Battle of Carchemish (605 BC): Babylon Defeats Egypt

The Battle of Carchemish was fought in 605 BC at the city of Carchemish on the upper Euphrates, between the Babylonian army of crown prince Nebuchadnezzar and the Egyptian army of Pharaoh Necho II. Babylon’s crushing victory ended Egyptian hopes of inheriting the Assyrian Empire and made the Neo-Babylonian kingdom the master of Syria and the Levant. It is one of the best-dated battles of the ancient Near East, recorded both in a Babylonian chronicle and in the Hebrew Bible.

Background: the fall of Assyria

For three centuries Assyria had dominated the Near East. In the 620s BC its power collapsed in civil war and in a rebellion led by Nabopolassar, who made himself king of Babylon in 626 BC. Allied with the Medes of western Iran, the Babylonians took Ashur in 614 BC, and the combined armies destroyed the Assyrian capital in the Fall of Nineveh in 612 BC.

An Assyrian prince, Ashur-uballit II, set up a rump government at Harran in northern Mesopotamia. Egypt, which had once been an Assyrian vassal and now feared Babylon more, came to his aid. Harran fell to the Babylonians and Medes in 610 BC, and an Assyrian-Egyptian attempt to retake it in 609 BC failed. After that, Ashur-uballit disappears from the record, and Assyria ceased to exist as a state.

Egypt’s bid for the Levant

Necho II, who became pharaoh in 610 BC, used the confusion to push Egyptian power north. On his march to Harran in 609 BC he was confronted at Megiddo by King Josiah of Judah, who was killed. Necho then deposed Josiah’s son Jehoahaz and installed Jehoiakim as an Egyptian vassal in Jerusalem.

By 609 BC the Egyptians held Carchemish, a fortified city at a key crossing of the Euphrates. It guarded the route between Mesopotamia and northern Syria. Between 607 and 606 BC Babylonian and Egyptian forces fought a series of smaller engagements in the region, at places named in the chronicle as Kimuhu and Quramati, with mixed results. A decisive confrontation was coming.

What happened

In the 21st year of Nabopolassar’s reign, 605 BC, the ageing king stayed in Babylon and gave command of the army to his eldest son, Nebuchadnezzar. The crown prince marched up the Euphrates to Carchemish, crossed the river and attacked the Egyptian army camped at the city.

The Babylonian chronicle states briefly that the two armies fought, that the Egyptians retreated before Nebuchadnezzar, and that he inflicted a defeat on them. It then adds that the Babylonians overtook the survivors who had escaped in the district of Hamath, in central Syria, and defeated them so completely that, in the chronicle’s words, not a single man returned to his own country. Scholars treat this claim as royal exaggeration, but the scale of the victory is not in doubt.

The precise date is not recorded. Because the campaign took place before Nabopolassar’s death in August, most historians place the battle in late spring or early summer of 605 BC. The Book of Jeremiah dates it to the fourth year of Jehoiakim of Judah, which agrees with the Babylonian evidence.

British Museum excavations at Carchemish led by D. G. Hogarth and then Leonard Woolley, with T. E. Lawrence, between 1911 and 1914 uncovered a destruction layer from this period. Finds in burnt houses included objects linked to Necho’s reign and pieces of Greek-style bronze armour, which many scholars connect with the Greek mercenaries known to have served in the Egyptian army.

Key people

• Nebuchadnezzar II (born c. 640s–630s BC, died 562 BC) was the eldest son of Nabopolassar. Carchemish was his first great victory, and he went on to rule Babylon for 43 years, from 605 to 562 BC.
• Necho II (reigned 610–595 BC) was the second king of Egypt’s 26th Dynasty. Herodotus credits him with starting a canal from the Nile to the Red Sea and sending a fleet around Africa. Carchemish ended his ambitions in Asia.
• Nabopolassar (reigned 626–605 BC) founded the Neo-Babylonian dynasty and destroyed Assyria; his story is told in Nabopolassar and the rise of the Neo-Babylonian Empire.

Consequences

The victory was quickly followed by a change of reign. On the 8th of the month Abu (August) 605 BC, Nabopolassar died. Nebuchadnezzar returned to Babylon, according to Berossus by a fast route across the desert, and was crowned on the 1st of Ululu, in September 605 BC. He then went back to the west to collect tribute.

Over the next few years the kingdoms of Syria and the Levant, called “Hatti-land” in the chronicle, submitted to Babylon. Jehoiakim of Judah switched his allegiance from Egypt to Babylon, and the Philistine city of Ashkelon was sacked in late 604 BC. In 601 BC Nebuchadnezzar tried to invade Egypt itself; the chronicle admits that both sides suffered heavy losses, and the Babylonian army had to spend the following year refitting.

Egypt never regained control of the Levant. Its continued encouragement of local revolts, however, drew Babylonian armies back repeatedly. Judah’s rebellions led to the capture of Jerusalem in 597 BC and its destruction in the Siege of Jerusalem in 587 or 586 BC, followed by the Babylonian Exile.

Legacy

Carchemish marks the moment when power in the Near East passed decisively from Assyria to Babylon. The Neo-Babylonian Empire created by Nabopolassar and Nebuchadnezzar would last until Cyrus the Great of Persia took Babylon in 539 BC.

The battle also left a mark on the Bible. Jeremiah 46 contains a poem on the defeat of Pharaoh Necho’s army “by the river Euphrates in Carchemish”, one of the few biblical passages that can be matched directly to an event dated in a contemporary non-biblical source. The publication of the relevant chronicle tablet by D. J. Wiseman in 1956 gave historians a firm date and confirmed the outline of the biblical account.

Carchemish itself never recovered its old importance. It had been a major Hittite and then Neo-Hittite city, and Assyria had annexed it in 717 BC. After 605 BC it became a provincial town. Today its ruins straddle the Turkey–Syria border; the Turkish part of the site was reopened to visitors as an archaeological park in 2019, after years of closure as a military zone.

A common misconception is that Assyria fought at Carchemish as an equal partner of Egypt. In fact the Assyrian state had already vanished by 609 BC, and the Babylonian account of 605 BC names only the Egyptian army as the enemy.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 626 BC: Nabopolassar becomes king of Babylon and begins the war against Assyria.
• 612 BC: Babylonians and Medes destroy Nineveh.
• 610 BC: Harran, the last Assyrian base, falls; Necho II becomes pharaoh of Egypt.
• 609 BC: Necho marches to support the Assyrians; Josiah of Judah is killed at Megiddo; the attempt to retake Harran fails.
• 607–606 BC: Babylonian and Egyptian forces clash along the middle Euphrates.
• 605 BC, spring or summer: Nebuchadnezzar defeats the Egyptians at Carchemish and again near Hamath.
• 605 BC, August–September: Nabopolassar dies and Nebuchadnezzar II is crowned in Babylon.
• 604 BC, December: The Babylonians sack Ashkelon.
• 601 BC: Nebuchadnezzar’s attack on Egypt ends in heavy losses on both sides.

Why it matters

The Battle of Carchemish decided who would inherit Assyria’s empire. Babylon’s victory gave it the Levant for two generations, shaped the fate of Judah and Jerusalem, and launched the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II, the most famous king of ancient Babylon.