First Dynasty of Babylon

One Amorite kingdom among several

Drafted from Beaulieu, Blackwell History of the Ancient World (2018)formation

The century after Ur fell is a period of Amorite dynasties. The Amorites are the people the Ur III texts described as not knowing grain and not burying their dead, and within three generations of that wall their chiefs were kings in every significant Mesopotamian city, ruling with Akkadian names, Akkadian titles and Sumerian scribes.

Babylon was not one of the significant cities. It had existed for a long time and had done nothing in particular. In 1894 BC a man named Sumu-abum established a dynasty there, and for the next hundred years his successors held a small territory around it while the real powers were elsewhere — Isin and then Larsa in the south, Eshnunna on the Diyala, Mari on the middle Euphrates, and Shamshi-Adad's kingdom in the north.

The world before the empire

This is the best-documented political landscape of the ancient world before the Amarna letters, and it comes almost entirely from one building. The palace of Zimri-Lim at Mari was excavated from 1933 and produced something over twenty thousand tablets, mostly letters: reports from ambassadors, intelligence on troop movements, complaints about allies, the correspondence of a king with his officials and his wives and his diviners.

The single most quoted sentence in the whole corpus is a diplomat's summary of the balance of power:

There is no king who is strong on his own. Ten or fifteen kings follow Hammurabi of Babylon, the same number follow Rim-Sin of Larsa, the same number follow Ibal-pi-El of Eshnunna, the same number follow Amut-pi-El of Qatna, and twenty kings follow Yarim-Lim of Yamhad.

Hammurabi is first on the list and is one of five. The letter dates from somewhere around 1770, roughly twenty years into a forty-three-year reign, and it is a fair description: he had been king for two decades and had achieved essentially nothing.

What kind of state

How the army was raised is one of the very few institutional facts about any ancient state that can be read straight off a statute instead of inferred from a narrative.

The ilkum was a field held from the palace by a soldier — the redum, the regular, and the ba'irum, whose title probably means something like "fisherman" and by this period means a category of soldier — on condition of service. The land could not be sold. If the holder failed to go on campaign and sent a substitute, he lost it. If he was taken prisoner and came home, he got it back; if his son was old enough to serve, the son took it; if not, a third of it was assigned to the mother to raise him on.

All of that is in the law collection, in sixteen consecutive paragraphs. It is the earliest surviving case anywhere of a state's military tenure being set out as legislation rather than reconstructed from receipts, and it raises a question taken up three chapters later: whether the legislation described a practice or proposed one.

Twelve years

Drafted from Mieroop, Blackwell Ancient Lives (2005)expansion

In his twenty-ninth year Hammurabi was one of five. In his thirty-eighth he held Mesopotamia from the Gulf to the Habur. Everything the reign is known for happens in its last dozen years, after three decades that had been unremarkable.

The sequence, from the year-names and the Mari letters: in 1764 a coalition out of Elam, Eshnunna, Assyria and elsewhere came against him and was beaten. In 1763 he took Larsa from Rim-Sin, who had ruled the south for sixty years, after a siege of several months and by diverting the water supply. In 1761 he turned on Mari, whose king Zimri-Lim had been his ally throughout, and took it; two years later he had its walls demolished. In 1755 he took Eshnunna, apparently by damming and releasing a river. By the end he had Ashur and Nineveh as well.

Diplomacy, mostly

Van De Mieroop's argument is that reading Hammurabi as a conqueror gets the career backwards. The letters show a man who spent thirty years on alliances, arbitration, marriage negotiations, water disputes and the extradition of runaways, in a system where every king had ten or fifteen clients and none could move without the others. The conquests were possible only because that system had been ground down by a generation of mutual exhaustion, and Babylon had spent the period being useful to everybody.

The betrayal of Mari is the clearest case. Zimri-Lim had sent troops to Hammurabi's campaigns for years and the two courts corresponded constantly; the Mari archive contains letters from Babylon in a tone of complete cordiality within months of the attack.

What the archive stopping means

Mari burned in 1761 and the fire baked the tablets, which is why they survive. The consequence is large. The empire Hammurabi built is worse documented than the twenty years of manoeuvring that preceded it.

