Mesopotamia to the 18th Century B.C.
Towards the close of the fourth millennium, about the time when it is judged that Senefru was building his pyramids in Egypt, there was a king of Kish, in the valley of the Euphrates, not far from the later Babylon, named Utug, an indubitably real person who dedicated a vase in a temple at the city of Nippur. A little later reigned at Lagash--then on the extremity of the Persian Gulf, which in the course of the centuries has receded a couple of hundred miles--a king named Urnima of whom there remain contemporary representations in relief. His grandson Eannatum was a mighty warrior, whose war with the neighbouring city of Umma is recorded in the reliefs and inscriptions of which is called the "Stele of the Vultures," discovered at Telloh, now in the Louvre. Also he made war upon Elam, the land among the mountains immediately eastward of the Tigris valley. The date can be fixed with some certainty in the first century of the third millennium--that is, a few years after 3000 B.C. Thus in the year 3000 we are in a definitely historical period, a period which left conscious records of its doing not only in the form of pictorial representations, but in writing which represents language, the cuneiform script which was employed throughout the whole Babylonian or Mesopotamian area. Bronze was already in use; the use of bronze and the established practice of writing, to say nothing of carved reliefs, prove that the people of Lower Mesopotamia had already long passed out of the primitive and barbaric stage.
This early seat of Asiatic civilization, lying in an area of about one hundred and fifty by two hundred miles, fell into the upper and lower regions of Akkad and Sumer. Its civilization and its language, generally Sumerian, were Mongolian--that is, neither Hamitic, Semitic, nor Aryan. Whether the Sumerians were the original indigenous inhabitants is a matter of some doubt: they were of a type clearly akin to the Dravidian races of India, but the theory which brings them to Mesopotamia as emigrants from India is certainly questionable. On the other hand, certain other affinities with the Chinese point to a prehistoric connection with that race, suggesting the view that in spite of the immense divergence of the Dravidians from the Chinese, they had a common origin, and that the Sumerian was a special development of the same original stock.
Here, however, we are in the realms of conjecture, with evidence totally inadequate to the forming of any definite conclusions. We must for the present take the Sumerians as we find them, only wondering at the curious fact that they depicted their gods not as Sumerians but as Semites, from the earliest times. They must, therefore, in the earliest times have already been in collision with Semites; but whether they conquered or expelled Semites who were there before them, or were attacked by Semitic invaders who failed to conquer them, is as yet an unsolved problem. It is to be remembered that while Sumer itself is always strictly Sumerian, there were always Semites in Akkad. The farther we move north-westward and westward from the head of the Persian Gulf the more exclusively Semitic the population becomes, throughout the whole region bounded to the westward by the Taurus Mountains, the Mediterranean and the Red Sea.
At the earliest period, the Sumerians and Akkadians were dwellers in cities, and the Semites were already on the verge of becoming the dominant race; though in spite of all vicissitudes the language and the learning of the Sumerians showed an unfailing power of recuperation, forced themselves upon the Semite conquerors, and even ultimately triumphed in the last great Babylonian Empire, which was finally overcome not by Semites but by the Persians.
We know, then, that an advanced civilization, city-dwelling, metal-using, and writing, was flourishing before the end of the fourth millennium. We infer that it had been already in existence for centuries, but of that earlier period there is no record except legends which tell of kings who reigned for several hundreds or even thousands of years; in whose time was the great deluge in which the part of Noah was played by Sit-napishtim. Most mythologies introduce some hero of supernatural prowess and vigour, who smites giants and monsters and performs other similar marvellous works; and such a Sumerian hero duly appears in the person of Gilgamesh. As with other mythologies, it is possible to suspect that some genuine historical personality was the prototype of the hero; but it is only when there are actual contemporary records that we can feel ourselves really in the presence of history.
Lagash was the dominant city for some generations after Eannatum. Its supremacy ended in the reign of a usurping monarch, Urukagina, who allowed his zeal for social reform and the abolition of aristocratic privileges to rend the state in factions; of which advantage was taken by Lugalzaggisi of Umma to overthrow Lagash. This energetic conqueror not only made himself lord of Sumer but marched through Syria, the land of the Amorites, or Westerners, as far as the Mediterranean. A hundred years or so after the fall of Lagash, Kish in Akkad had again waxed powerful under Semitic rulers and challenged the supremacy of Umma. There is a sculptured monument of one Sharrukin, in the days of whose successor Manishtusu it is recorded upon an obelisk that Lagash and Umma were subject to him. The portraits of the kings of these monuments show that they were bearded Semites, not clean-shaven Sumerians. Soon after him came Urumush, who conquered Elam and was succeeded by Shargani Sharri, Sargon of Agade, the traditional founder of the imperial Semitic power to whom legends were attached probably appropriated from some of his predecessors. He seems at least to have been mixed up with Sharrukin and Shargani. "Sargon," in fact, stands to the Semites a good deal as Menes stands to the Egyptians.
