Nabopolassar – Nabopolassar, first King of the Neo-Babylonian Empire and the Babel Fish
https://wiki.wizard101central.com/wiki/NPC:Nabopolassar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabopolassar
https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Babel_Fish
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babel_Fish_(website)
Thank you Austin for the Babylonia King connection.
Nabopolassar is a Babble Fish found inside the Tower of Babble. He needs to approve your wizard’s permanent access to the Tower.
Nabopolassar is excited to hear that people are once again excited about communication and knowledge and eagerly gives you the Chronoshard contained in the tower.
Nabopolassar (Babylonian: Nabû-apla-uṣur, meaning “Nabu, protect the son”) was the founder and first king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, ruling from his coronation as king of Babylon in 626 BC to his death in 605 BC. Though initially only aimed at restoring and securing the independence of Babylonia, Nabopolassar’s uprising against the Neo-Assyrian Empire, which had ruled Babylonia for more than a century, eventually led to the complete destruction of the Assyrian Empire and the rise of the Neo-Babylonian Empire in its place.
Nabopolassar’s origins are unclear. In his own inscriptions, he refers to himself as a mâr lā mammâna (“son of a nobody”), a striking descriptor that is not known from any other Mesopotamian king. The two other Neo-Babylonian kings who had no blood connection to previous royalty; Neriglissar (r. 560–556 BC) and Nabonidus (r. 556–539 BC), nevertheless mentioned the names of their fathers and wrote about them with pride in their inscriptions. On account of a lack of sources in regards to his true origins, subsequent historians have variously identified Nabopolassar as a Chaldean, an Assyrian or a Babylonian. Although no evidence conclusively confirms him as being of Chaldean origin, the term “Chaldean dynasty” is frequently used by modern historians for the royal family he founded, and the term “Chaldean Empire” remains in use as an alternate historiographical name for the Neo-Babylonian Empire. Several near-contemporary texts, such as the Uruk prophecy, describe Nabopolassar as a “king of the sea”, i.e. of southernmost Babylonia, suggesting that his origin was south of Babylon itself. The Assyrians also ascribed him a southern origin; a letter from the Neo-Assyrian king Sinsharishkun (r. 627–612 BC) describes Nabopolassar as “of the lower sea”, i.e. southernmost Mesopotamia.
According to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy novels by Douglas Adams, the Babel fish is a small, bright yellow fish, which can be placed in someone’s ear in order for them to be able to hear any language translated into their first language. Ford Prefect puts one in Arthur Dent’s ear at the beginning of the first novel so that Arthur can understand the Vogon speech.
The Babel Fish description from fictional Hitchhiker’s Guidebook; “The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier, but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.
Yahoo! Babel Fish was a free Web-based multilingual translation application. In May 2012 it was replaced by Bing Translator (now Microsoft Translator), to which queries were redirected. Although Yahoo! has transitioned its Babel Fish translation services to Bing Translator, it did not sell its translation application to Microsoft outright. As the oldest free online language translator, the service translated text or Web pages in 36 pairs between 13 languages, including English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.
The internet service derived its name from the Babel fish, a fictional species in Douglas Adams’s book and radio series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that could instantly translate languages. In turn, the name of the fictional creature refers to the biblical account of the confusion of languages that arose in the city of Babel.
The current list of all the (known) Mirage references can be found here.
Although I am well versed in Pop Culture references but I do not claim to have caught them all. Let me know your favorites in the comments and if I’ve missed one you caught, let me know so I can add it to the list.
Text for this article is excerpted from the linked wiki pages
Nabopolassar image is from Wizard101, and is copyright of KingsIsle Entertainment
Nabopolassar cylinder image is borrowed from Wikipedia. It is copyright The British Museum and is shared under the CC BY-SA 4.0 Creative Commons license.
Babel Fish still image is copyright the BBC
Yahoo! Babel Fish screenshot is borrowed from Wikipedia. Copyright Yahoo!
Image usage qualifies as fair use under US copyright law.
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