Almost everything known about the years before comes from Mari. After 1761 there is no Mari, and no comparable archive anywhere else; what remains is year-names, a modest quantity of Babylonian legal and administrative material, some letters, and the law collection. The moment this state became an empire is the moment the light goes out on it, and the reason is that the empire's own greatest act of destruction was aimed at the place the light was coming from.

Empires with no archive are common enough. This is stranger: an empire that had one, and destroyed it, and is legible only up to the point where it started to matter.

Judgment according to the yoke

Drafted from King, The Letters and Inscriptions of Hammurabi, King of Babylon, Volume III (1900)peak

Hammurabi's letters to Sin-idinnam, his governor at Larsa, survive in quantity, and they are the least famous important documents of the ancient world. The king who set up a stele of laws in a temple also spent his days writing to a provincial governor about corn.

What the king actually wrote about

The subjects, in the order King groups them, are these.

Land disputes. He instructs the governor to restore a property to its owner whose claim has been fully proved, and to force a man to hand back mortgaged property although the mortgage had been redeemed.

Corn. He forwards for trial the case of a man who says grain was stolen from his granary; orders that a loan of corn be repaid with the interest on it; and settles a long-running argument about the rent owed on a field out of the crop that field produced.

Arrests. Three letters order men taken into custody and sent to Babylon. In one of them the men are eight officials who, the king notes, have not gone to their posts — insubordinates who had disobeyed him. In the other two he does not say what they had done.

Sentences. In one case, sending a matter down for trial, he specifies the punishment he wants if the man is convicted: judgment according to the yoke — hard labour in the king's service.

The revenue

The letters show a tax system in operation, and one detail in it is worth more than the rest.

The provinces owed revenue; the governors and local authorities were responsible for collecting it; and a collector who failed to bring in his full dues had to make up the shortfall out of his own pocket. Hammurabi forwards Sin-idinnam a complaint from exactly such a man — someone who had been prevented from collecting in certain districts and from whom the palace had nevertheless taken the whole amount.

He also has to write urgently summoning a collector to Babylon, because collectors, understandably, preferred not to come.

The calendar

The most revealing letter is about the calendar and is really about money.

The king informs the governor that an intercalary month is to be inserted — a routine adjustment, since a lunar year needs correcting against the seasons. Then he adds the point of the letter: the change is not to affect the day on which Larsa's tribute falls due.

A ruler adding a month to the year, and specifying in the same breath that the tax deadline does not move with it, is the whole of Old Babylonian government in one sentence.

The other Hammurabi

Set these letters beside the stele and the two do not contradict each other so much as explain it.

The famous document opens by saying that the king was called to make justice appear in the land, to destroy the wicked, and to keep the strong from oppressing the weak. The letters show what that meant in practice for the man who wrote it: reading a complaint from a tax collector who had been made to pay someone else's arrears, ruling on a disputed field boundary, and telling a governor four hundred kilometres away which of two men was telling the truth about a granary.

The stele

Drafted from Roth, Writings from the Ancient World 6 (1997)peak

It is a block of black diorite, two and a quarter metres tall, carved late in Hammurabi's reign. At the top the king stands before Shamash, god of justice, who is seated and holds out a rod and a ring. Below, in beautifully cut archaising script, run a prologue, something like two hundred and seventy-five provisions, and an epilogue.

It was not found in Babylon. Elamites carried it off to Susa around 1155 BC as plunder, along with a good deal else, and it was excavated there in 1901. The most famous object of the Mesopotamian world survives because Elam carried it off from Babylon, and it re-entered the world because a French expedition dug it up in Iran.

What is in it

The provisions are conditional: if a man does X, then Y. They cover false accusation, theft, the ilkum tenure, agriculture and irrigation, loans and interest, deposits, marriage, inheritance, adoption, wet-nursing, assault, the fees of surgeons and builders and boatmen, the hire of oxen, and the sale of slaves. The penalties are graded by the status of both parties, and for the highest class of victim they are retaliatory: an eye for an eye, a bone for a bone, a tooth for a tooth, in those words, twelve hundred years before the formulation appears in Exodus.

The prologue lists the cities whose gods have entrusted the king with their care. The epilogue instructs the wronged man to come and have the stele read to him, and curses at length anyone who erases the name on it.

Whether it was law

No Old Babylonian court verdict cites it. Thousands of legal records survive from the period, cases are decided, and none of them says "according to the stele of the king". Some of the decisions do not match its provisions.

