page_title: Neo-Babylonian Empire
section_title: Military
hierarchical_section_title: Neo-Babylonian Empire / Government and military / Military
caption_attribution_description: English: Xerxes I tomb Babylonian soldier circa 470 BCE
context_page_description: The Neo-Babylonian Empire, also known as the Second Babylonian Empire and historically known as the Chaldean Empire, was the last of the great Mesopotamian empires to be ruled by monarchs native to Mesopotamia. Beginning with Nabopolassar's coronation as King of Babylon in 626 BC and being firmly established through the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in 612 BC, the Neo-Babylonian Empire would be short-lived, being conquered after less than a century by the Persian Achaemenid Empire in 539 BC.
  The defeat of the Assyrians and the transfer of empire to Babylon marked the first time the city, and southern Mesopotamia in general, had risen to dominate the Ancient Near East since the collapse of Hammurabi's Old Babylonian Empire nearly a thousand years prior. The period of Neo-Babylonian rule thus saw unprecedented economic and population growth throughout Babylonia and a renaissance of culture and artwork, with the Neo-Babylonian kings conducting massive building projects, especially in Babylon itself, and bringing back many elements from the previous two thousand or so years of Sumero-Akkadian culture.
context_section_description: For the Neo-Babylonian kings, war was a means to obtain tribute, plunder (in particular sought after materials such as various metals and quality wood) and prisoners of war which could be put to work as slaves in the temples. Like their predecessors, the Assyrians, the Neo-Babylonian kings also used deportation as a means of control. The Assyrians had displaced populations throughout their vast empire, but the practice under the Babylonian kings seems to have been more limited, only being used to establish new populations in Babylonia itself. Though royal inscriptions from the Neo-Babylonian period don't speak of acts of destruction and deportation in the same boastful way royal inscriptions from the Neo-Assyrian period do, this does not prove that the practice ceased or that the Babylonians were less brutal than the Assyrians. There is for instance evidence that the city Ashkelon was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar II in 604 BC.
  The troops of the Neo-Babylonian Empire would have been supplied by all parts of its complex administrative structure – from the various cities of Babylonia, from the provinces in Syria and Assyria, from the tribal confederations under Babylonian rule and from the various client kingdoms and city-states in the Levant. The most detailed sources preserved from the Neo-Babylonian period concerning the army are from the temples, which supplied a portion of the temple dependents (called širāku) as soldiers in times of war. These dependents were mostly farmers (ikkaru) but some were also shepherds, gardeners and craftsmen. The vast majority of these levies from the temples seved in the army as archers, equipped with bows, arrows (each archer was supplied with 40–60 arrows), bow-cases and daggers. The bows, made in both distinct Akkadian and Cimmerian styles, were manufactured and repaired at the temples by trained bowmakers and arrows and daggers were made by temple smiths. Inscriptions from the Ebabbara temple in Sippar suggests that temples could field as many as 14% of their dependents in times of crisis (for the Ebabbara this would account for 180 soldiers), but that the number was usually much lower (with the most common number of soldiers supplied by the Ebabbara being 50 soldiers). The archers fielded by these temples were divided into contingents or decuries (ešertu) by profession, each led by a commander (rab eširti). These commanders were in turn under the command of the rab qašti, who answered to the qīpu (a local high official). Cavalry and chariots were also supplied by the temples, but there are few known inscriptions detailing their equipment, relative number or leadership structure.
  The citizens of the cities in Babylonia were obliged to perform military service, often as archers, as a civil duty. These citizen militias were, just like the archers raised by the temples, divided and organized by profession. Citizens who served as soldiers were paid in silver, probably at a rate of 1 mina per year. The Neo-Babylonian army is also likely to have bolstered its numbers through conscripting soldiers from the tribal confederacies within the empire's territory and through hiring mercenaries (the presence of Greek mercenaries in the army of Nebuchadnezzar II is known from a poem). In times of war, the entire Babylonian army would have been assembled by an official called the dēkû ("mobilizer") sending word to the many rab qašti, who then organized all the ešertu. Soldiers on campaigns (which could last anywhere from three months to a full year) were supplied with ratios (including barley and sheep), silver as payment, salt, oil and water bottles and were also equipped with blankets, tents, sacks, shoes, jerkins and donkeys or horses.
caption: Babylonian soldier as represented on the tomb of the Achaemenid king Xerxes I, c. 480 BC.
exif: {"Image ImageWidth": "432", "Image ImageLength": "814", "Image DateTime": "2018:10:27 08:44:31", "Image Software": "PaintShop Pro 20,00", "Image InterColorProfile": "[]", "Image ExifOffset": "86", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "3414", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "5435", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "432", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "814"}