Isin and Larsa
:-
During the collapse of Ur III,
Ishbi-Erra established himself in Isin and
founded a dynasty there that lasted from 2017 to 1794. His example was
followed elsewhere by local rulers, as in Der,
Eshnunna, Sippar, Kish, and
Larsa. In many localities an urge was felt to imitate the
model of Ur; Isin probably took over
unchanged the administrative system of that state.
Ishbi-Erra and his successors had themselves
deified, as did one of the rulers of Der, on the
Iranian border. For almost a century Isin
predominated within the mosaic of states that were slowly reemerging.
Overseas trade revived after Ishbi-Erra had driven out
the Elamite garrison from Ur, and under
his successor, Shu-ilishu, a statue of the moon god
Nanna, the city god of Ur, was recovered
from the Elamites, who had carried it off. Up to the
reign of Lipit-Ishtar (c. 1934-c. 1924), the rulers of
Isin so resembled those of Ur, as far as
the king's assessment of himself in the hymns is concerned, that it seems
almost arbitrary to postulate a break between Ibbi-Sin
and Ishbi-Erra. As a further example of continuity it
might be added that the Code of Lipit-Ishtar stands
exactly midway chronologically between the Code of Ur-Nammu
and the Code of Hammurabi. Yet it is much closer to the
former in language and especially in legal philosophy
than to Hammurabi's compilation of judgments. For
example, the Code of Lipit-Ishtar does not know the lex
talionis "an eye for an eye and a tooth
for a tooth", the guiding principle of Hammurabi's
penal law.
Political
fragmentation :-
It is probable that the definitive separation from
Ur III came about through changing components of the
population, from "Sumerians and Akkadians" to "Akkadians
and Amorites." An Old Babylonian liver omen
states that "he of the steppes will enter, and
chase out the one in the city." This is indeed an abbreviated
formula for an event that took place more than once: the usurpation of the
king's throne in the city by the "sheikh" of some
Amorite tribe. These usurpations were regularly carried out as
part of the respective tribes became settled, although this was not so in
the case of Isin because the house of Ishbi-Erra
came from Mari and was of Akkadian
origin, to judge by the rulers' names. By the same linguistic token the
dynasty of Larsa was Amorite. The
fifth ruler of the latter dynasty, Gungunum
(ruled c. 1932-c. 1906), conquered Ur and established
himself as the equal and rival of Isin; at this
stage--the end of the 20th century BC--if not before, Ur
had certainly outlived itself. From Gungunum until the
temporary unification of Mesopotamia under
Hammurabi, the political picture was determined by the
disintegration of the balance of power, by incessant vacillation of
alliances, by the presumption of the various rulers, by the fear of
encroachments by the Amorite nomads, and by increasingly
wretched social conditions. The extensive archive of correspondence from
the royal palace of Mari (c. 1810-1750) is the best
source of information about the political and diplomatic game and its
rules, whether honored or broken; it covers treaties, the dispatch and
reception of embassies, agreements about the integration of allied armies,
espionage, and "situation reports" from "foreign" courts.
Devoid of exaggeration or stylization, these letters, dealing as they do
with everyday events, are preferable to the numerous royal inscriptions on
buildings, even when the latter contain historical allusions.
Literary texts
and increasing decentralization :-
Another indirect but far from negligible source for the
political and socioeconomic situation in
the 20th-18th centuries BC is the literature of omens.
These are long compendiums in which the condition of a
sheep's liver or some other divinatory
object (for instance, the behavior of a drop of oil in a beaker
filled with water, the appearance of a newborn baby,
and the shape of rising clouds of incense) is described
at length and commented on with the appropriate prediction: "The king will
kill his dignitaries and distribute their houses and property among the
temples"; "A powerful man will ascend the throne in a foreign city"; "The
land that rose up against its shepherd' will continue to be ruled by that
shepherd'"; "The king will depose his chancellor"; and "They will lock the
city gate and there will be a calamity in the city."
Beginning with Gungunum of Larsa, the
texts allow greater insight into the private sector than
in any other previous period. There is a considerable increase in the
number of private contracts and private correspondences. Especially
frequent among the private contracts are those concluded about loans of
silver or grain (barley), illustrating
the common man's plight, especially when driven to seek out a creditor,
the first step on a road that in many instances led to ruin. The rate of
interest, fixed at 20 percent in the case of silver and
33 percent in that of grain, increased further if the
deadline for repayment, usually at harvest time, was not
kept. Insolvency resulted in imprisonment for debt,
slavery by mortgage, and even the sale of children and
the debtor's own person. Many private letters contain entreaties for the
release of family members from imprisonment at the creditor's hands. Yet
considerable fortunes were also made, in "liquid" capital
as well as landed property. As these tendencies threatened to end in
economic disaster, the kings prescribed as a corrective
the liquidation of debts, by way of temporary alleviation at least. The
exact wording of one such decree is known from the time of
Ammisaduqa of Babylon.
