The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

138 THE GENTILE TIMES RECONSIDERED
The royal name was evidently given only for the first year of
each ruler. But as the immediate predecessor of Cyrus was
Nabonidus, “year 15”, “year 16”, and “year 17” clearly refer to his
reign. The inventory of the year following upon “year 17” ends
with the words, “year 1, Cyrus, King of Babylon, King of the
Lands” (line 39). The last lines of the entry for the fifth year of
inventory are damaged, and “year 2” (of Cyrus) can only be
understood as implied. 97
11) In ancient Mesopotamia, in the various temples the presence
of the deities was represented by their statues. In times of war,
when a city was taken, the temples were usually looted and the
divine statues were carried away as “captives” to the land of the
conquerors.
As such captures were seen by the citizens as an omen that the
gods had abandoned the city and called for its destruction, they
often tried to protect the statues by moving them to a safer place at
the approach of a military force.
This is what happened shortly before the Persian invasion of
northern Babylonia in 539 B.C.E., when according to the Nabonidus
Chronicle Nabonidus ordered a gathering of the gods of several cities
into Babylon. The same chronicle also tells that Cyrus, after the
fall of Babylon, returned the statues to their respective cities. 98
As discussed by Dr. Paul-Alain Beaulieu, there are several
documents from the archive of the Eanna temple of Uruk which
confirm that, in the seventeenth year of Nabonidus, the statue of
Ishtar (referred to in the documents as “Lady-of-Uruk” or “Lady
of the Eanna”) was brought upstream by boat on the river
Euphrates to Babylon. Further, these documents also show that the
regular offerings to this statue of Ishtar were not interrupted during
her temporary stay at Babylon. Cargoes of barley and other kinds
of foodstuff for her cult were sent from Uruk to Babylon.
One example of this is given by a tablet in the Yale Babylonian
Collection, YOS XIX:94, which is dated to the seventeenth year of
Nabonidus and records a deposition before the assembly of the
noblemen of Uruk:
(These are) the mar banî [noblemen] in whose presence Zeriya,
son of Ardiya, has thus spoken: Bazuzu, son of Ibni-Ishtar,
97 Ibid., p. 209. A transliteration of the tablet is given by Karl Oberhuber in his
Sumerische and akkadische Keilschriftdenkmäler des Archäologischen Museums zu
Florenz (= Innsbruck Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft, Sonderheft 8, Innsbruck,
1960), pp. 111–113.
98 A. K. Grayson, ABC (1975), pp. 109, 110.