Hammurabi’s Babylon

The First Dynasty of Babylon was founded around 1894 BC by an Amorite king named Sumu-abum. For nearly a century Babylon was only one of several small Amorite kingdoms in central Mesopotamia. The sixth king of the dynasty, Hammurabi (r. c. 1792–1750 BC), changed that. By a combination of careful diplomacy, canal-building, and decisive war, he absorbed his rivals — Larsa, Eshnunna, Mari, and finally Assyria — and by the end of his reign ruled the whole of Mesopotamia from a centralised capital at Babylon. His famous Code of Laws, inscribed on a basalt stele and now in the Louvre, set out 282 case rulings in everyday Babylonian — debt, marriage, theft, assault, professional liability — and shows the legal world in which the patriarchs Isaac and Jacob lived. Hammurabi’s empire did not long outlast him: under his successors it shrank back toward the city itself, and in 1595 BC the Hittite king Mursili I sacked Babylon, ending the dynasty. The city would rise again under the Kassites and, far later, as the Neo-Babylonian capital of Nebuchadnezzar.