Until the Ur III period, the only
archives so far recovered dealt with temples or the
palace. However, belonging to the Old Babylonian
period, along with documents pertaining to civil law,
were an increasing number of administrative records of
privately managed households, inns, and farms:
settlements of accounts, receipts, and notes on various transactions. Here
was clearly a regular bourgeoisie, disposing of its own
land and possessing means independent of temple and
palace. Trade, too, was now chiefly in
private hands; the merchant traveled (or sent his partners) at his own
risk, not on behalf of the state. Among the
civil-law contracts there was a substantial increase in records
of land purchases. Also significant for the economic
situation in the Old Babylonian era was a process that
might be summarized as "secularization of the temples,"
even if all the stages of this development cannot be traced. The
palace had probably possessed for centuries the authority to
dispose of temple property, but, whereas
UruKAgina of Lagash had still branded the
tendency as leading to abuses, the citizen's relationship to the
temple now took on individual traits. Revenues from certain
priestly offices--benefices, in other words--went to private individuals
and were sold and inherited. The process had begun in Ur,
where the king bestowed benefices, although the recipients could not own
them. The archives of the "canonesses" of the sun god of
Sippar furnish r a particularly striking example of the
fusion of religious service and private economic
interest. These women, who lived in a convent called
gagûm, came from the city's leading families and were not
allowed to marry. With their property, consisting of land
and silver, they engaged in a lively and remunerative
business by granting loans and leasing out fields.
The tendency toward decentralization
had begun in the Old Babylonian period with Isin.
It concluded with the 72-year reign of the house of Kudur-Mabuk
in Larsa (c. 1834-c. 1763). Kudur-Mabuk,
sheikh of the Amorite tribe of the Jamutbal,
despite his Elamite name, helped his son Warad-Sin
to secure the throne. This usurpation allowed Larsa,
which had passed through a period of internal unrest, to flourish one more
time. Under Warad-Sin and in the long reign of his
brother Rim-Sin, large portions of southern
Babylonia, including Nippur, were once again
united in one state of Larsa in 1794. Larsa
was conquered by Hammurabi in 1763.
Political
fortunes :-
Hammurabi (c. 1792-c. 1750 BC) is
surely the most impressive and by now the best-known figure of the ancient
Middle East of the first half of the 2nd millennium BC. He owes his
posthumous reputation to the great stela into which the Code of
Hammurabi was carved and indirectly also to the fact that his
dynasty has made the name of Babylon famous for all time.
In much the same way in which pre-Sargonic Kish
exemplified the non-Sumerian area north of Sumer
and Akkad lent its name to a country and a language,
Babylon became the symbol of the whole country that the
Greeks called Babylonia. This term is used
anachronistically by Assyriologists as a geographic concept
in reference to the period before Hammurabi. Originally
the city's name was probably Babilla, which was
reinterpreted in popular etymology as Bab-ili "Gate
of the God".
The 1st dynasty of Babylon rose from
insignificant beginnings. The history of the erstwhile province of
Ur is traceable from about 1894 onward, when the Amorite
Sumuabum came to power there. What is known of these events fits
altogether into the modest proportions of the period when
Mesopotamia was a mosaic of small states. Hammurabi
played skillfully on the instrument of coalitions and became more powerful
than his predecessors had been. Nonetheless, it was only in the 30th year
of his reign, after his conquest of Larsa, that he gave
concrete expression to the idea of ruling all of southern
Mesopotamia by "strengthening the foundations of Sumer
and Akkad," in the words of that year's dating formula. In the
prologue to the Code of Hammurabi the king lists
the following cities as belonging to his dominions: Eridu,
Ur, Lagash and Girsu,
Zabalam, Larsa, Uruk,
Adab, Isin, Nippur,
Keshi, Dilbat, Borsippa,
Babylon itself, Kish, Malgium,
Mashkan-shapir, Kutha, Sippar,
Eshnunna in the Diyala region,
Mari, Tuttul on the lower Balikh
(a tributary of the Euphrates), and finally Ashur
and Nineveh. This was on a scale reminiscent of
Akkad or Ur III. Yet Ashur and
Nineveh cannot have formed part of this empire for long
because at the end of Hammurabi's reign mention is made
again of wars against Subartu [in
Assyria].
