The Watchtower, “When Was Ancient Jerusalem Destroyed?—Part One (box: “A Pivotal Date in History”)”
“The date 539 B.C.E. when Cyrus II conquered Babylon is calculated using the testimony of: ▪ Ancient historical sources and cuneiform tablets: Diodorus of Sicily (c. 80-20 B.C.E.) … The Greek historian Herodotus (c. 485-425 B.C.E.) … Cuneiform tablets show that Cyrus ruled Babylon for nine years before his death.”
The box adds: “Confirmation by a cuneiform tablet: A Babylonian astronomical clay tablet (BM 33066) confirms the date of Cyrus’ death in 530 B.C.E. Though this tablet contains some errors regarding the astronomical positions, it contains the descriptions of two lunar eclipses that the tablet says occurred in the seventh year of Cambyses II”, identified with eclipses of 16 July 523 B.C.E. and 10 January 522 B.C.E.
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Provenance and verification note for The Watchtower, When Was Ancient Jerusalem Destroyed?—Part One (box: “A Pivotal Date in History”)
Confidence note. Full document fetched from the Watchtower Online Library on 19 September 2026 and read in full; the quotation, the paragraph and the page were confirmed against the article text and its embedded page markers (span class=“pageNum”).
Corroborated by. src-chr-o-it1-chronology-pivotal-539
Notes. The fixed point of the whole scheme, 539 BCE, is established from classical historians and from an astronomical tablet — the two classes of evidence the same series treats as unreliable for the Neo-Babylonian reigns.
Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-chr-o-w-2011-1001-pivotal-539