They were stimulated or taught by what they saw in the south and by the empire of Ur, as well as by their own needs. The diffusion of civilized ways was already rapid. This makes it very hard to delineate and categorize the main processes of these centuries in a clear-cut way. Worse still, the Middle East was for long periods a great confusion of peoples, moving about for reasons we often do not understand. The Akkadians themselves had been one of them, pushing up originally from the great Semitic reservoir of Arabia to finish in Mesopotamia. The Gutians, who took part in the Akkadians’ overthrow, wernortherners.
The most successful of all of these peoples were the Amorites, a Semitic group which had spread far and wide and joined the Elamites to overthrow the armies of Ur and destroy its supremacy. They had established themselves in Assyria, or upper Mesopotamia, in Damascus, and in Babylon in a series of kingdoms which stretched as far as the coast of Palestine. Southern Mesopotamia, old Sumer, they continued to dispute with the Elamites. In Anatolia their neighbours were the Hittites, an Indo-European people who crossed from the Balkans in the third millennium. At the edges of this huge confusion stood another old civilization, Egypt, and the vigorous Indo-European peoples who had fi lled up Iran. The picture is a chaos; the area is a maelstrom of groups pushing into it from all sides. Patterns grow hard to distinguish.
One convenient landmark is provided by the appearance of a new empire in Mesopotamia, one which has left behind a famous name: Babylon. Another famous name is inseparably linked to it, that of one of its kings, Hammurabi. He would have a secure place in history if we knew nothing of him except his reputation as a law-giver; his code is the oldest statement of the legal principle of an eye for an eye. He was also the fi rst ruler to unify the whole of Mesopotamia, and though the empire was short-lived, the city of Babylon was to be from his time the symbolic centre of the Semitic peoples of the south. It began with the triumph of one Amorite tribe over its rivals in the confused period following the collapse of Ur. Hammurabi may have become ruler in 1792 BC ; his successors held things together until sometime after 1600 BC , when the Hittites destroyed Babylon and Mesopotamia was once more divided between rival peoples who fl owed into it from all sides.
At its height the fi rst Babylonian empire ran from Sumeria and the Persian Gulf north to Assyria, the upper part of Mesopotamia. Hammurabi ruled the cities of Nineveh and Nimrud on the Tigris, Mari high on the Euphrates, and controlled that river up to the point at which it is nearest to Aleppo. Seven hundred or so miles long and about a hundred miles wide, this was a great state, the greatest, indeed, to appear in the region up to this time, for the empire of Ur had been a looser, tributary affair. It had an elaborate administrative structure, and Hammurabi’s code of laws is justly famous, though it owes something of its pre-eminence to chance. As probably happened to earlier collections of judgments and rules which have only survived in fragments, Hammurabi’s was cut in stone and set up in the courtyard of temples for the public to consult.
But at greater length and in a more ordered way than earlier collections it assembled some 282 articles, dealing comprehensively with a wide range of questions: wages, divorce, fees for medical attention and many other matters. This was not legislation, but a declaration of existing law, and to speak of a ‘code’ may be misleading unless this is remembered. Hammurabi assembled rules already current; he did not create those laws de novo. This body of ‘common law’ long provided one of the major continuities of Mesopotamian history.
The family, land and commerce seem to be the main concerns of this compilation of rules. It gives a picture of a society already far beyond regulation by the ties of kindred, local community and the government of village headmen. By Hammurabi’s time the judicial process had emerged from the temple and non-priestly courts were the rule. In them sat the local town notables and from them appeals lay to Babylon and the king himself. Hammurabi’s stele (the stone pillar on which his code was carved) clearly stated that its aim was to assure justice by publishing the law: Let the oppressed man who has a cause Come into the presence of my statue And read carefully my inscribed stele.
Public Addressing Titles: Codes of Public Communications