Under Hammurabi's son
Samsuiluna (c. 1749-c. 1712 BC) the Babylonian empire
greatly shrank in size. Following what had almost become a tradition, the
south rose up in revolt. Larsa regained its autonomy for
some time, and the walls of Ur, Uruk,
and Larsa were leveled. Eshnunna, which
evidently had also seceded, was vanquished about 1730. Later chronicles
mention the existence of a state in the Sealand, with its
own dynasty (by "Sealand" is understood the
marshlands of southern Babylonia). Knowledge of
this new dynasty is unfortunately very vague, only one of its kings being
documented in contemporary texts. About 1741 Samsuiluna
mentions the Kassites for the first time; about 1726 he
constructed a stronghold, "Fort Samsuiluna," as a bulwark
against them on the Diyala near its confluence with the
Tigris.
Like the Gutians before them, the
Kassites were at first prevented from entering
Babylonia and pushed into the mid-Euphrates
region; there, in the kingdom of Khana (centered on
Mari and Terqa, both below the junction
with the Khabur River), a king appears with the
Kassite name of Kashtiliashu, who ruled toward
the end of the Babylonian dynasty. From Khana
the Kassites moved south in small groups, probably as
harvest workers. After the Hittite invasion under
Mursilis I, who is said to have dethroned the last king of
Babylon, Samsuditana, in 1595, the
Kassites assumed the royal power in Babylonia.
So far, the contemporary sources do not mention this epoch, and the
question remains unresolved as to how the Kassite rulers
named in king lists mesh with the end of the 2nd millennium BC.
Babylonian
literature :-
The literature and the literary languages of
Babylonia during the three centuries following Ur III
deserve attention. When commenting on literary and historical texts such
as the inscriptions of the kings of Akkad, it was pointed
out that these were not originals but copies of Old Babylonian
vintage. So far, such copies are the main source for Sumerian
literature. Yet, while the Old Babylonian period
witnessed the creation of much literature (royal hymns of the kings of
Isin, Larsa, and Babylon
and elegies), it was above all a time of intensive cultivation of
traditional literature. The great Sumerian poems, whose
origins or first written version, respectively, can now be traced back to
about 2600, were copied again and again. After 2000, when Sumerian
as a spoken language rapidly receded to isolated regions and eventually
disappeared altogether, texts began to be translated, line by line, into
Akkadian until there came to be bilingual versions. An
important part of this, especially in the instructional program in
schools, were the so-called lexicographical texts.
Sumerian word lists are almost as old as
cuneiform writing itself; they formed the perfect material for
those learning to write. In the Old Babylonian period,
the individual lexical entries were translated and often
annotated with phonetic signs. This led to the creation
of "dictionaries," the value of which to the modern
philologist cannot be exaggerated. Since Sumerian had to
be taught much more than before, regular "grammatical treatises"
also came into being: so far as it was possible, in view of the radically
different structures of the two languages, Sumerian
pronouns, verb forms, and the like were translated into Akkadian,
including entire "paradigms" of individual verbs.
In belles letters, Sumerian still
predominates, although there is no lack of Akkadian
masterpieces, including the oldest Akkadian version of
the epic of Gilgamesh. The very high prestige still
enjoyed by Sumerian should not be underestimated, and it
continued to be used for inscriptions on buildings and the yearly dating
formulas. Aside from being the language of practical affairs
(i.e., letters and contracts), there was
a high incidence of Akkadian in soothsaying and
divinatory literature. To be sure, the Sumerians
also practiced foretelling the future from the examination of animal
entrails, but as far as is known they did not write down the results. In
Akkadian, on the other hand, there are extensive and "scientifically"
arranged compendiums of omens based on the liver (as well
as other omens), reflecting the importance that the divination of the
future had in religion, in politics, and
in all aspects of daily life.
Judging by its increasingly refined juridical
thought, its ability to master in writing ever more complicated
administrative procedures, its advanced knowledge of
mathematics, and the fact that it marks the beginning of the
study of astronomy, the Old Babylonian
period appears to have been a time of exceedingly active
intellectual Endeavour--despite, if not because of, its lack of
political cohesiveness.
