Nabonidus Chronicle

So skeptics, minimalists said, well – Belshazzar never existed.

Well, the discovery of the Nabonidus Cylinder and the Nabonidus Chronicle silenced the critics, because you may not be familiar with your listeners and viewers of Nabonidus himself, but you're familiar with his son, Belshazzar.

And so before those discoveries, we had no specific concrete extra-biblical source that affirms that Belshazzar existed.

But now with these two discoveries, both of them, one written in stone, the Chronicle, chronicling the events of Nabonidus' reign.

The other, the cylinder, in clay, hardened in clay.

Four of those were discovered.

And so...

Both of them mentioned Nabonidus and his son, Belshazzar.

Although Babylon was heavily fortified, the city did not endure a prolonged siege.

The Nabonidus Chronicle, a contemporary Babylonian record, states that Persian forces entered Babylon and that Ugbaru, an ally of Cyrus, took control of the city.

Modern reconstructions of the sequence of events have since pinpointed this as happening on the 12th of October.

The Chronicle also records that Nabonidus was captured after the fall of the city but, unlike some later accounts, does not describe a spectacular assault involving the diversion of the Euphrates.