No date is given, but the writer may well have supposed or have traditionally heard that some such event took place about the eighteenth year of Nebuchadrezzar's reign, when he had brought to conclusion a series of great victories and conquests.[329] Nor are we told whom the image represented. We may imagine that it was an idol of Bel-merodach, the patron deity of Babylon, to whom we know that he did erect an image;[330] or of Nebo, from whom the king derived his name. When it is said to be "of gold," the writer, in the grandiose character of his imaginative faculty, may have meant his words to be taken literally, or he may merely have meant that it was gilded, or overlaid with gold.[331] There were colossal images in Egypt and in Nineveh, but we never read in history of any other gilded image ninety feet high and nine feet broad.[332] The name of the plain or valley in which it was erected--Dura--has been found in several Babylonian localities.[333] Then the king proclaimed a solemn dedicatory festival, to which he invited every sort of functionary, of which the writer, with his usual πύργωσις and rotundity of expression, accumulates the eight names. They were:-- 1. The Princes, "satraps," or wardens of the realm.[334] 2. The Governors[335] (ii. 48). 3. The Captains.[336] 4. The Judges.[337] 5. The Treasurers or Controllers.[338] 6. The Counsellors.[339] 7. The Sheriffs.[340] 8. All the Rulers of the Provinces. Any attempts to attach specific values to these titles are failures. They seem to be a catalogue of Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian titles, and may perhaps (as Ewald conjectured) be meant to represent the various grades of three classes of functionaries--civil, military, and legal. Then all these officials, who with leisurely stateliness are named again, came to the festival, and stood before the image. It is not improbable that the writer may have been a witness of some such splendid ceremony to which the Jewish magnates were invited in the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes.[341] Then a herald (_kerooza_[342]) cried aloud[343] a proclamation "to all peoples, nations, and languages." Such a throng might easily have contained Greeks, Phœnicians, Jews, Arabs, and Assyrians, as well as Babylonians. At the outburst of a blast of "boisterous janizary-music" they are all to fall down and worship the golden image. Of the six different kinds of musical instruments, which, in his usual style, the writer names and reiterates, and which it is neither possible nor very important to distinguish, three--the harp, psaltery, and bagpipe--are Greek; two, the horn and sackbut, have names derived from roots found both in Aryan and Semitic languages; and one, "the pipe," is Semitic. As to the list of officials, the writer had added "and all the rulers of the provinces"; so here he adds "and all kinds of music."[344]