Babylonian law
:-
The Code of Hammurabi is the most
frequently cited cuneiform document in specialized literature. Its first
scholarly publication in 1902 led to the development of a special branch
of comparative jurisprudence, the study of cuneiform law.
Following the division made by the first editor, Jean-Vincent
Scheil, the Code of Hammurabi contains
280 judgments, or "paragraphs," on civil
and criminal law, dealing in the main with cases from
everyday life in such a manner that it becomes obvious that the "lawgiver"
or compiler had no intention of covering all possible contingencies. In
broad outline, the themes treated in the Code of Hammurabi
are libel; corrupt administration of justice;
theft, receiving stolen goods, robbery,
looting, and burglary; murder,
manslaughter, and bodily injury;
abduction; judicature of tax lessees;
liability for negligent damage to fields and crop damage caused by grazing
cattle; illegal felling of palm trees;
legal problems of trade enterprises, in particular, the
relationship between the merchant and his employee traveling
overland, and embezzlement of merchandise;
trust monies; the proportion of interest to loan
money; the legal position of the female publican;
slavery and ransom, slavery for debt,
runaway slaves, the sale and manumission of
slaves, and the contesting of slave status;
the rent of persons, animals, and
ships and their respective tariffs,
offenses committed by hired laborers, and the
vicious bull; family law: the price of a
bride, dowry, the married woman's
property, wife and concubine, and the
legal position of the respective issue, divorce,
adoption, the wet nurse's contract, and
inheritance; and the legal position of certain
priestesses.
A similar if much shorter compendium of
judgments, probably antedating that of Hammurabi
by a generation or two, has been discovered in Eshnunna.
Hammurabi, who called his own work
dinat misarim, or "verdicts of the just order,"
states in the epilogue that it was intended as legal aid for
persons in search of advice. Whether these judgments were meant
to have binding force in the sense of modern statutes, however, is a
matter of controversy. The Code of Hammurabi differs in
many respects from the Code of Lipit-Ishtar, which was
written in Sumerian. Its most striking feature lies in
the extraordinary severity of its penalties
and in the principle of the lex talionis. The same
attitude is reflected in various Old Babylonian contracts
in which defaulters are threatened with bodily punishment.
It is often said, and perhaps rightly so, that this severity,
which so contrasts with Sumerian judicial tradition, can
be traced back to the Amorite influence. There is yet
another way in which the Code of Hammurabi has given rise
to much discussion. Many of its "paragraphs" vary
according to whether the case concerns an awilum, a
muskenum, or a wardum. A threefold
division of the populace had been postulated on the basis of these
distinctions. The wardum is the least problematic: he is
the slave--that is, a person in bondage who could be bought and sold,
unless he was able to regain his freedom under certain
conditions as a debtor-slave. The muskenum
were, under King Hammurabi at least, persons employed by
the palace who could be given land in usufruct without
receiving it as property. Awilum were the
citizens who owned land in their own right and depended neither
on the palace nor on the temple. As the
Soviet scholar Igor M. Diakonov has
pointed out, the distinction cannot have been very sharply drawn, because
the classes awilum and muskenum are not
mutually exclusive: a man in high palace office could fairly easily
purchase land as private property, whereas the free citizen who got into
debt as a result of a bad harvest or some other misfortune had one foot in
the slave class. Still unanswered is the question as to which segment of
the population could be conscripted to do public works, a
term that included the levy in case of war.
Ammisaduqa (c. 1646-c. 1626 BC) comes
a century and a half after Hammurabi. His edict, already
referred to, lists, among others, the following social
and economic factors: private debts in silver
and grain, if arising out of loans, were
canceled; also canceled were back taxes that certain officials owed the
palace and that had to be collected from the people; the
female publican had to renounce the collection of
outstanding debts in beer and barley and
was, in turn, excused from paying amounts of silver and
barley to the king; taxes on leased property
were reduced; debt slaves who had formerly been free (as
against slaves made over from debtor to creditor) were ransomed; and high
officials were forbidden on pain of death to press those who held property
in fee into harvest work by prepayment of wages. The phrase "because
the king gave the land a just order" serves as a rationale for
many of these instances. In contrast to the codes, about
whose binding force there is much doubt, edicts such as those of
Ammisaduqa had legal validity since there are references to the
edicts of other kings in numerous legal documents of the
Old Babylonian period.
