ern Israel (601/600 b.c.) led to a defeat, forcing him to
return to Babylon to repair his armies and his chariots.
A period of peace until late 599 b.c. gave Nebuchadnez-
zar a chance to restore his army’s strength, leading to
another campaign that lasted for several years. During
this operation, he attacked the nomadic tribes of what
is now Saudi Arabia and, in 598, the city of Judah. In
597, he laid siege to the city of Jerusalem, capturing it in
March that same year and taking the city’s leader, king
Jehoiachin, to Babylon.
Fighting again in what is now Syria in 596 and 595
b.c., Nebuchadnezzar marched east to counter a poten-
tial invasion from tribes in what is now southwest Iran.
He easily put down a rebellion inside Babylon in 594,
and in 586 he put down a revolt against Babylonian rule
in Jerusalem, destroying that city. Thousands of Jerusa-
lem’s occupants were taken as slaves to Babylon, mark-
ing a period in history called the Babylonian captivity
(586–538 b.c.).
After this period, Nebuchadnezzar’s military record
is unclear. The Jewish historian Josephus Flavius relates
a 13-year siege of the city of Tyre, now in Lebanon,
and suggests that Nebuchadnezzar’s armies may have
invaded Egypt, which is explained in some cuneiform
tablets found by archaeologists. One tablet, in the Brit-
ish Museum in London, reads in part, “In the thirty-
seventh year of Nebuchadnezzar, king of the country
of Babylon, he went to Mitzraim [in Egypt] to make
war. Amasis, king of Egypt, collected [his forces] and
marched and spread abroad.” But Nebuchadnezzar was
not only a man of war: He sent perhaps the world’s first
“ambassador,” Nabonidus, to defuse a potential conflict
between the Lydians and the Medes in Asia Minor (now
Turkey). (Nabonidus later succeeded Nebuchadnezzar
as the head of Babylon and was its last leader when the
army of cyrus the great of Persia invaded and oc-
cupied the Babylonian Empire in 539 b.c.)
Nebuchadnezzar died about 561 b.c., approxi-
mately 83 or 84 years old. His legacy is mixed, as Hinke
explains:
Where is he to be placed in the dynasty? It is now
generally agreed that he did not occupy the first
place. A renewed examination... seems to have
placed that beyond doubt. On the other hand,
there is strong and even irresistible evidence toshow that he was actively engaged in freeing
his country from chaos and disorder such as we
know prevailed at the close of the Cassite period.
This appears first of all in the remarkable titles
that are attributed to him. He is called “the Sun
of his land who makes Prosperous His People,”
“the Protector of Boundary Stones who fixes
the Boundaries,” [and] “the King of Right who
Judges a Righteous Judgment.” The last two
statements clearly imply previous lawlessness and
disorder, which he brought to an end. The titles
applied to him in the new inscription from Nip-
pur point even more strongly to a change in dy-
nasty. It is said that “Ellil broke the weapon of his
[Ellil’s] enemy and laid the Scepter of his enemy
into [Nebuchadrezzar’s] hand.”References: Budge, Ernest A., Nebuchadnezzar, King of
Babylon. On Recently-discovered Inscriptions of this King
(London: Victoria Institute, 1884); Weisberg, David
B., Texts from the Time of Nebuchadnezzar (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980); Sack, Ronald Her-
bert, Images of Nebuchadnezzar: The Emergence of a Legend
(Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 2004);
Hinke, William J., A New Boundary Stone of Nebuchadrez-
zar I from Nippur, with a Concordance of Proper Names and
a Glossary of the Kuddurru Inscriptions thus far Published
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1907); Clarke,
Samuel, The Life and Death of Nebuchadnezzar, the Great,
the First Founder of the Babylonian Empire... (London:
Printed for William Miller, 1664).Nelson, Horatio, Viscount Nelson (1758–
1805) British admiral
Horatio Nelson was born in the parsonage house in
Burnham Thorpe, a village in Norfolk, England, on 29
September 1758, the sixth of 11 children of the rector
Edmund Nelson and Catherine Suckling Nelson. His
maternal great-grandmother was an elder sister of Sir
Robert Walpole, who had served as the first prime min-
ister of England from 1721 to 1742. Perhaps the great-
est influence on Nelson was his maternal uncle, Captain
Maurice Suckling, who served as the comptroller of the
British navy. When Catherine Nelson died, Captain nelSon, hoRAtio, viScount nelSon