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Floro Turpin
Ancient Babylon was an influential city that served as a center of Mesopotamian civilization for nearly two millennia, from roughly 2000 B.C. to 540 B.C. It was located near the Euphrates River, about 60 miles (100 kilometers) south of Baghdad in what is now Iraq.
Babylon had a significant impact on Mesopotamia. One of its early rulers, Hammurabi, created a harsh system of laws, while in later times, the Babylonian language was used across the Middle East as a way of communicating across borders. The law code, while not the oldest in the Middle East, is one of the most famous. The city is also famous for the construction of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon (if the ancient stories are true), a wonder of the ancient world that some people believe was built by the biblical king Nebuchadnezzar II.
The ancient scientists who lived in Babylon made important discoveries in mathematics, physics and astronomy. Among their many accomplishments, they developed trigonometry, used mathematical models to track Jupiter and developed methods of tracking time that are still used today. Ancient Babylonian records are still used by modern-day astronomers to study how Earth's rotation has changed.
"Babylon, in all its manifestations, is at once remote to us and all around us. Like no other city, its history has become bound up with legend..." researchers Irving Finkel and Michael Seymour wrote in the book "Babylon: City of Wonders" (Oxford University Press, 2008).
Archaeologically, little is known about the early history of Babylon. Ancient records suggest that more than 4,000 years ago, at a time when the city of Ur (in what is now southern Iraq) was the center of an empire, Babylon was a provincial administration center and was part of Ur's empire, wrote historian Gwendolyn Leick in her book "The Babylonians: An Introduction" (Routledge, 2002).
Babylon was built in an area that's "subject to very high temperatures and lies well beyond the reach of rain-fed agriculture," Seymour, a research associate at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, wrote in his book "Babylon: Legend, History and the Ancient City" (I.B. Tauris, 2014). He noted that an irrigation system that distributed water from the Euphrates was required to grow crops. "Once established, however, such a system could reap the benefit of rich alluvial soils and support extremely productive agriculture on the levees of canals," Seymour wrote.
Leick noted that in 1894 B.C. after the Ur-based empire had collapsed, Babylon was conquered by a man named Samu-abum (also spelled Sumu-abum). He was an Amorite, a member of a Semitic-speaking people from the area around modern-day Syria. He turned Babylon into a petty kingdom made up of the city and a small amount of nearby territory. Babylon remained this way until, six kings later, a man named Hammurabi (1792 B.C. to 1750 B.C.) ascended the throne. He had a major impact on the city's fortunes and transformed this once-small kingdom into a great empire.
Hammurabi had to be patient before he could expand, Leick noted. Babylon was located between two large cities known as Larsa and Ashur, and Hammurabi had to be cautious. He used his time wisely. "At home he concentrated on improving the economic basis of his kingdom by building canals and strengthening fortifications," Leick wrote.
When the king of Ashur died around 1776 B.C., Hammurabi took advantage of the resulting power vacuum and expanded Babylon's territory by conquering Ashur. Following this, he conducted a series of campaigns against Larsa and defeated its ruler, Rim-Sin, who had ruled the large kingdom for nearly 60 years. "This victory signalled the annexation of all the old urban centers, such as Ur, Uruk, Isin and Larsa," Leick wrote. Further campaigns against Assyria and Mari further expanded Hammurabi's empire.
Archaeologists know little about what Babylon itself looked like during Hammurabi's reign. "The remains of Hammurabi's own city at Babylon are, unfortunately, almost inaccessible as the water table has risen too high to allow them to be explored," archaeology researcher Harriet Crawford wrote in a paper published in the book "The Babylonian World" (Routledge, 2007).
While archaeological remains in Babylon dating to this period are scarce, textual remains reveal more information. Leick noted that Hammurabi was so well respected that he became regarded as a deity. She wrote that parents gave their children names that meant "Hammurabi is my help" or "Hammurabi is my god."
The Code of Hammurabi (now in the Louvre Museum in Paris) is well known for its "eye for an eye" style of lawmaking, but it also set out the nature of the relationship among Hammurabi, the gods and the people he ruled.
In Hammurabi's view, the gods sent him to rule, with some level of compassion, over his empire. The preamble to the code says that "then Anu and Bel [both gods] called by name me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, who feared God, to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak." (translation by L.W. King).
