Nebuchadnezzar's own inscriptions boast about buildings, not the wars that made him infamous
In Jewish history Nebuchadnezzar II is the king who destroyed Jerusalem and carried its people into exile. Yet his own inscriptions talk mostly about temples, palaces and the Ishtar Gate, so much so that historians once saw him chiefly as a builder. Oddly, his 43-year reign is among the least documented of his dynasty.
His Akkadian name, Nabu-kudurri-usur, means Nabu, watch over my heir; older scholarship read it as protect the boundary, but modern historians favour the heir meaning, and the more accurate English form is Nebuchadrezzar. He made his reputation before taking the throne, leading armies as Babylon and the Medes brought down the Assyrian Empire. At Carchemish in 605 BC he routed an Egyptian army under Pharaoh Necho II, securing Babylon's place as the leading power of the Near East. His father Nabopolassar died soon afterwards, and he became king.
The early reign went badly. A failed invasion of Egypt made vassals doubt Babylon's strength, and rebellion spread. After suppressing revolts in the east, he campaigned through the Levant in the 580s BC. In 587 BC he besieged and destroyed Jerusalem, ending the Kingdom of Judah and deporting much of its population, the episode remembered as the Babylonian captivity. Taking Tyre, the Phoenician port, along with further Levantine expeditions, revived Babylon's fortunes, and by his death in 562 BC he ranked among the world's most powerful rulers.
At home he transformed Babylon. He raised or rebuilt great religious structures, including the Esagila temple and the ziggurat Etemenanki, embellished palaces, and renovated the processional street and the Ishtar Gate.
Knowledge of his reign is patchy. Few cuneiform texts survive from 594 to 557 BC, a span covering most of his rule and those of his three successors. The Babylonian Chronicle confirms clashes with Judah, but other events, such as the destruction of Solomon's Temple in 586 BC, appear in no known cuneiform source. Historians therefore lean on much later Hebrew, Greek and Latin writings, which carry their own cultural slant but are free of the flattery expected from scribes serving the king, combined with Babylonian contract tablets and archaeology.
Source: Nebuchadnezzar II
