, fearfulness affrighted me; therefore are my loins filled with pain; pangs have taken hold upon me, . . . I was bowed down at the hearing of it; I was dismayed at the seeing of it.” Isa. 21 : 4, 3. “Then the king’s countenance was changed, and his thoughts troubled him, so that the joints of his loins were loosed, and his knees smote one against another.” Dan. 5 : 6. “Let now the astrologers, the stargazers, the monthly prognosticators, stand up, and save thee from these things that shall come upon thee . . . none shall save thee.” Isa. 47 : 13, 15. “The king cried aloud to bring in the astrologers, the Chaldeans, and the soothsayers . . . but they could not read the writing nor make known to the king the interpretation thereof. Then was king Belshazzar greatly troubled, and his countenance was changed in him, and his lords were astonished. Now the queen, by reason of the words of the king and his lords, came into the banquet house; and the queen spake and said, . . . There is a man in thy kingdom, in whom is the spirit of the holy gods; . . . now let Daniel be called, and he will show the interpretation. Then was Daniel brought in before the king. . . . Then Daniel answered and said before the king, Thou . . . hast lifted up thyself against the Lord of Heaven; and they have brought the vessels of his house before thee, and thou and thy lords, thy wives and thy concubines, have drunk wine in them; and thou hast praised the gods of silver, and gold, of brass, iron, wood, and stone, which see not, nor hear, nor know; and the God in whose hand thy breath is, and whose are all thy ways, hast thou not glorified; then was the part of the hand sent from him; and this writing was written. And this is the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UTHARSIN. This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE; God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it. TEKEL; Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting. PERES; Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.” Dan. 5 : 7-28.] “Elsewhere the rest of the population was occupied in feasting and dancing. Drunken riot and mad excitement held possession of the town; the siege was forgotten; ordinary precautions were neglected. Following the example of their king, the Babylonians gave themselves up for the night to orgies in which religious frenzy and drunken excess formed a strange and revolting medley.” [“And I will make drunk her princes, and her wise men, her captains, and her rulers, and her mighty men; and they shall sleep a perpetual sleep, and not wake, saith the King, whose name is the Lord of Hosts.” “In their heat I will make their feasts, and I will make them drunken, that they may rejoice, and sleep a perpetual sleep, and not wake, saith the Lord.” Jer. 51 : 57, 39.]—Seven Great Monarchies, Fourth Mon., chap. 8, par. 47-51. “We are told in Daniel that Babylon was captured on the night of a great feast to the idol gods, at which the wives and concubines joined in a wild revelry. But the women were not in the habit of feasting with men—how is this? An account, by Cyrus himself, of his capture of Babylon, was dug up only three or four years ago. In it he declares that Babylon was captured ‘without fighting,’ on the fourteenth day of the month Tammuz. Now the month Tammuz was named in honor of the god Tammuz, the Babylonian Adonis, who married their Venus or Ishtar; and the fourteenth of Tammuz was the regular time to celebrate their union, with lascivious orgies. On this day of all others, the women took part in the horrible rites; and it was in this feast of king, princes, wives, and concubines that Babylon was taken and Belshazzar slain. The Bible is here fully and wonderfully corroborated.”—Wm. Hayes Ward, D. D., in Sunday-School Times, Vol. 25, No. 48, pp. 659, 660. “Meanwhile, outside the city, in silence and darkness, the Persians watched at the two points where the Euphrates entered and left the walls. [“Set up the watchmen, prepare the liers in wait.” Jer. 51 : 12, margin.] Anxiously they noted the gradual sinking of the water in the river-bed; still more anxiously they watched to see if those within the walls would observe the suspicious circumstance and sound an alarm through the town. Should such an alarm be given, all their labors would be lost. If when they entered the river-bed, they found the river-walls manned and the river-gates fast-locked, they would be indeed ‘caught in a trap.’ Enfiladed on both sides by the enemy whom they could neither see nor reach, they would be overwhelmed and destroyed by his missiles before they could succeed in making their escape. But, as they watched, no sounds of alarm reached them—only a confused noise of revel and riot, which showed that the unhappy townsmen were quite unconscious of the approach of danger. [“Therefore shall evil come upon thee; thou shalt not know from whence it riseth; and mischief shall fall upon thee; thou shalt not be able to put it off, and desolation shall come upon thee suddenly, which thou shalt not know.” Isa. 47 : 11.] “At last shadowy forms began to emerge from the obscurity of the deep river-bed, and on the landing-places opposite the river-gates clusters of men grew into solid columns. [“The Lord of hosts hath sworn by himself, saying, Surely I will fill thee with men, as with caterpillars; and they shall lift up a shout against thee.” Jer. 51 : 14.] The undefended gateways were seized; a war-shout was raised; the alarm was spread, and swift runners started off to ‘show the king of Babylon that his city was taken at one end.’ [“One post shall run to meet another, and one messenger to meet another, to show the king of Babylon that his city is taken at one end, and that the passages are stopped, and the reeds they have burned with fire, and the men of war are affrighted.” Jer. 51 : 31, 32.] “In the darkness and confusion of the night a terrible massacre ensued. [“Against him that bendeth let the archer bend his bow, and against him that lifteth himself up in his brigandine [coat of mail]; and spare not her young men; destroy ye utterly all her host. Thus the slain shall fall in the land of the Chaldeans, and they that are thrust through in the streets.” “Therefore shall her young men fall in the streets, and all her men of war shall be cut off in that day, saith the Lord.” Jer. 51 : 3, 4; 50 : 30.] The drunken revelers could make no resistance. [“The mighty men of Babylon have forbore to fight, they have remained in their holds; their might hath failed; they became as women; they have burned her dwelling places; her bars are broken.” Jer. 51 : 30.] “The king, paralyzed with fear at the awful hand-writing upon the wall, which too late had warned him of his peril, could do nothing even to check the progress of the assailants who carried all before them everywhere. Bursting into the palace, a band of Persians made their way to the presence of the monarch, and slew him on the scene of his impious revelry. [“In that night was Belshazzar the king of the Chaldeans slain.” Dan. 5 : 36.] Other bands carried fire and sword through the town. [“A sword is upon the Chaldeans, saith the Lord, and upon the inhabitants of Babylon, and upon her princes, and upon her wise men. A sword is upon the liars; and they shall dote; a sword is upon her mighty men; and they shall be dismayed. A sword is upon their horses, and upon their chariots, and upon all the mingled people that are in the midst of her; and they shall become as women.” “Thus saith the Lord of hosts; The broad walls of Babylon shall be utterly broken, and her high gates shall be burned with fire; and the people shall labor in vain, and the folk in the fire, and they shall be weary.” Jer. 50 : 35-37; 51 : 58.] When the morning came, Cyrus found himself undisputed master of the city, which if it had not despised his efforts might with the greatest ease have baffled them.” [“Thus saith the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden, to subdue nations before him; and I will loose the loins of kings, to open before him the two-leaved gates; and the gates shall not be shut.” Isa. 45 : 1.] “Thus perished the Babylonian Empire.” [“And it shall be, when thou hast made an end of reading this book, that thou shalt bind a stone to it, and cast it into the midst of Euphrates; and thou shalt say, Thus shall Babylon sink, and shalt not rise from the evil that I will bring upon her; and they shall be weary. Thus far are the words of Jeremiah.” Jer. 51 : 63, 64.]—Seven Great Monarchies, Fourth Mon., chap. 8, par. 52-55. “The fall of Babylon was also the fall of an ancient, widely spread, and deeply venerated religious system. Not, of course, that the religion suddenly disappeared or ceased to have votaries, but that, from a dominant system, supported by all the resources of the State, and enforced by the civil power over a wide extent of territory, it became simply one of the many of the tolerated beliefs, exposed to frequent rebuffs and insults, and at all times overshadowed by a new and rival system—the comparatively549pure creed of Zoroastrianism. The conquest of Babylon by Persia was, practically, if not the death-blow, at least a severe wound, to the sensuous idol-worship which had for more than twenty centuries been the almost universal religion in the countries between the Mediterranean and the Zagros Mountain Range. The religion never recovered itself—was never reinstated. It survived a longer or a shorter time, in places. To a slight extent it corrupted Zoroastrianism; but on the whole, from the date of the fall of Babylon it declined. Bel bowed down; Nebo stooped [Isa. 46 : 1]; Merodach was broken in pieces [Jer. 50 : 2]. Judgment was done upon the Babylonian graven images; and the system, of which they formed a necessary part, having once fallen from its proud pre-eminence, gradually decayed and vanished. [“Babylon is fallen, is fallen; and all the graven images of her gods hath he broken unto the ground. O my threshing, and the corn of my floor; that which I have heard of the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, have I declared unto you.” Isa. 21 : 9, 10.]—Id., Fifth Mon., chap. 7, par. 27. “So long as Babylon, ‘the glory of kingdoms,’ ‘the praise of the whole earth,’ retained her independence, with her vast buildings, her prestige of antiquity, her wealth, her learning, her ancient and grand religious system, she could scarcely fail to be in the eyes of her neighbors the first power in the world, if not in mere strength, yet in honor, dignity, and reputation. Haughty and contemptuous herself to the very last, she naturally imposed on men’s minds, alike by her past history and her present pretensions; nor was it possible for the Persian monarch to feel that he stood before his subjects as indisputably the foremost man upon the earth until he had humbled in the dust the pride and arrogance of Babylon. But, with the fall of the great city, the whole fabric of Semitic greatness was shattered. Babylon became ‘an astonishment and a hissing’—all her prestige vanished—and Persia stepped manifestly into the place, which Assyria had occupied for so many centuries, of absolute and unrivaled mistress of Western Asia.”—Id., par. 26. The geographical extent of the Fifth Monarchy [the Medo-Persian Empire] was far greater than that of any one of the four [Chaldea, Assyria, Babylon, and Media alone] which had preceded it. . . . The dominions of the Persian kings covered a space fifty-six degrees [about 3,878 miles] long, and in places more than twenty [about 1,400 miles] wide. The boundaries of their empire were the desert of Thibet, the Sutlej and the Indus [rivers], on the east; the Indian Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Arabian and Nubian Deserts, on the south; on the west, the Greater Syrtis, the Mediterranean [and] the Ægean [seas], and the Strymon River [the Kara-Soo, of European Turkey]; on the north the [river] Danube, the Black Sea, the Caucasus [mountains], the Caspian [sea], and the Jaxartes [the present Syr Daria River]. Within these limits lay a territory, the extent of which from east to west was little less than 3,000 [4,000] miles, while its width varied between 500 and 1,500 miles. Its entire area was probably not less than two millions of square miles, or more than half that of modern Europe. It was thus at least eight times as large as the Babylonian Empire at its greatest extent.—Id., chap. 1, par. 1. The Persian Empire continued to the defeat of Darius Codomannus by Alexander the Great, near Arbela, B. C. 331, October. A. T. J.