The Kassites,
the Mitanni, and the rise of Assyria :-
About 150 years after the death of Hammurabi,
his dynasty was destroyed by an invasion of new peoples. Because there are
very few written records from this era, the time from about 1560 BC to
about 1440 BC (in some areas until 1400 BC) is called the dark
ages. The remaining Semitic states, such as the
state of Ashur, became minor states within the sphere of
influence of the new states of the Kassites and the
Hurrians/Mitanni. The languages of the older cultures,
Akkadian and Sumerian, continued or were
soon reestablished, however. The cuneiform script
persisted as the only type of writing in the entire area. Cultural
continuity was not broken off, either, particularly in Babylonia.
A matter of importance was the emergence of new Semitic
leading classes from the ranks of the priesthood and the
scribes. These gained increasing power.
The Hurrians :-
The Hurrians enter the orbit of
ancient Middle Eastern civilization toward the end of the 3rd
millennium BC. They arrived in Mesopotamia from
the north or the east, but it is not
known how long they had lived in the peripheral regions. There is a brief
inscription in Hurrian language from the end of the
period of Akkad, while that of King Arishen
(or Atalshen) of Urkish and Nawar is
written in Akkadian. The language of the Hurrians
must have belonged to a widespread group of ancient Middle Eastern
languages. The relationship between Hurrian and
Subarean has already been mentioned, and the language of the
Urartians, who played an important role from the end of
the 2nd millennium to the 8th century BC, is likewise closely related to
Hurrian. According to the Soviet
scholars Igor M. Diakonov and Sergei A. Starostin,
the Eastern Caucasian languages are an offshoot of the
Hurrian-Urartian group.
It is not known whether the migrations of the
Hurrians ever took the form of aggressive invasion;
18th-century-BC texts from Mari speak of battles with the
Hurrian tribe of Turukku south of
Lake Urmia (some 150 miles from the Caspian Sea's
southwest corner), but these were mountain campaigns, not the warding off
of an offensive. Proper names in cuneiform texts, their
frequency increasing in the period of Ur III, constitute
the chief evidence for the presence of Hurrians.
Nevertheless, there is no clear indication that the Hurrians
had already advanced west of the Tigris at that time. An
entirely different picture results from the 18th-century palace
archives of Mari and from texts originating near
the upper Khabur River. Northern Mesopotamia,
west of the Tigris, and Syria appear
settled by a population that is mainly Amorite and
Hurrian; and the latter had already reached the
Mediterranean littoral, as shown by texts from Alalakh
on the Orontes. In Mari, literary texts
in Hurrian also have been found, indicating that
Hurrian had by then become a fully developed written
language as well.
The high point of the Hurrian period
was not reached until about the middle of the 2nd millennium. In the 15th
century, Alalakh was heavily Hurrianized;
and in the empire of Mitanni the Hurrians
represented the leading and perhaps the most numerous population group.
The Kassites in
Babylonia :-
The Kassites had settled by
1800 BC in what is now western Iran in the
region of Hamadan-Kermanshah. The first to feel their
forward thrust was Samsuiluna, who had to repel groups of
Kassite invaders. Increasing numbers of Kassites
gradually reached Babylonia and other parts of
Mesopotamia. There they founded principalities,
of which little is known. No inscription or document in
the Kassite language has been preserved. Some 300
Kassite words have been found in Babylonian
documents. Nor is much known about the social structure
of the Kassites or their culture. There seems to have
been no hereditary kingdom. Their religion
was polytheistic; the names of some 30 gods are known.
The beginning of Kassite rule in
Babylonia cannot be dated exactly. A king called
Agum II ruled over a state that stretched from western
Iran to the middle part of the Euphrates valley;
24 years after the Hittites had carried off the statue of
the Babylonian god Marduk, he regained
possession of the statue, brought it back to Babylon, and
renewed the cult, making the god Marduk the equal of the
corresponding Kassite god, Shuqamuna.
Meanwhile, native princes continued to reign in
southern Babylonia. It may have been Ulamburiash
who finally annexed this area around 1450 and began negotiations with
Egypt in Syria. Karaindash
built a temple with bas-relief tile ornaments in Uruk
around 1420. A new capital west of Baghdad, Dur
Kurigalzu, competing with Babylon, was founded
and named after Kurigalzu I (c. 1400-c. 1375). His
successors Kadashman-Enlil I (c. 1375-c. 1360) and
Burnaburiash II (c. 1360-c. 1333) were in correspondence
with the Egyptian rulers Amenhotep III
and Akhenaton (Amenhotep IV). They were interested in
trading their lapis lazuli and other items for
gold as well as in planning political marriages.
