Belshazzar, last king of Babylon, gave a great banquet for a thousand of his nobles, and ordered the gold and silver vessels — which Nebuchadnezzar his father had carried off from the Temple at Jerusalem — to be brought out. The king, his nobles, his wives, and his concubines drank from them as they praised the gods of gold, silver, bronze, iron, wood, and stone.
Suddenly the fingers of a human hand appeared in the lampstand light and wrote on the plaster of the palace wall: 'MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPARSIN.' The king's countenance changed; his knees knocked together. None of the wise men of Babylon could interpret. The queen mother remembered the exiled Daniel; he was brought in.
Daniel refused gifts and gave the interpretation: 'MENE — God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end. TEKEL — you have been weighed in the balances and found wanting. PERES — your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians.' That very night Belshazzar was slain and Darius the Mede took the kingdom — the same Darius under whom Daniel would be thrown to the lions a few years later. The Persian capture of Babylon is independently attested in the contemporary Babylonian Chronicle of Nabonidus.