BELSHAZZAR, a Babylonian general of the 6th century B.C. Until the decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions, he was known only from the book of Daniel (v. 2, II, 13, 18) and its reproduction in Josephus, where he is represented as the son of Nebuchadrezzar and the last king of Babylon. His identification with Nabonidos, the last Babylonian king according to the native historian Berossus, goes back to Josephus. In 1854 Sir H. C. Rawlinson discovered the name of Bel-sarra-uzur—"O Bel, defend the king"—in an inscription belonging to the first year of Nabonidos which had been discovered in the ruins of the temple of the Moon-god at Muqayyar or Ur. Here Nabonidos calls him his "first-born son." In the contracts and similar docu ments there are frequent references to Belshazzar, who is some times entitled simply "the son of the king." He was never king himself, nor was he son of Nebuchadrezzar. Indeed his father Nabonidos (Nabunaid), the son of Nabu baladsu-iqhi, was not related to the family of Nebuchadrezzar and owed his accession to the throne to a palace revolution. Belshazzar took command of the army, living with it in the camp near Sippara, and the measures of defence organized against the invasion of Cyrus appear to have been due to him. Hence Jewish tradition substituted him for his less known father, and rightly concluded that his death marked the fall of the Babylonian monarchy. According to the Babylonian Chronicle, from the 7th year of Nabonidos (548 B.c.) onwards "the son of the king" was with the army in Akkad, that is, in the close neighbourhood of Sippara. At an earlier period there is frequent mention of his trading transactions, which were carried out through his house steward or agent. Thus in 545 B.C. he lent 20 manehs of silver to a private individual, a Persian by race, on the security of the property of the latter.
The legends of Belshazzar's feast and of the siege and capture of Babylon by Cyrus which have come down to us from the book of Daniel and the Cyropaedia of Xenophon have been shown by the contemporaneous inscriptions to have been a "projection backwards" of the re-conquest of the city by Darius Hystaspes. The actual facts were very different (see BABYLONIA: History). His death subsequent to the surrender of Babylon and the cap ture of Nabonidos, and with it the last native effort to resist the invader, would account for the position he assumed in later tradition and the substitution of his name for that of the actual king.
See Th. G. Pinches, P.S.B.A., May 1884 ; H. Winckler, Zeitschri f t fiir Assyriologie, ii. 2, 3 (1887) ; Records of the Past, new series, i. p. 22-31 (1888) ; A. H. Sayce, The Higher Criticism, p.