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Sixth-Century BC Babylonian Building Inscription Naming Belshazzar

Nabonidus Cylinder

Also called Nabonidus Cylinders, Cylinder of Nabonidus

A clay foundation cylinder from the ziggurat at Ur in which the last king of Babylon prays for himself and for "Belshazzar, (my) first-born son" — the man who, until the nineteenth century, was known only from the book of Daniel.

Object
Clay foundation cylinder inscribed in Akkadian cuneiform
Found at
The ziggurat at Ur (Tell el-Muqayyar), southern Iraq
Found in
1854
Found by
John George Taylor, British vice-consul at Basra, excavating for the British Museum. He is frequently miscited as "J. E. Taylor"
Dates from
Reign of Nabonidus, 556-539 BC
Now held at
British Museum, London (BM 91125)

The Problem Daniel 5 Used to Have

Daniel 5 tells of a feast held by Belshazzar, king of Babylon, interrupted by a hand writing on the wall, and ending that same night with the king dead and the city in Persian hands. For a long time this was one of the standard examples of the Bible getting history wrong. Greek and Roman historians named the last king of Babylon as Nabonidus, and none of them had ever heard of a Belshazzar. Daniel also has Belshazzar offer Daniel "the third ruler in the kingdom" as a reward, which looked like an odd way to describe second place.

Then the cuneiform record began to be read. Clay cylinders inscribed for Nabonidus, buried in the fabric of temples he restored, turned up at Ur and elsewhere from the 1850s onward. The one that matters here came out of the ziggurat at Ur in 1854, recovered by J. G. Taylor, the British vice-consul at Basra — the same man who later found the Kurkh Monolith, and one whose initials are very often miscited as J. E. — and it closes with a prayer asking the moon god to preserve the king, and then, in the same breath: "Moreover, with regard to Belshazzar, (my) first-born son, my own offspring, have the fear of your great divinity placed in his heart so that he does not commit a(ny) sin." Belshazzar was real, and he was Nabonidus's son. It is worth being precise about which cylinder this is, because popular accounts often attach the Belshazzar prayer to Nabonidus's better-known cylinder from Sippar; that one is a different inscription and does not mention him.

Regent While the King Was Away

Other Babylonian documents filled in the rest. Nabonidus spent roughly a decade of his reign at Tayma in Arabia, far from his capital, and administrative texts show that he entrusted the kingship — the practical government of Babylon — to his son during that absence. That accounts for the detail that looked like a mistake: with Nabonidus first and Belshazzar acting second, the highest honour actually in Belshazzar's gift was third place.

This is a genuinely strong case, and it is stronger for being stated exactly. A book that could name a co-regent no classical historian remembered, and get the peculiar rank right, is showing knowledge of Babylonian court arrangements that had been lost for two thousand years and were recovered only from clay.

What It Still Does Not Settle

Two caveats belong in the same paragraph as the case. First, the Babylonian texts never call Belshazzar "king"; he is the king's son exercising kingship, which is not quite the same thing, and Daniel's usage is best read as reflecting practical reality rather than Babylonian protocol. Second, Daniel 5 repeatedly calls Nebuchadnezzar Belshazzar's "father." Nabonidus was not descended from Nebuchadnezzar. The usual explanation — that Aramaic and Hebrew use father and son for predecessor and successor, as Assyrian scribes did for Jehu "son of Omri" — is reasonable and widely accepted, and it is still an explanation rather than a confirmation.

The wider question of when the book of Daniel was written is not settled by any of this, and readers should not be told that it is. Scholars who date the book to the second century BC and scholars who date it to the sixth both have to account for the Belshazzar material, and they do so differently. What the cylinders establish is narrower and quite solid: a figure the book names, whom no other surviving ancient historian remembered, existed exactly as it says.

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