returned from these expeditions into the unknown only to plan fresh undertakings.  There remained nothing now to hinder him from marching against the Chaldaeans, and the discord prevailing at Babylon added to his chance of success.  Nabonidus’s passion for archaeology had in no way lessened since the opening of his reign.  The temple restorations prompted by it absorbed the bulk of his revenues.  He made excavations in the sub-structures of the most ancient sanctuaries, such as Larsam, Uruk, Uru, Sippar, and Nipur; and when his digging was rewarded by the discovery of cylinders placed there by his predecessors, his delight knew no bounds.  Such finds constituted the great events of his life, in comparison with which the political revolutions of Asia and Africa diminished in importance day by day.  It is difficult to tell whether this indifference to the weighty affairs of government was as complete as it appears to us at this distance of time.  Certain facts recorded in the official chronicles of that date go to prove that, except in name and external pomp, the king was a nonentity.  The real power lay in the hands of the nobles and generals, and Bel-sharuzur, the king’s son, directed affairs for them in his father’s name.  Nabonidus meanwhile resided in a state of inactivity at his palace of Tima, and it is possible that his condition may have really been that of a prisoner, for he never left Tima to go to Babylon, even on the days of great festivals, and his absence prevented the celebration of the higher rites of the national religion, with the procession of Bel and its accompanying ceremonies, for several consecutive years.  The people suffered from these quarrels in high places; not only the native Babylonians or Kalda, who were thus deprived of their accustomed spectacles, and whose piety was scandalised by these dissensions, but also the foreign races dispersed over Mesopotamia, from the confluence of the Khabur to the mouths of the Euphrates.  Too widely scattered or too weak to make an open declaration of their independence, their hopes and their apprehensions were alternately raised by the various reports of hostilities which reached their ears.  The news of the first victories of the Persians aroused in the exiled Jews the idea of speedy deliverance, and Cyrus clearly appeared to them as the hero chosen by Jahveh to reinstate them in the country, of their forefathers.

The number of the Jewish exiles, which perhaps at first had not exceeded 20,000* had largely increased in the half-century of their captivity, and even if numerically they were of no great importance, their social condition entitled them to be considered as the elite of all Israel.