Belshazzar

Belshazzar was the son and crown prince of Nabonidus, the last king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. During periods when Nabonidus was absent from Babylon, Belshazzar exercised royal authority there, although he did not formally reign as king. He is best known to later readers from the Book of Daniel and the story of the writing on the wall.

Babylon fell to the Persian forces of Cyrus the Great in 539 BCE, ending the Neo-Babylonian kingdom in which Belshazzar had exercised authority. The biblical Book of Daniel later transformed him into the king who sees the mysterious writing on the wall during a feast on the night his kingdom is taken. That story gave Belshazzar a cultural afterlife far larger than the relatively limited cuneiform evidence for his historical career.

In H. Rider Haggard’s Belshazzar, Ramose, an Egyptian noble, becomes entangled with the court of Babylon, the fate of a royal woman and the unstable rule associated with Belshazzar.