The scholarly options are roughly: it was a real code that judges were expected to know without citing; it was a royal monument, a demonstration that the king had made justice appear, whose function was ideological; or it was a scholarly compilation of the kind Mesopotamian scribes made for omens and medicine and grammar — a list of cases assembled to display the completeness of a system of thought. Van De Mieroop leans towards the last two. What is disputed is not the date or the details but whether the collection was the hinge it is usually taken for.

Why it does not matter, and why it does

For the empire, it did nothing. The territory Hammurabi assembled came apart within twelve years of his death and the stele did not slow it down by a day.

For everything after, it did more than any other object in this region. Scribes copied it as a school text for fifteen hundred years, down into the Neo-Babylonian period, and it fixed the form that Mesopotamian and later Near Eastern legal writing took. It belongs to a line that runs from the laws of Ur-Nammu through Lipit-Ishtar and Eshnunna to the Middle Assyrian and Hittite laws — a single conversation carried on across a thousand years and several languages, in which Hammurabi's is neither the first entry nor the last.

And it is why a hundred-and-forty-year dynasty with a fifty-year empire is a household name, while the Third Dynasty of Ur — which governed more thoroughly, lasted about as long and left a hundred thousand documents — is not. Nothing that measures states by their reach or their campaigns registers what a school text does over fifteen centuries.

The price of an eye

Drafted from Harper, The Code of Hammurabi, King of Babylon, about 2250 B.C. (1904)aside?What aside means

The best-known line in the laws of Hammurabi is if a man destroy the eye of another man, they shall destroy his eye. It is quoted as the principle of the whole collection. It is actually the first of three provisions, and the two that follow it are the ones that tell you how the society worked.

Three prices

The sequence runs:

§196. If a man destroy the eye of another man, they shall destroy his eye.

§198. If one destroy the eye of a freeman or break the bone of a freeman, he shall pay one mana of silver.

§199. If one destroy the eye of a man's slave or break a bone of a man's slave, he shall pay one-half his price.

Three classes, and the same injury has three different consequences depending entirely on who was hurt. For the first, retaliation in kind. For the second, a fixed sum. For the third, compensation — paid not to the injured person but to the person who owns him, and calculated as a percentage of his market value.

Harper's "freeman" translates a term for a class of dependants below the full citizen and above the slave, and its exact standing is still argued. What the law does not leave in doubt is where it sits: it costs a mana to blind one, and the mana is not paid to him.

Priced the same way going in

The structure repeats in a place where you might expect it not to — the medical fees.

§215. If a physician operate on a man for a severe wound with a bronze lancet and save the man's life, or open an abscess in the eye of a man and save that man's eye, he shall receive ten shekels of silver.

§216. If he be a freeman, he shall receive five shekels.

§217. If it be a man's slave, the owner of the slave shall give two shekels of silver to the physician.

The identical operation, on the identical organ, costs ten, five or two according to the patient. And the doctor's exposure follows the same ladder: if he destroys a full citizen's eye with the lancet, they cut off his fingers; if the patient is a slave, he replaces him or pays half his value.

A surgeon in Babylon knew the price of what he was about to do before he knew the diagnosis.

What that makes the collection

Read this way, the famous retaliatory clauses are not the primitive core of the laws with the money penalties as refinements. They are one rung of a single schedule.

Retaliation in kind is what you get when the parties are equals; between unequals the injury converts into silver, and the direction of the payment follows property rather than pain. An eye for an eye has been quoted for three thousand years as a rule about proportion. In its original setting it is a rule about proportion between men of the same rank, and the collection is at its most articulate precisely where the ranks differ.

None of this is hidden or grudging. It is set out plainly, on a public monument, in the same beautifully cut script as the prologue about the king to whom the gods entrusted the care of the people.

The woman who kept the tavern

Drafted from Harper, The Code of Hammurabi, King of Babylon, about 2250 B.C. (1904)aside?What aside means

Four consecutive provisions of the laws deal with drink-sellers. Every one of them has a female subject, and three of the four are capital.

The four

§108. If a wine-seller do not receive grain as the price of drink, but if she receive money by the great stone, or make the measure for drink smaller than the measure for corn, they shall call that wine-seller to account, and they shall throw her into the water.

