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Chronology and 607 BCE · Claim record

Current scholarship places the whole Neo-Babylonian dynasty, six kings from Nabopolassar to Nabonidus, between 625 and 539 BCE, with Nebuchadnezzar II reigning 604-562 BCE. Adding twenty years to that period would require twenty years for which no dated tablet, chronicle entry or royal inscription exists.

Claim ID claim-chronology-neo-babylonian-spanConcerns 2020Context
Context · 2020 Verified

Current scholarship places the whole Neo-Babylonian dynasty, six kings from Nabopolassar to Nabonidus, between 625 and 539 BCE, with Nebuchadnezzar II reigning 604-562 BCE. Adding twenty years to that period would require twenty years for which no dated tablet, chronicle entry or royal inscription exists. RIBo, Babylon 7: The Inscriptions of the Neo-Babylonian Dynasty, 2020Babylonian Chronology, 626 B.C. - A.D. 45 (Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization 24), 1942RIBo, Babylon 7: The Inscriptions of the Neo-Babylonian Dynasty, 2020

Show the evidence (3 sources)
Peer-reviewed / scholarly Verified

RIBo, Babylon 7: The Inscriptions of the Neo-Babylonian Dynasty, “About the Project; ruler pages for Nabopolassar, Nebuchadnezzar II and Nabonidus”

2020 · Frauke Weiershaeuser and Jamie Novotny · Oracc / LMU Munich

“up-to-date editions of the officially commissioned texts of the six kings of the Neo-Babylonian Dynasty (625-539 BC)”

The project's ruler pages give the reigns as Nabopolassar (625-605 BC), Nebuchadnezzar II (604-562 BC) and Nabonidus (555-539 BC). Six kings across eighty-six years leaves no room for an additional twenty.

Official source

Provenance and verification note

Confidence note. The About page and the three ruler pages were fetched and read on 19 September 2026; the reign dates are in the page titles and headings.

Corroborated by. src-chr-e-pd-1942-p9-10-transitions, src-chr-e-oracc-adadguppi-i29

Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-chr-e-oracc-ribo-dynasty-span

Peer-reviewed / scholarly Verified

Babylonian Chronology, 626 B.C. - A.D. 45 (Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization 24), “II. Kings' Reigns: Nebuchadnezzar II and Amel-Marduk”

1942 · pp.9-10 · Richard A. Parker and Waldo H. Dubberstein · Oriental Institute, University of Chicago

“Evidence for End of Reign VI/14/43 (Sept. 25, 562), Uruk ... VI/26/43 (Oct. 7, 562), Uruk ... The first tablet dated to Amel-Marduk (see below) comes from Sippar (?) and is dated on the same day as the last tablet of Nebuchadnezzar from Uruk. Accordingly Nebuchadnezzar died during the first days of October, 562.”

The standard reference chronology establishes the length of each Neo-Babylonian reign from dated business and administrative tablets, listing for every king the last tablet of his reign and the first tablet of his successor's. At this junction the two are dated to the same day.

Official source Scan of original

Provenance and verification note

Confidence note. The full PDF was downloaded from the ISAC asset server on 19 September 2026, converted with pdftotext and read. The running head reads '10 BABYLONIAN CHRONOLOGY 626 B.C.--A.D. 45'.

Scan provenance. Free PDF of the volume published by the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (formerly the Oriental Institute), University of Chicago; CC BY-NC-ND 4.0; DOI https://doi.org/10.83354/68x5-8f30

Corroborated by. src-chr-e-oracc-adadguppi-i29, src-chr-e-w11-1101-footnote-e

Notes. The same pages show Amel-Marduk’s last tablet on 7 August 560 and Neriglissar’s first on 13 August 560, a gap of six days. Page 10 also carries Labashi-Marduk: first dated tablet 22 May 556, last 20 June 556, with the conclusion that he “seems to have been recognized as king only in May and June, 556”. He is the one king the organisation says Ptolemy omitted who falls inside the Neo-Babylonian dynasty, and the standard chronology accounts for him in weeks, not years.

Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-chr-e-pd-1942-p9-10-transitions

Peer-reviewed / scholarly Verified

RIBo, Babylon 7: The Inscriptions of the Neo-Babylonian Dynasty, “Nabonidus 2001 (the Harran stele of Adad-guppi), column i line 29”

2020 · i 29 · Frauke Weiershaeuser and Jamie Novotny (edition) · Oracc / LMU Munich

“From the twentieth year of Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria, (during) which I was born, until the forty-second year of Ashurbanipal, the third year of Aššur-etel-ilāni, his son, the twenty-first year of Nabopolassar, the forty-third year of Nebuchadnezzar (II), the second year of Amēl-Marduk, (and) the fourth year of Neriglissar, after (these) ninety-five years”

Adad-guppi, the mother of King Nabonidus, dates her own long life by naming in order the regnal years it ran between. The count starts in the twentieth year of Ashurbanipal, in which she says she was born, and ends in the fourth year of Neriglissar, and the inscription calls that span ninety-five years: a further twenty-two years of Ashurbanipal, then three, twenty-one, forty-three, two and four. The inscription is a sixth-century BCE document from Harran, written within living memory of the reigns it counts.

Official source Archived or alternative copy

Provenance and verification note

Confidence note. The Oracc HTML edition was downloaded and read on 19 September 2026; the transliteration and the English translation of column i 29 were read together and the line label “(i 29)” read from the page. Oracc asks that the page be cited as http://oracc.org/ribo/Q005471/. The year-numbers named here are the points the count runs between, not a list of reign lengths: 22 + 3 + 21 + 43 + 2 + 4 = 95.

Scan provenance. Royal Inscriptions of Babylonia online (RIBo), Babylon 7, edited by Frauke Weiershaeuser and Jamie Novotny for the Munich Open-access Cuneiform Corpus Initiative at LMU Munich; CC BY-SA 3.0.

Corroborated by. src-chr-e-oracc-adadguppi-ii40, src-chr-e-pd-1942-p9-10-transitions

Notes. The same inscription records that Sin kept her alive 'for 104 good years' from the time of Ashurbanipal 'until the ninth year of Nabonidus'.

Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-chr-e-oracc-adadguppi-i29

Claim page

A direct link to this claim is https://jwtruth.org/evidence/claim-chronology-neo-babylonian-span/. Every source above opens the original document or the best available copy. If you believe the wording, date or context is wrong, report an error.