Questions, and their answers, will be added from time-to-time as I receive them from readers, schedule permitting. The more recent entries will appear at the top of this page, here:
Q. Why on earth did you choose this topic "the Last King of Babylon" to write a novel about? Who on earth would be interested in buying and reading such a book?
A. My goodness! Everything we are today came from Nabu Na'id and his age. The primary theme of "The Last King of Babylon Trilogy" is about religious conflict because that is what was going on during his tenure. Nabu Na'id, with his belief in the Holy Trinity whose chief deity spent three days and three nights in death and was then resurrected, was in conflict with Babylon's official state religion based on the god Marduk which featured a spring renewal/resurrection ritual based on the seven tablets of creation from which the Bible's seven days of creation was taken. In counterpoint to this conflict was the ambitions of Cyrus II (the Great) whose "monotheistic" religion preached a resurrection of the dead, a last judgment day, and heavenly paradise for the righteous. It was out of this matrix, this three-way conflict between these three great Ancient Religions that our Judeo-Christian culture emerged. And we, today, of course, are a product of the Judeo-Christian culture. As a matter of fact, virtually every piece of dogma found in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam came from one of those three earlier religions. It is no accident that the Jewish scribes, scholars, and intellectuals who were to produce the proto-types of what we now call the Old Testament, were residing in Babylon during Nabu Na'id's day and the century following. And they were heavily influenced by the intellectual and religious ferment going on around them.
So, to answer your question more simply, anyone who has any interest in anything remotely intellectual or metaphysical should be very interested in "The Last King of Babylon."
Q. Your websites, and apparently your novel, are based on Nabonidus being the last king of Babylon but I saw on the internet where he was not the last king of Babylon.
A. Good point. What happened was that after Cyrus the Great (Khurushu) conquered Babylon in 539 B.C. putting an end to Babylon's independence and the rule of Nabu Na'id (Nabonidus), he appointed his son Cambyses as "king" of Babylon. To understand what this title means one has to look back to the traditions of the kings of the Medes and the Persians. The top dog in the Persian Empire, as in the Mede Empire which it replaced, was called "shah ye shah" which in their language meant "king of kings." Underneath the top dog were a number of subservient, or vassal, kings, who were nothing more than governors of provinces in actual fact.
Thus when Cyrus the Great had his son Cambyses crowned as "king" of Babylon, he was essentially appointing him as governor. Crowning him as "king" was just a formality that looked and sounded good for local consumption and coincided with the Persian and Mede traditions of Imperial structure having a "king of kings" standing above a number of lesser "kings" who were actually governors of provinces within the Empire.
After Cyrus died in 529 B.C. Cambyses became "king of kings" of the whole banana, but rather than appointing a new governor, or "king" of Babylon, he retained the title "king" of Babylon for himself. But again, by this time the title "king" of Babylon was only a figurative title, just a little something to add to his resume so to speak. Thus his official title would read something like "king of kings, king of Babylon, and king of the four quarters," much as Nabu Na'id himself used the title of king of the long dead civilizations of Sumer and Akkad as part of his official title that he would stamp onto official documents such as:
"Nabu Na'id, king of Babylon and Assyria, king of Sumer and Akkad, and king of the four quarters."
So to sum up, the answer to your question is that Nabu Na'id (Nabonidus) was indeed the last true king of an independent Babylon, though the title "king" of Babylon continued to survive for some years under Persian rule as a formality.