Kurigalzu II (c. 1332-c. 1308) fought against the
Assyrians but was defeated by them. His successors sought to ally
themselves with the Hittites in order to stop the
expansion of the Assyrians. During the reign of
Kashtiliash IV (c. 1232-c. 1225), Babylonia
waged war on two fronts at the same time--against Elam
and Assyria--ending in the catastrophic invasion and
destruction of Babylon by Tukulti-Ninurta I.
Not until the time of the kings Adad-shum-usur (c.
1216-c. 1187) and Melishipak (c. 1186-c. 1172) was
Babylon able to experience a period of prosperity and
peace. Their successors were again forced to fight, facing the conqueror
King Shutruk-Nahhunte of Elam (c.
1185-c. 1155). Cruel and fierce, the Elamites finally
destroyed the dynasty of the Kassites during these wars
(about 1155). Some poetical works lament this catastrophe.
Letters and documents of the time after 1380 show that
many things had changed after the Kassites took power.
The Kassite upper class, always a small minority, had
been largely "Babylonianized." Babylonian names
were to be found even among the royalty, and they
predominated among the civil servants and the
officers. The new feudal character of the social structure showed
the influence of the Kassites. Babylonian
town life had revived on the basis of commerce and
handicrafts. The Kassitic nobility,
however, maintained the upper hand in the rural areas, their wealthiest
representatives holding very large landed estates. Many of these holdings
came from donations of the king to deserving officers and civil servants,
considerable privileges being connected with such grants. From the time of
Kurigalzu II these were registered on stone tablets or,
more frequently, on boundary stones called kudurrus.
After 1200 the number of these increased substantially, because the kings
needed a steadily growing retinue of loyal followers. The boundary stones
had pictures in bas-relief, very often a multitude of religious
symbols, and frequently contained detailed inscriptions giving
the borders of the particular estate; sometimes the deserts of the
recipient were listed and his privileges recorded; finally, trespassers
were threatened with the most terrifying curses. Agriculture
and cattle husbandry were the main pursuits on these
estates, and horses were raised for the light war
chariots of the cavalry. There was an
export trade in horses and vehicles
in exchange for raw material. As for the king, the idea
of the social-minded ruler continued to be valid.
The decline of Babylonian
culture at the end of the Old Babylonian period
continued for some time under the Kassites. Not until
approximately 1420 did the Kassites develop a distinctive
style in architecture and sculpture.
Kurigalzu I played an important part, especially in
Ur, as a patron of the building arts. Poetry
and scientific literature developed only gradually after
1400. The existence of earlier work is clear from poetry,
philological lists, and collections of omens
and signs that were in existence by the 14th century or before and that
have been discovered in the Hittite capital of
Hattusa, in the Syrian capital of Ugarit,
and even as far away as Palestine. Somewhat later,
new writings appear: medical diagnoses
and recipes, more Sumero-Akkadian word
lists, and collections of astrological and other
omens and signs with their interpretations. Most
of these works are known today only from copies of more recent date. The
most important is the Babylonian epic of the creation of
the world, Enuma elish. Composed by an unknown poet,
probably in the 14th century, it tells the story of the god Marduk.
He began as the god of Babylon and was elevated to be
king over all other gods after having successfully accomplished the
destruction of the powers of chaos. For almost 1,000
years this epic was recited during the New Year's festival
in the spring as part of the Marduk cult
in Babylon. The literature of this time contains very few
Kassitic words. Many scholars believe that the essential
groundwork for the development of the subsequent Babylonian
culture was laid during the later epoch of the Kassite
era.
Babylonia under
the 2nd dynasty of Isin :-
In a series of heavy wars about which not much is
known, Marduk-kabit-ahheshu (c. 1152-c. 1135) established
what came to be known as the 2nd dynasty of Isin. His
successors were often forced to continue the fighting. The most famous
king of the dynasty was Nebuchadrezzar I (Nabu-kudurri-usur;
c. 1119-c. 1098). He fought mainly against Elam, which
had conquered and ravaged a large part of Babylonia. His
first attack miscarried because of an epidemic among his troops, but in a
later campaign he conquered Susa, the capital of
Elam, and returned the previously removed statue of the god
Marduk to its proper place. Soon thereafter the king of
Elam was assassinated, and his kingdom once again fell
apart into small states. This enabled Nebuchadrezzar to
turn west, using the later years of peace to start extensive building
projects. After him, his son became king, succeeded by his brother
Marduk-nadin-ahhe (c. 1093-c. 1076). At first successful in his
wars against Assyria, he later experienced heavy defeat.
