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“May all the gods whom I settled in their sacred centers ask daily of Bel and Nabu that my days be long and may they intercede for my welfare. The people of Babylon blessed my kingship, and I settled all the lands in peaceful abodes.”

After deposing his grandfather and uniting the kingdoms of Media and Persia, Cyrus began to look outside these newly established borders to expand his empire even further. First, he pushed further north and seized the realm of Urartu from Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey). Even after this annexation, Cyrus wanted more, and as such he naturally began to look toward the west and the kingdom of nearby Lydia which was controlled by a king named Croesus.

The forces of Cyrus engaged Croesus’ troops around the city of Cappadocia, in what is today part of Turkey. If the legend is to be believed, Cyrus used a cavalry equipped with camels to take on the armies of Croesus, and according to Herodotus, it was the camels that proved the deciding factor in the engagement. As this ancient historian described, “The horse fears the camel and cannot abide the sight or the smell of it. Indeed, as soon as the battle was joined, the very moment the horses smelled the camels and saw them, they bolted back; and down went all hope for Croesus.”

Whatever the case may be, it seems that after a stint of bloody, protracted warfare, the Lydian army collapsed and did indeed submit to the rule of Cyrus. In similar fashion to how he treated his own grandfather, it is said that Cyrus spared the life of King Croesus but kept him prisoner after taking over his kingdom. As Herodotus tells it, the troops were allowed to kill anyone else they encountered on the battlefield without mercy, but Croesus was not to be harmed.

The conquest of the Lydian Empire and Asia Minor is believed to have occurred right on the heels of the seizure of Media, most likely ending in the mid-540s BCE. Not a lot is known of the happenings of Cyrus as he consolidated these new holdings, but it is said that his armies were on the march again by 539 BCE, this time leading a massive invasion of the Neo-Babylonian Empire which at that time consisted of modern-day Iraq, Syria, and Israel.

Cyrus was able to catch the Babylonian army off guard, and it is said that the Babylonian military was quickly routed, making the fruits of Babylon ready for Cyrus’ taking. It is also said that Cyrus was greatly helped in these efforts by a general named Ugbaru who defected from the Babylonian side. In similar fashion to what happened during the conquest of Media, it is alleged that many Babylonians had in fact become disenchanted with their ruler and were ready to welcome Cyrus as a liberator rather than a conqueror.

During his rule, Cyrus played up this role of beneficent liberator as much as possible, as was most famously demonstrated in his decision to allow the Jews, who had long been exiled by the Babylonians during the so-called Babylonian Captivity, to finally be repatriated back to their native lands, albeit under Persian rule. It was the prophetic Book of Isaiah that is said to have predicted this feat, with a direct mention of a ruler named Cyrus being used as God’s right hand to free Israel.

The Hebrew Bible plays yet another role in this story because it is through the Book of Daniel—Daniel being one of the Jewish exiles who had been held in captivity—that we get an inside portrayal of the last days of the Babylonian regent before his removal from power by Cyrus the Great. Named Belshazzar, this Babylonian ruler was said to have visions and dreams of his own doom, which Daniel helped him decipher. In one particularly spectacular scene, Belshazzar is said to have seen a ghostly hand scrawling the Aramaic words “mene, mene, tekel, upharsin” across the walls of his banquet hall. It was Daniel who informed Belshazzar that the handwriting on the wall had spelled out the fall of the Babylonian Empire. Eventually, this vision of a ghostly hand’s penmanship gave rise to the old expression, “It’s time to see the writing on the wall.”

True to the vision, when Cyrus let loose on Babylon, all of Belshazzar’s offices of governance were demolished. Unlike other rulers whom Cyrus had spared, Belshazzar himself was killed in the fighting. It seemed that Babylon, whose leadership had become despised even by the Babylonians themselves, was destined to blot out the corrupt leadership of their past. Seeking to fill the void and insert himself into local beliefs and traditions of the lands he conquered, Cyrus announced himself as the new king of Babylon immediately upon his arrival in the capital city. He even went so far as to say that the popular local deity Marduk had blessed his acquisition of that title.

The resulting massive kingdom, the largest the world had known to that point, stretched from the Indus River in the east to Asia Minor in the west. Now, Cyrus the Great rightfully proclaimed himself “king of the four corners of the world.”