We can affirm with some confidence that Shargani arose in Agade, which was presumably subordinate to Kish, about the latter half of the twenty-eighth century. He extended his dominions over Sumer and Akkad, and a good deal further to the east and north. His successor, Naram-sin, was also a great conqueror who was more or less warranted in assuming the grandiloquent life of "King of the Four Quarters of the World." There is a fine stele now in the Louvre which commemorates one of his conquests. Records many centuries later affirm that Sargon carried his arms to the Mediterranean, into Arabia, and into Elam, statements which are likely enough to be true.
After Naram-sin (circa 2700 B.C.), there is a blank extending over some two hundred years. In the interval it would seem that the Sumerians had recovered their ascendancy. Lagash was again the dominant city with a ruler bearing the old Sumerian title of Patesi. Gudea of Lagash was evidently a powerful prince; but in the next generation, the scepter passed to the city of Ur. Dungi, the second of the kings of Ur, made himself master of the whole of Akkad as well as Sumer, and possibly of Elam as well. But the power of his dynasty was broken early in the twenty-third century by an Elamite king. A hundred years later it disappeared altogether.
In the twentieth century, Elamite kings were reigning at Ur and the neighbouring Larsam, and Semites from Syria had established themselves in Akkad with the hitherto comparatively unimportant Babylon as the seat of their power. In the year 1944 B.C., the great King Khammurabi, or Hammurabi, ascended the throne of Babylon.
The Semite Dynasty had now been reigning at Babylon for about one hundred years. Akkad is a buffer shielding Sumer from invasion either from Upper Mesopotamia or from Syria. Presumably there was some migratory or expansive movement of the Semites which brought the westerns, the Amorites, in force upon Mesopotamia in the twenty-first century. Akkad was easily torn from the weakened kings of the south; and during the time of Hammurabi's five predecessors of the First Babylonian Dynasty, Babylon acquired the supremacy over the whole of the upper region. In the reign of the fifth Babylonian, Sin-muballit, it would seem that an Elamite conqueror established himself at Larsam, expelling the representative of the Sumerian line, the Sin-iddinan, who presently reappeared as the vassal of Hammurabi, who again was periodically at war with Rim-Sin, the Elamite prince of Larsam.
During his first thirty years, Hammurabi obtained some successes against Rim-Sin, extended his dominion northward, and compelled to submission the King of Ashur on the Tigris, or Assyria, an old Semite power which had resisted the new Semite incursion. The Assyrian Shamshi-Adad became a stout supporter of the victorious Hammurabi, who apparently adopted the principle of transforming defeated kings into trusted lieutenants. During this period, however, it would seem that he found the Elamite power too strong for him; entered into temporary alliance with Chedorlaomer (Chudur Lagumur), King of Elam itself, Arioch of Ellasar, who is probably to be identified as Rim-Sin of Larsam, and Tidal "King of the Gentiles"
--that is, of the Hittites (Khatti) beyond the Taurus; and took part in the campaign against the cities of Palestine recorded in Genesis XIV. It is probable enough that Abraham had emigrated from "Ur of the Chaldees" when the Elamites ejected its Sumerian rulers. The Hebrew account would seem to imply at least that Chedorlaomer was the head of the northern confederacy. It is perhaps noteworthy that the biblical chronology dates his campaign precisely at the time when Hammurabi was on the point of renewing his wars with Rim-Sin, wars in which he won the overlordship over Larsam and Ur. Perhaps he attempted an attack upon Elam itself, as he seems to have met with some severe reverses, which he attributed to the anger of the Elamite goddesses whose images had been carried off from their shrines into Babylon.
