on the classic Babylonian folk-tale Ludlul-bel-nemeqi, telling of a courtier who suffers disgrace at the hands of evil enemies but is eventually restored due to the intervention of a kindly god (in the story in Daniel, this is the God of Israel); in the Babylonian original the "pit of lions" is a metaphor for human adversaries at court, but the biblical tale has turned the metaphorical lions into real animals. In Daniel 9, Daniel, pondering the meaning of Jeremiah's prophecy that Jerusalem would remain desolate for seventy years, is told by the angel Gabriel that the 70 years should be taken to mean seventy weeks (literally "sevens") of years. Verse 1 sets the time of Daniel's vision as the "first year of Darius son of Ahasuerus, by birth a Mede", but no Darius is known to history, nor can any king of Babylon be placed between the genuine historical figures of Belshazzar and Cyrus. Identity H. H. Rowley's 1935 study of the question (Darius the Mede and the Four World Empires of Darius the Mede, 1935) has shown that Darius the Mede cannot be identified with any king, and he is generally seen today as a literary fiction combining the historical Persian king Darius I and the words of Jeremiah 51:11 that God "stirred up" the Medes against Babylon. Nevertheless, numerous attempts have been made to identify him with historical figures, with the following being perhaps the best-known candidates: Darius the Great (Darius I Hystaspes), c. 550–486 BCE. This historically known Darius was the third Persian emperor, and an important figure for Jews in the early Persian period because of his role in the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem. At the beginning of his career Darius had to (re)conquer Babylon to remove a usurper, before expanding the empire and dividing it into satrapies. The author of Daniel, mindful of certain prophecies that the Medes would destroy Babylon (Jeremiah 51:11,28 and Isaiah 13:17), and needing a Median king to complete his four-kingdom schema (see the story of Nebuchadnezzar's dream in Daniel 2), appears to have taken the historical Darius and projected him into a fictional past. Astyages. Astyages was the last king of the Medes; he was defeated by Cyrus in 550 (or 553), his father was named Cyaxares (not Ahasuerus/Xerxes), and there is no record of him being present at the fall of Babylon. Consequently, he gets little attention