A famine of catastrophic proportions triggered an attack from
Aramaean tribes, the ultimate blow. His successors made peace
with Assyria, but the country suffered more and more from
repeated attacks by Aramaeans and other Semitic
nomads. Even though some of the kings still assumed grand titles, they
were unable to stem the progressive disintegration of their empire. There
followed the era known as the 2nd dynasty of the Sealand
(c. 1020-c. 1000), which included three usurpers. The first of these had
the Kassitic name of Simbar-Shihu (or
Simbar-Shipak; c. 1020-c. 1003).
Toward the end of its reign, the dynasty of the
Kassites became completely Babylonianized. The
changeover to the dynasty of Isin, actually a succession
of kings from different families, brought no essential
transformation of the social structure. The feudal order
remained. New landed estates came into existence in many places through
grants to deserving officers; many boundary stones (kudurrus)
have been found that describe them. The cities of Babylonia
retained much of their former autonomy. The border
provinces, however, were administered by royally appointed governors with
civil and military functions.
In the literary arts this was a period
of creativity; thus the later Babylonians with good
reason regarded the time of Nebuchadrezzar I as one of
the great eras of their history. A heroic epic, modeled upon older
epics, celebrates the deeds of Nebuchadrezzar I,
but unfortunately little of it is extant. Other material comes from the
ancient myths. The poet of the later version of the epic of
Gilgamesh, Sin-leqe-unnini (c. 1150-?) of
Uruk, is known by name. This version of the epic is known
as the Twelve-Tablet Poem; it contains about 3,000
verses. It is distinguished by its greater emphasis on the human qualities
of Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu; this
quality makes it one of the great works of world literature.
Another poet active at about the same time was the
author of a poem of 480 verses called Ludlul bel nemeqi
("Let Me Praise the Possessor of Wisdom"). The poem
meditates on the workings of divine justice, which
sometimes appear strange and inexplicable to suffering human beings; this
subject had acquired an increasing importance in the contemporary religion
of Babylon. The poem describes the multifarious
sufferings of a high official and his subsequent
salvation by the god Marduk.
The gradual reduction of the Sumerian pantheon
of about 2,000 gods by the identification and integration of originally
distinct gods and goddesses of similar functions resulted in a growing
number of surnames or compound names for the main gods (Marduk,
for example, had about 50 such names) and later in a conception of "the
god" and "the goddess" with interchangeable
names in the cults of the great temples. There was a theology of
identifications of gods, which was documented by god lists
in two columns with hundreds of entries in the form "Enzag
= Nabû of (the island of) Dilmun," as
well as by many hymns and prayers of the time and by later compositions.
As a consequence of the distinction of an enormous
number of multifarious sins, the concept of a universal sinfulness
of mankind is increasingly observed in this period and
later. All human beings, therefore, were believed to be in need of the
forgiveness afforded by the deities to sincere worshipers.
Outside of Israel, the concept of sinfulness
can be found in ancient times only in Babylonia
and Assyria.
The Hurrian and Mitanni kingdoms
The weakening of the Semitic states in
Mesopotamia after 1550 enabled the Hurrians
to penetrate deeper into this region, where they founded numerous small
states in the eastern parts of Anatolia,
Mesopotamia, and Syria. The Hurrians
came from northwestern Iran, but until recently very
little was known about their early history. After 1500, isolated dynasties
appeared with Indo- Aryan names, but the significance of
this is disputed. The presence of Old Indian technical
terms in later records about horse breeding and the use
of the names of Indian gods (such as, for example,
Indra and Varuna) in some compacts of
state formerly led several scholars to assume that numerous groups of
Aryans, closely related to the Indians,
pushed into Anatolia from the northeast.
They were also credited with the introduction of the light war chariot
with spoken wheels. This conclusion, however, is by no means established
fact. So far it has not been possible to appraise the numbers and the
political and cultural influence of the Aryans in
Anatolia and Mesopotamia relative to those of the
Hurrians.
