Page "Croesus" Paragraph 16

It is not known when exactly Croesus died, although it is traditionally dated 547 BC, after Cyrus ' conquest.

In the Nabonidus Chronicle it is said that Cyrus " marched against the country --, killed its king, took his possessions, put there a garrison of his own.

" Unfortunately, all that remains of the name of the country are traces of the first cuneiform sign.

It has long been assumed that this sign should have been LU, so that the country referred to would be Lydia, with Croesus as the king that was killed.

However, J. Cargill has shown that this restoration was based upon wishful thinking rather than actual traces of the sign LU.

Instead, J. Oelsner and R. Rollinger have both read the sign as Ú, which might imply a reference to Urartu.

With Herodotus ' account also being unreliable chronologically in this case, as J. A. S.

Evans has demonstrated, this means that we have no way of dating the fall of Sardis ; theoretically, it may even have taken place after the fall of Babylon.

Evans also asks what happened after the episode at the pyre and suggests that " neither the Greeks nor the Babylonians knew what really happened to Croesus.