§109. If outlaws collect in the house of a wine-seller, and she do not arrest these outlaws and bring them to the palace, that wine-seller shall be put to death.

§110. If a priestess who is not living in a convent open a wine-shop or enter a wine-shop for a drink, they shall burn that woman.

§111. If a wine-seller give sixty measures of drink on credit, at the time of harvest she shall receive fifty measures of grain.

Taken together they describe a trade that was normal, female, regulated, and dangerous.

What each one is about

The first is a weights-and-measures offence. The tavern-keeper takes payment in grain at harvest and in silver otherwise, and the fraud available to her is to weigh the silver on a heavy stone or to serve drink by a smaller measure than the one she reckons the corn by. The penalty for cheating on the ratio is drowning.

The second is not about drink at all. It makes the tavern-keeper responsible for policing her own premises: if criminals gather in her house and she does not arrest them herself and deliver them to the palace, she dies. The state is treating the tavern as the place where trouble organises, and deputising the woman who runs it, on pain of death, because it has nobody else standing there.

The third is about a different woman entirely. A consecrated woman who has left the cloister may not open a wine-shop, and may not so much as go into one for a drink; if she does she is burned — the heaviest penalty in the collection, and one reserved elsewhere for incest and for theft from a burning house.

The fourth is quiet and is the most informative of the four. It fixes the rate at which drink sold on credit is repaid at harvest: sixty measures of beer against fifty of grain. That is a law protecting the seller. Someone had to be given a formula because the debts were real, seasonal and worth litigating.

The picture that comes out of it

A tavern in an Old Babylonian town was run by a woman, extended credit through the year against the coming harvest, and was where the men the palace was looking for could be found.

She was liable for her own arithmetic and for her own customers, and could be executed for either. She was also, by the fourth law, a creditor with an enforceable claim on a harvest she had helped feed.

The collection is famous for kings, temples and retaliation. It is at its most informative in the four paragraphs where it turns to a working woman with a debt ledger and a room full of people she is legally obliged to inform on.

Samsu-iluna

Drafted from Beaulieu, Blackwell History of the Ancient World (2018)contraction

Hammurabi died in 1750. His son Samsu-iluna reigned thirty-eight years and spent almost all of them losing what his father had taken.

The south went first. In 1741 a man calling himself Rim-Sin — probably taking the name of the king of Larsa whom Hammurabi had deposed — led a revolt; then a dynasty that called itself the Sealand established itself in the far south and was never dislodged. By 1738 the great southern cities had been lost, and what happened to them next is one of the strangest events in Mesopotamian history.

The cities stop

Nippur, Ur, Uruk, Larsa and Isin were substantially abandoned. Not sacked and rebuilt: abandoned. The temple establishments moved north, taking their gods and their personnel and their archives with them. The administrative record, which had run without a break in some of these places for six hundred years, stops. Sumerian, which had survived the fall of Ur as a written language of cult and scholarship in the southern schools, largely relocates north with the scribes.

The cause is argued about — a shift in the Euphrates channel starving the southern canals, salinisation, the political collapse itself, or all three feeding each other. What is not argued about is the scale. The heartland of Sumerian civilisation, the ground Ur III had governed from, went quiet for roughly three hundred years.

What was left

Samsu-iluna's successors held Babylon and its immediate region and not much else, and did so for another hundred and forty years — four kings, father to son, in the same line that runs through the whole dynasty. There are eleven of them from Sumu-abum to Samsu-ditana across three hundred years, and from the second onward the throne passes father to son without one contested accession on record.

Nobody wrote down how the throne passed, and that is worth dwelling on rather than passing over. Ten consecutive father-to-son successions produced no statement of a rule. The dynasty legislated the price of hiring an ox and the compensation owed for a slapped face, and did not legislate who inherited. Ur III is the same across five generations.

The temptation is obvious: ten father-to-son successions look exactly like primogeniture, and it would be easy to write the word down. It would also be inventing a statute that nobody has ever found.

Two dynasties in one country leaving the same silence for the same reason is not a coincidence about two families. It is a fact about what cuneiform law was for, and the honest thing is to leave the question open and say why.

1595

Drafted from Beaulieu, Blackwell History of the Ancient World (2018)end

Mursili I of Hatti came down the Euphrates from central Anatolia, took Babylon, ended the dynasty, and went home. He installed no governor and left no garrison. He was murdered on his return by his brother-in-law, and Hatti spent the following century tearing itself apart.

