In the 1st half of the 2nd millennium BC, the center of gravity moved northward, and it was the city of Babylon in Central Mesopotamia that under an Amorite dynasty for the first time acquired hegemony over the lands of Sumer and Akkad. Its king Hammurabi (around 1700 BC) became especially renowned; he ordered an extensive law code to be set up, known to us from a famous inscription. Hammurabi’s laws are not the oldest ones known, for we
Figure 7 Stele with the Code of Hammurabi (1728-1686 BC). A stele of black basalt, found in Susa, the old capital of Elam, now in the Louvre in Paris, and carrying the Code of Hammurabi. Not long after the end of Hammurabi’s reign, Babylon was captured and plundered by the Elamites, and on that occasion this copy of the Code of Hammurabi must have been carried to Susa. Part of the cuneiform text was removed, but comparison with other copies enables us to reconstruct most of the code, which comprises almost 300 laws. The relief on the Louvre stele shows the Babylonian king standing in front of the enthroned sun god Shamash. In Mesopotamia (and later in the Greco-Roman world), the aU-seeing sun was associated with the idea of justice. The god is depicted as a king, and the king as his humble servant. Photo: De Agostini/SuperStock
Possess parts of the legal codes of some Sumerian kings from the 3rd millennium BC. In comparison with these older law codes, there is in some respects even a certain regression in Hammurabi’s code. For instance, the laws of Hammurabi prescribe corporal punishments and acknowledge the principle of “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,” whereas for many such cases in Sumerian law fines had been deemed sufficient. But Hammurabi’s law code is the most detailed and presents the historian with a lot of information on social and economic life in Mesopotamia in his times, especially, the many rules on selling and buying, renting, leasing and borrowing, inheritance, and so on. Private property and individual freedom of action were not a given in this period, for in near-contemporary Mari on the middle Euphrates, the economy was centralized, with the royal palace, like the temple in the older Sumerian cities, dictating the various tasks of a large part of the population and regulating and distributing the products of agriculture and handicrafts.
The empire of Hammurabi did not last long. Babylonian power came to an end through new incursions of mountainous peoples from the northeast and invasions of the Elamites, a pre-Indo-European people in Southwest Iran from the area surrounding the city of Susa, whose civilization had developed parallel with and roughly over the same period as the civilizations of Sumer and Akkad, with which there were great similarities. From around 1600 BC, a period began in which South and Central Mesopotamia were politically surpassed by neighboring powers that had often derived important elements of their civilization from southern Mesopotamia: in the east, the Elamites already mentioned; to the north, along the Tigris, the Semitic kingdom of Assyria; to the northwest, the kingdom of Mitanni, where an Indo-European aristocracy of chariot-fighters dominated an indigenous population ofHurrites; and further to the northwest in Anatolia, the Hittites, mainly Indo-European but with an admixture of Hurrites, ruling over older inhabitants of the region. Between these kingdoms, a system of “international relations” developed, with political coalitions and concerns about a “balance of power.” Soon, Egypt too for the first time got involved in this international system as a result of its ongoing efforts from around 1500 BC to control the eastern Mediterranean coastlands of Palestine, Phoenicia, and Syria.
Egypt
Shortly after 3000 BC, Egypt had already become a unitary state ruled by a king, the pharaoh. The names of the kings survived in lists composed in the “sacred script” (the literal meaning of the Greek term “hieroglyphics”) that was developed about the same time. The texts on the inner walls of the pharaoh’s funeral chamber were written in this script. Much later, after Egypt had been conquered by Macedonians and Greeks, these royal names would be grouped into dynasties of succeeding royal houses, 30 in all. Under the first two dynasties, the unification of the land was consolidated, with the kings residing at the southern point of the delta. With the 3rd dynasty, the first great period of Egyptian history began, lasting from around 2750 BC to the beginning of the 7th dynasty at around 2250 BC. In this period, known as the Old Kingdom, Memphis in northern Egypt was the royal residence. Not far from Memphis, were erected enormous solid monuments, the pyramids, which resembled artificial hills of stone and deep inside housed the funeral chambers of the kings. The three largest near Gizeh on the edge of modern Cairo belonged to the pharaohs of the 4th dynasty, the pinnacle of the Old Kingdom. In that period, Egyptians already undertook expeditions to Nubia (along the Nile south of Egypt), to the Sinai, and Palestine. Contacts with the farther Near East, however, seem to have been rare. Egypt was a country largely turned inward with a civilization that was in many respects unique.
In Egypt, unlike Mesopotamia, the king was considered to be a god in human form. He and the other gods guaranteed, so to say, the well-being of the people that was so dependent upon the one river that alone seemed to make life possible here. Already at an early stage, the Egyptian priests developed a calendar, a solar calendar of 365 days, in order to accurately fix and predict the yearly flooding of the Nile. The Sun would always remain one of the high gods of the Egyptian pantheon, and the reigning pharaoh would be considered
His son. In the Old Kingdom, only the soul of the king was thought to ascend to heaven for eternal life after his death, the king’s body being mummified because preservation of the body was deemed necessary for the soul’s journey. In a later period, even the souls of ministers and other notables of the land were thought to ascend to heaven. In the 2nd millennium BC, in principle, every deceased person could hope for the soul’s immortality as long as he or she was, albeit often in a rudimentary fashion, mummified and provided with the correct sacred texts (the so-called Book of the Dead). Pyramids were only built during the Old Kingdom. In later periods, the kings and notables were buried in funeral chambers cut into the rocks along the Nile valley, while the commoners were simply buried in the desert sand.
The Egyptian gods seemed directly associated with life in the long and narrow stretches of land on both sides of the river. The fertility of the Nile’s sediments made extremely rich harvests possible. The population lived scattered over villages, and even the residences of the kings could hardly be called cities. Already at an early stage, the government of the pharaohs developed a bureaucracy of officials whose task it was to oversee the delivery of goods and the payment of taxes in kind to the temples and to the palace. At the same time, they oversaw the work for the community that the peasant population was required to provide in connection with the irrigation of the fields during the annual flooding of the river, or with the building of public works, such as the pyramids in the Old Kingdom and the palaces and frontier fortifications in later times. These officials were rewarded and thereby bound to the throne by grants of land. In the long run, however, this led to a certain undermining of royal authority because some powerful ministers acquired so much land that at the local level they could behave like independent potentates. This to some extent explains the weakening of central authority in Egypt that occurred periodically and every time was followed by a period of renewed centralization. For when effective royal authority was limited to a part of the country, or when two or more kings reigned simultaneously in different parts of the land, civil war and total chaos threatened to thoroughly disrupt the order of life in this peasant society regulated by the natural tempo of the Nile. Usually, a local potentate after a while succeeded in forcefully subjecting his competitors and re-establishing unity under a new dynasty. In this way, periods of unity and a flourishing of culture were interrupted by periods of disunity and decay. The Old Kingdom was at around 2250 BC followed by such an interim period, after which at around 2100 BC local potentates from Thebes in Upper Egypt established the Middle Kingdom comprising the 11th and 12th dynasties. In its turn, this flourishing kingdom gave way to another period, lasting from roughly 1750 to 1550 BC, of renewed disintegration that was made worse by the arrival of immigrants from the Near East, who founded a separate kingdom in the delta. These newcomers, called the Hyksos in our sources, had come under the influence of Indo-European groups and introduced the horse and the chariot into Egypt.
World History
