Neo-Babylonian Empire

Its hard to understand the Babylonian empire of Nebuchadnezzar and Nabonidus. Pagan texts in Aramaic were not selected to be copied and recopied by Christian scribes like Christian scribes copied some pagan Greek and Latin texts, and the heart of the empire fell to Cyrus without a fight. Burning cities can preserve texts painted on or pressed into clay, but archivists under Cyrus and Darius just continued to throw out old documents like they had under Nabopolassar, and so those documents were lost to us. Most surviving documents from the Neo-Babylonian empire are from temple or family archives which stuck to the old script and language, not the archives of the kings or governors which may not have been written on clay anyways. The famous Babylonian chronicles tell us about some events but not the structure of the kingdom or life in the provinces. By the time Greeks like Herodotus and Ctesias were writing, they were as vague on the difference between Assyrians and Babylonians as we are on the difference between upper and lower Egyptians. We know far more about Babylonia in the sixth century BCE than Greece in the sixth century BCE, but not everything (and not much about the rest of the empire). Some teaching in spring made me think of one of the oddest things about this empire.