Hammurabi, a great political organizer who codified the laws of Babylonia, died in the last year of the century. His successor finally overthrew Rim-Sin. But the dynasty did not long retain its power. A new Sumerian king established his throne on the coast of the Persian Gulf, calling himself King of the Sea Land. But this was not the power which was destined to displace the Babylonians. Beyond the Taurus Mountains on the north-west lay the hordes of the Khatti. Beyond the mountains of Elam on the east an Aryan migration was in progress. In the middle of the 18th century the Khatti overflowed the mountain barrier and swept through Mesopotamia in a devastating raid which shattered the power of Babylon. Like Genghis Khan or Nadir Shah in India many centuries later, the Khatti came and departed fro the time being; but an Aryan wave burst through Elam and rolled into Mesopotamia, which was too much shattered to resist. The newcomers did not sweep away or even enslave the natives, whether Sumerian or Semite; but they set up a ruling dynasty and aristocracy, something after the fashion of the Normans in England, which reigned for more than five hundred years, bearing the name of Kassites. In like manner what would seem to be a second branch of these precursors of the Medes and Persians pushed their way north-west, and set up in Northern Mesopotamia, beyond Ashur, the kingdom of Mitanni--an Aryan lordship over a mixed population mainly Semite. The names of the Kassite and Mitannian rulers are almost conclusive proof that they were of the same Aryan stock as the later Persians. But Hammurabi had in fact completed the work of Semitizing the whole great region over which his sway extended, though the Sumerian element was indeed never obliterated. The old Sumerian and Semite civilization triumphed over its barbarian conquerors as, in much less degree, the Latin civilization conquered the Goths and Franks and Lombards who overran Western Europe and overthrew the Roman Empire in the West.
There is little room to doubt that Hammurabi's is the first name definitely entitled to a place among those of the world's great rulers who have been organizers and administrators, though usually also of necessity conquerors: men who, if they were destroyers in some degree yet destroyed only to build. He was a sort of Babylonian Alfred the Great, whose title to fame rests above all else upon the legal code which he caused to be engraved upon a stone stele now at the Louvre. He is not indeed to be regarded as a great promulgator of new laws; but the ruler who put into permanent shape the law of the land evolved out of diverse custom during many centuries cannot be denied the title of a legislator.
Legal deeds, Hammurabi's governmental letters and dispatches, and his code of laws, supply us with positive information as to the condition of Babylonia in the 19th century B.C.
We find three great classes of the community not without a resemblance to the thegnhood, the free ceorls, and the serfs of the early English--the first comprising the government officials and great landholders, the second small freeholders and free labourers, and the third, slaves whose persons were the actual property of their owners. The Babylonian had a high conception of the majesty of the law and of its functions in protecting the liberties, lives and property of the people; the Babylonian law protected the slave even against his own master. The slave could acquire property and might obtain freedom by purchase. A free woman who married a slave remained free, and the children of the marriage were free. Women enjoyed much independence; they could be owners of property; married women were very far indeed from being the chattels of their husbands; if a woman were divorced, except for unchastity, she could claim the custody of her children and maintenance. There were even religious sisterhoods vowed to chastity, and the vow was compatible with formal marriage and life in the world.
There were elaborate laws controlling the relations between debtors and creditors, principals and agents, for the regulation and security of the extensive foreign commerce; regulations also dealing with the respective liabilities of employers and employed. Strict legal forms were necessary to give validity to wills and to the transfer of land; the witnesses wet their seals to the clay tablets upon which the deeds were drawn out--the use of clay had probably been responsible for the comparatively rapid development of a script or writing. The Babylonian law was particularly careful in its insistence upon the maintenance of canals and the regulation of the water supply upon which the enormous fertility of the whole area was dependent; the matter was one which demanded the attention of a paternal government, just as the regulation of the Nile demanded the care of the Senuserts and Amenemhats in Egypt. Shrewd kings in both countries realized that a prosperous country could be taxed for the benefit of the royal treasury without feeling the strain.
It is interesting to observe that there was a silver standard of price by which land and goods were valued, but no general employment of currency--that is, the purchaser of land of goods and the payer of taxes made his payment in goods equivalent to the purchase price, the goods being regularly valued before the exchange was completed.
Finally, it is to be noted that portions of the Babylonian mythology correspond respectively to the Hellenic legends on the one hand and to the Hebrew cosmogony on the other--so closely that we must regard each of those extremely diverse systems as having been at an early stage infected by Babylonian influences. But the Hebrew and the Hellene each assimilated only what was sympathetic to his own religious outlook; the Babylonian influence brought them no closer to each other.