The Kassites, who had been present in Babylonia as a minority for generations, took over the vacated kingship within a few decades and held it for four hundred years — the longest single dynasty in Mesopotamian history.

The conquest that conquered nothing

It is easy to read 1595 as a change of masters, and it was not one.

The Hittites came a very long way, took the city, took the statue of Marduk, and went home. Mursili I was assassinated shortly after his return and Hatti spent the next century on its own troubles. Nobody in Anatolia governed Babylonia for a day.

What actually followed in Babylonia was the Kassite dynasty, which ruled the country for something over four hundred years — longer than any other dynasty in Mesopotamian history — and which arrived without anybody recording how. So the best-attested event at the end of this dynasty is a raid that led nowhere, and the thing that really replaced it is one of the least documented successions in the ancient world.

What survived it

Two things did, and neither is a state.

The first is the writing. Hittite cuneiform is Old Babylonian cuneiform adapted, probably by way of northern Syria, to write an Indo-European language — and Hittite is the earliest attested Indo-European language in the world. It is attested because Anatolian scribes took this dynasty's script and made it write something it had never been designed for.

The second is a name, and the distinction matters. Every later ruler of Mesopotamia wanted to be king of Babylon: the Kassites, the Assyrians, Cyrus, Alexander, the Seleucids. None of them claimed to be continuing the First Dynasty. They claimed a place.

That is the difference between a succession and a resumption, and Mesopotamia is full of the second. There are two Babylons, two Assyrias and two Elams, and in each pair the later one is the same ground and the same gods picking up after an interruption — not an heir, not a conquest, and not an event with a year on it. Nothing happened on the day Babylon resumed being Babylon, which is exactly why it is so hard to say when it did.

Eight feet of diorite

Drafted from Harper, The Code of Hammurabi, King of Babylon, about 2250 B.C. (1904)afterlife

The stele went to Susa as plunder. Around 1100 BC, five hundred years after Hammurabi, an Elamite king carried it out of Babylonia along with a great deal else, and it stood in his capital until his capital stopped existing.

Then it lay in the ground for three thousand years, and in December 1901 and January 1902 a French expedition under de Morgan dug it out of the acropolis at Susa.

The object

It is a block of black diorite nearly eight feet high, found broken into three pieces that were easily rejoined.

On the front, above the text, is a relief of the king receiving the laws from the sun god. Below that are sixteen columns, of which the first four and a half are the prologue. On the back are twenty-eight more, the last five forming the epilogue.

There should be five further columns on the front. They are not there. The Elamite who took it had them cut away — presumably to carve his own inscription in the space, which he never did.

So the most famous legal document of the ancient world reaches us with a hole in it, deliberately made, by the man who stole it, for a purpose he never carried out.

It was never only one stone

A second fragment turned up at Susa which does not belong to that monument at all and carries text from what would be its forty-first column. That is the proof of something the epilogue itself implies: the code was set up in more than one place, and at least two copies had been carried off to the same Elamite city.

Beyond the steles there are the tablets. Copies of the laws were being made by scribes for more than a thousand years after Hammurabi died, and enough of those later fragments survive that Harper could use them in 1904 to restore passages where the stone was damaged.

A school exercise copied in Assyria eight centuries after the fact is what allows a modern editor to repair a monument defaced in Elam.

How it was read when it came back

The reception is the last part of the afterlife, and it is worth recording exactly.

Harper's introduction, describing the relief of the king receiving the laws from the god, adds immediately that the story of Moses receiving the Ten Words from Yahweh corresponds to it. He identifies Hammurabi, as most Assyriologists then did, with the Amraphel of Genesis 14. And he dates the reign to about 2250 BC, which is roughly five hundred and fifty years too early by any chronology now in use.

None of that is careless. It is what the document meant to the people who recovered it: a confirmation, in stone, that the world of the Hebrew Bible had a verifiable background — and the first sustained encounter of European scholarship with a legal system older than the one it had been taught to regard as the oldest.

The First Dynasty of Babylon lasted about three hundred years and ruled an empire for fifty of them. What it is now is a rock in the Louvre, and the reason it is famous is that somebody stole the rock.