Some time after 1500 the kingdom of Mitanni
(or Mittani) arose near the sources of the Khabur River
in Mesopotamia. Since no record or inscription of their
kings has been unearthed, little is known about the development and
history of the Mitanni kingdom before King
Tushratta. The Mitanni empire was known to the
Egyptians under the name of Naharina,
and Thutmose III fought frequently against it after 1460
BC. By 1420 the domain of the Mitanni king
Saustatar (Saushatar) stretched from the Mediterranean
all the way to the northern Zagros Mountains, in western
Iran, including Alalakh, in northern
Syria, as well as Nuzi,
Kurrukhanni, and Arrapkha. The northern boundary
dividing Mitanni from the Hittites and
the other Hurrian states was never fixed, even under
Saustatar's successors Artatama I and
Shuttarna II, who married their daughters to the pharaohs
Thutmose IV (1400-1390) and Amenhotep III
(1390-1353). Tushratta (c. 1365-c. 1330), the
son of Shuttarna, was able to maintain the kingdom he had
inherited for many years. In his sometimes very long letters--one of them
written in Hurrian--to Amenhotep III and
Akhenaton (1353-1336), he wrote about commerce,
his desire for gold, and marriage.
Weakened by internal strife, the Mitanni kingdom
eventually became a pawn between the rising kingdoms of the
Hittites and the Assyrians.
The kingdom of Mitanni was a
feudal state led by a warrior nobility of Aryan
or Hurrian origin. Frequently horses
were bred on their large landed estates. Documents and contract agreements
in Syria often mention a chariot-warrior
caste that also constituted the social upper class in the cities. The
aristocratic families usually received their landed property as an
inalienable fief. Consequently, no documents on the selling of landed
property are to be found in the great archives of Akkadian
documents and letters discovered in Nuzi, near
Kirkuk. The prohibition against selling landed property was often
dodged, however, with a stratagem: the previous owner "adopted"
a willing buyer against an appropriate sum of money. The wealthy lord
Tehiptilla was "adopted" almost 200
times, acquiring tremendous holdings of landed property in this way
without interference by the local governmental authorities. He had gained
his wealth through trade and commerce
and through a productive two-field system of agriculture
(in which each field was cultivated only once in two years). For a long
time, Prince Shilwa-Teshub was in charge of the royal
governmental administration in the district capital. Sheep
breeding was the basis for a woolen industry,
and textiles collected by the palace
were exported on a large scale. Society was highly
structured in classes, ranks, and
professions. The judiciary, patterned
after the Babylonian model, was well organized; the
documents place heavy emphasis on correct procedure.
Native sources on the religion of the Hurrians
of the Mitanni kingdom are limited; about their
mythology, however, much is known from related Hittite
and Ugaritic myths. Like the other peoples of the ancient
Middle East, the Hurrians worshiped gods of various
origins. The king of the gods was the weather god Teshub.
According to the myths, he violently deposed his father Kumarbi;
in this respect he resembled the Greek god Zeus,
who deposed his father Kronos. The war chariot of
Teshub was drawn by the bull gods Seris ("Day")
and Hurris ("Night"). Major sanctuaries
of Teshub were located at Arrapkha
(modern Kirkuk) and at Halab (modern
Aleppo) in Syria. In the east his
consort was the goddess of love and war Shaushka, and in
the west the goddess Hebat (Hepat); both were similar to
the Ishtar-Astarte of the Semites.
The sun god Shimegi and the moon god
Kushuh, whose consort was Nikkal, the
Ningal of the Sumerians, were of lesser
rank. More important was the position of the Babylonian
god of war and the underworld, Nergal. In northern
Syria the god of war Astapi and the
goddess of oaths Ishara are attested as early as the 3rd
millennium BC.
In addition, a considerable importance was attributed
to impersonal numina such as heaven and earth
as well as to deities of mountains and rivers.
In the myths the terrible aspect of the gods often prevails over
indications of a benevolent attitude. The cults of sacrifices and other
rites are similar to those known from the neighboring countries; many
Hurrian rituals were found in Hittite Anatolia.
There is abundant evidence for magic and oracles.
Temple monuments of modest dimensions have been
unearthed; in all probability, specific local traditions were a factor in
their design. The dead were probably buried outside the settlement. Small
artifacts, particularly seals, show a peculiar
continuation of Babylonian and Assyrian
traditions in their preference for the naturalistic representation of
figures. There were painted ceramics with finely drawn decorations (white
on a dark background). The strong position of the royal house was evident
in the large palaces, existing even in district capitals. The palaces were
decorated with frescoes. Because only a few Mitanni
settlements have been unearthed in Mesopotamia, knowledge
of Mitanni arts and culture is as yet
insufficient.
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