Page:Herodotus and the Empires of the East.djvu/56

50 in honor of the god Nebo at Borsippa. All these facts point to the hypothesis that by Nitocris we must understand Nebuchadrezar. The difficulties which meet this supposition ought not to be overlooked. Nitocris is the mother of Labynetos the younger, in whose reign Cyrus destroyed Babylon. It is universally admitted that this Labynetos is identical with the Nabû-na'id (Nabonidus) of the inscriptions; but the father of this Nabû-na'id is not called Nabû-na'id, as we should infer from Herodotus, but Nabû-balaṭsu-iḳbi. We do not know the name of the wife of this Nabû-balaṭsu-iḳbi. According to Herodotus her name appears as Nitocris. Nabû-balaṭsu-iḳbi was never king, but only a Babylonian officer (Rab-mag); so we are confronted by the new question how Herodotus could call his wife a queen. Among the predecessors of Nabû-na'id, up to Nebuchadrezar, there is no one whose name is compounded with Nabu. The list reads: Nebuchadrezar, Evil-Merodach, Neriglissar, LabasiMarduk, Nabû-na'id. Consequently Herodotus received false statements from his voucher. This can be explained by the fact that the voucher was a Persian, and that the history of the Babylonian kings who followed Nebuchadrezar was very complicated, owing to continual revolutions and to repeated changes in rulers.

The Persian voucher named only the two prominent