from 3 - The major regions of the empire
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
SOURCES
Before embarking on an outline of the history of Babylonia from Cyrus II to Xerxes, it is important to present a brief survey and assessment of the available sources. The historiographic texts from Babylonia providing an outline of the main political events are very sparse, the major one being the Nabonidus Chronicle (ABC Chronicle 7) which covers the whole reign of Nabonidus, last king of Babylonia, the rise of Cyrus and his conquest of Babylonia. The main limitation of this text, apart from the ever-present problem of interpretation, is the destruction of most of the last column on the reverse of the tablet, which would have covered Cyrus' first year of rule. Although chronicles of this type were being composed throughout the Achaemenid period and the Seleucid era (as is clear from the fairly consistent and continuous compilation of astronomical diaries which very probably provided the material on which the ‘Babylonian Chronicle Series’ was based) and earlier ones continued to be copied, there are so far only three further chronicle texts available for the period of Persian rule: one of these is a brief text relating one event of the reign of Artaxerxes III (ABC Chronicle 9), while the second (if it really is a chronicle) contains a reference to Arses; both thus fall outside the chronological scope of this section. The other text (ABC Chronicle 8) is so broken and difficult to read that it is uncertain to which Persian ruler it should be assigned; although Xerxes is a possibility, the lamentable state of the text makes it impossible to draw any real historical information from it, though it proves the continuity of chronicle compilation in this period.
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