xlv. 1-4.

** Second Isaiah, in Isa. xlvi. 1, 2.

*** Second Isaiah, in Isa. xlvii. 1-5.

The task which Cyrus had undertaken was not so difficult as we might
imagine. Not only was he hailed with delight by the strangers who
thronged Babylonia, but the Babylonians themselves were weary of their
king, and the majority of them were ready to welcome the Persian who
would rid them of him, as in old days they hailed the Assyrian kings who
delivered them from their Chaldaean lords. It is possible that towards
the end of his reign Nabonidus partly resumed the supreme power;* but
anxious for the future, and depending but little on human help, he had
sought a more powerful aid at the hands of the gods. He had apparently
revived some of the old forgotten cults, and had applied to their use
revenues which impoverished the endowment of the prevalent worship of
his own time. As he felt the growing danger approach, he remembered
those towns of secondary grade--Uru, Uruk, Larsam, and Eridu--all
of which, lying outside Nebuchadrezzar's scheme of defence, would be
sacrificed in the case of an invasion: he had therefore brought away
from them the most venerated statues, those in which the spirit of the
divinity was more particularly pleased to dwell, and had shut them up in
the capital, within the security of its triple rampart.**

* This seems to follow from the part which he plays in the
final crisis, as told in the _Cylinder of Cyrus_ and in the
_Annals_.

** The chronicler adds that the gods of Sippar, Kutha, and
Borsippa were not taken to Babylon; and indeed, these cities
being included within the lines of defence of the great
city, their gods were as well defended from the enemy as if
they had been in Babylon itself.

This attempt to concentrate the divine powers, accentuating as it did
the supremacy of Bel-Marduk over his compeers, was doubtless flattering
to his pride and that of his priests, but was ill received by the rest
of the sacerdotal class and by the populace. All these divine guests had
not only to be lodged, but required to be watched over, decked, fed, and
feted, together with their respective temple retinues; and the prestige
and honour of the local Bel, as well as his revenues, were likely to
suffer in consequence. The clamour of the gods in the celestial heights
soon re-echoed throughout the land; the divinities complained of their
sojourn at Babylon as of a