While Hammurabi claimed to be compassionate, his code was harsh and made liberal use of death sentences (in some cases, even for stealing) and allowed for the hacking off of body parts. This is a change from an earlier law code, created centuries ago by a ruler of Ur named Ur-Nammu, that was more inclined to impose fines.
Women did not always receive equal treatment to men under Hammurabi's code. One law reads, "If a finger has been pointed at a man's wife because of some male but she has not been caught copulating with another male, she shall leap into the river for the sake of her husband" (translation by H. Dieter Viel).
However, the code did have rules that protected women. For instance, if a man divorced his wife he had to give her back her dowry and give her some of his land. Other rules stipulated that a widowed woman should receive an inheritance and that an unmarried woman should receive financial support from her brothers after the death of her father so that she could live alone.
Ultimately, Hammurabi's empire did not last; it fell into decline after his death in 1750 B.C. In 1595 B.C., Mursili I, ruler of the Hittites, a people from Anatolia, sacked Babylon, bringing the rule of Hammurabi's successors to a close.
Adding insult to injury, the Hittites seized a statue of Marduk, who had become a principal god of the Babylonians, from his temple, historian Susanne Paulus noted in a 2011 paper published in Beihefte zur Zeitschrift fr Altorientalische und Biblische Rechtsgeschichte (Supplements to the Journal of Ancient Near Eastern and Biblical Legal History). Stealing the statue of Marduk from his own temple would have been seen as being extremely disrespectful by the Babylonians.
In the chaos that followed, a people called the Kassites (also known as the Galzu), likely from the Zagros Mountains east of Babylon, came to power in Babylon around 1550 B.C. They had access to good horses, giving them a military advantage, according to Leick.
Following the conquest, the Kassites appear to have made an effort to win over the people of Babylon. "They brought back the statue of the major deity, Marduk, which had been stolen by the Hittites, and restored his cult in Babylon," Paulus wrote. "The Kassite kings restored the temples of the Babylonian gods, while their own pantheon had little influence."
During this period, Babylonian writing may have become more professionalized and exclusive (Leick noted that there appears to have been far fewer personal letters written), but the language itself became widely used across the Middle East.
It turned into a "lingua franca for the whole Near East from the fifteenth to the end of the thirteenth century," Leick wrote. Babylonian works could be found in Turkey, Syria, the Levant and Egypt. "Babylonian scribes were very much in demand at foreign courts," Leick noted.
The period from roughly 1200 B.C. to 600 B.C. was a rocky one for Babylon, and involved many wars and some successes. Around 1200 B.C., the eastern Mediterranean faced calamity as a wave of migrants sometimes called the "Sea People" swept through much of the Middle East, destroying cities in Turkey and the Levant and contributing to problems that caused the breakup of ancient Egypt.
While Babylon was not hit directly by the Sea People they faced wars with other powers. A war with Assyria resulted in a Babylonian king being led to Ashur in chains, while a conflict with Elam led to the statue of Marduk being stolen yet again. A new Babylonian ruler named Nebuchadnezzar I (1126 B.C. to 1105 B.C.) defeated Elam and brought the statue back once more. Leick noted that his success added greater importance to the Babylonians' New Year festival.
"This complex ritual, which involved the gathering of all important Babylonian deities at Babylon, the recitation of the Creation Epic (enuma elish) and the confirmation of kingship by the god Marduk, was given new impetus, if it was not altogether invented at this time," Leick wrote.
However, these successes were short-lived. Babylon struggled over the following centuries, and the Assyrians invaded again. Leick noted that the city was put under direct Assyrian rule from 729 B.C. to 627 B.C,. and during a Babylonian rebellion in 689 B.C., the city was supposedly deliberately flooded, and the statues of its gods were seized or destroyed by the Assyrians. Babylon eventually broke free of Assyrian rule following a war waged by a king named Nabopolassar (allied with an Iranian people called the Medians), and the Babylonians eventually conquered Nineveh, the Assyrian capital, in 612 B.C.
In Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar II began a major building and reconstruction program. "Babylon reached its greatest glory as a city during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II," SOAS University of London professor Andrew George wrote in a chapter of the book "Babylon: City of Wonders" (Oxford University Press, 2008). Religion played a key role. "At its heart were fourteen different sanctuaries, and another twenty-nine were distributed throughout the rest of the city. That was quite apart from the hundreds of street site chapels and shrines," George wrote.
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