Mesopotamia II: Cities, Kings, and Empires

Look Closer · Primary SourceEnlarge

×

Human-headed winged bull (lamassu) · Assyrian, ca. 883–859 BCE
Assyrian kings set guardians like this at palace gates to show visitors the power of the empire.

Babylon was not always a great city. It started out as a fairly minor town founded around 1894 BCE, and for over a century it controlled only a small patch of land nearby. Everything changed in the eighteenth century BCE under King Hammurabi, who allied with the powerful Assyrians to the north, then used that security to conquer rival cities and build an empire stretching from near modern Aleppo down to the Persian Gulf. Hammurabi is best remembered for his law code, a list of legal rulings carved into stone pillars and displayed publicly so people could see how justice would be applied. The code split society into three groups, nobles, commoners, and enslaved people, and punishments differed depending on which group a person belonged to, showing how closely law and social class were linked in Babylon.

After centuries of ups and downs, Assyria reemerged as a major power around 900 BCE in what historians call the Neo-Assyrian Empire, growing into the dominant force in the Near East by 727 BCE. The Assyrians built their success on a highly trained, professional standing army that could fight year-round, unlike the farmer-soldiers of many rival kingdoms, combining spear fighters, archers, slingers, and horse-drawn chariots. This military strength let Assyrian kings build an empire larger than any before it in the region, but the Assyrians ruled through fear as much as force, using brutal public punishments and forcibly relocating conquered populations to discourage rebellion.

By the late seventh century BCE, two rising powers, Babylonia and Media, had grown strong enough to challenge Assyrian dominance. The Median and Babylonian armies destroyed the Assyrian capital of Asshur in 614 BCE and the great city of Nineveh in 612 BCE, ending the Assyrian Empire by 605 BCE. The victors then divided the conquered lands between them, the Medes taking territory to the east, the Neo-Babylonians taking the western lands including Syria and the Phoenician coast. This division marked the end of the Assyrian era and set the stage for the rise of the Persian Empire that followed.

Hammurabi's Code mattered as much for how it was shared as for what it said. Before it, justice often depended on the mood of a local ruler or on families taking revenge themselves. By writing the laws down and posting them in public, Hammurabi gave everyone in his empire, across many conquered cities, the same set of rules. That created unity, because people from different cities now lived under one law, and order, because punishments were known in advance rather than invented after the fact. Its famous principle of an eye for an eye set punishments to match crimes, and its idea that the state, not angry families, decides and carries out punishment is why historians credit the Babylonians with one of the greatest early influences on criminal justice systems.

New technology also reshaped warfare in the region. The Hittites, a people from Anatolia (modern Turkey) who even raided Babylon around 1595 BCE, were among the first to work iron on a large scale. Iron weapons were harder than bronze and made from a more common metal, so more soldiers could be armed, and the Assyrians later built their fearsome army around them. The Assyrians also valued knowledge: King Ashurbanipal gathered thousands of cuneiform tablets at Nineveh into one of the earliest known libraries.

Hammurabi's Code also shows that Babylonian justice was not equal. The same crime brought a different punishment depending on who was hurt. Injuring a noble brought the harshest penalty, injuring a commoner or a freed person brought a lighter one, and injuring an enslaved person brought the mildest punishment of all, often only a payment of silver to the enslaved person's owner. The code protected everyone a little, but it favored people from the higher social classes, a clear sign of the inequality built into Babylonian society.

Babylon rose again centuries later under the Neo-Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II, who rebuilt the city in grand style around 600 BCE. Ancient writers described the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, rising terraces of trees and flowers that the king reportedly built to remind his queen of the green, mountainous homeland she missed. Archaeologists have never found clear remains of the gardens, so some historians doubt they stood in Babylon at all. Still, the story shows how much ancient people appreciated their physical environment, and the gardens were counted among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

Adapted from Studio Aletheia's World Builders Academy curriculum library, drawing on classical world history resources on the ancient Near East.