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The Babylonian Chronicles. Saved from the obscurity of the British Museum’s storerooms, this 3.25-inch by 2.5-inch clay cuneiform tablet is one of nine published by author Wiseman in 1956. The nine are part of the Babylonian Chronicles, an accurate record of the historic events in each king’s regnal year. They are just a tiny portion of the 90,000 tablets received by the British Museum between 1872 and 1889—a time when that famed institution did not even have the staff to catalogue the tablets.

The tablet’s obverse side recounts Babylon’s defeat of the Egyptian army at Carchemish in 605 B.C. and its conquest of Syria; Nebuchadnezzar’s succession to the Babylonian throne that same year and his acceptance of tribute from the kings of Syro-Palestine in 604 B.C.; the sack of Ashkelon in 603 B.C.; and the hitherto-unknown battle in 601 B.C. between the Babylonians and the Egyptians that ended inconclusively and which caused Jehoiakim, king of Judah, to align himself with Egypt. That proved a disastrous decision in light of subsequent events.

A paragraph on the reverse side of the tablet tells us just what those subsequent events were: “In the month of Kislev of his seventh year the king of Babylon [Nebuchadnezzar] mustered his army to march to Hatti-land [Syro-Palestine] and besieged the city of Judah [Jerusalem] and on the second day of Addar [15/16 March 597 B.C.] captured the city and seized its king [Jehoiachin]. He appointed there a king of his own choice [Zedekiah/Mattaniah] and took vast tribute, bringing it back to Babylon.” (Translation by Donald J. Wiseman.) A failed revolt ten years later in Judah ended in the utter destruction of the Jerusalem Temple and in the exile of most of the population to Babylon.