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Hammurabi: Old Babylonia
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Now the master of southern and central Mesopotamia, Hammurabi was not a man to stop there. The great empires of Akkad and Ur must have been in his mind when he decided to attack his old friend Zimri-Lim:
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During the first two decades of his forty-two year reign (1792-1750B.C.), Hammurabi fortified several cities in northern Babylonia. In 1764, Babylon defeated the coalition of Elam, Subartu and Eshnunna. By 1762, Hammurabi claimed to have "established the foundations of Sumer and Akkad, a phrase borrowed from Sumerian royal hymns to express the ideal of pan-Babylonian rule. With the conquest of Mari in 1759, virtually all of Mesopotamia had come under Babylonian rule.
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The splendid reign of Hammurabi lasted fifty-five years. After that his successors seem to have degenerated gradually in ability, until in the eighteenth century B.C., a half-savage swarm of invaders overran Babylonia. These were the Kassites, a mountain race from the northeast, seemingly the very folk whom Sargon, founder of Babylon, had harried from their homes two thousand years before when he "searched the corners of the earth." Now the Kassite chief, Gandis, seized the throne; and his people held sway in Babylon for over three hundred years. Under them the ancient empire crumbled. The Kassite soldiery formed merely a sort of rough and turbulent aristocracy, parasites upon he almost inexhaustible wealth of commercial and agricultural Babylonia.
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As Hammurabi was assisted during the war in the south by his allies from the north, the absence of soldiers in the north led to unrest. Continuing his expansion, Hammurabi turned his attention northward, quelling the unrest and soon after crushing Eshnunna. Next the Babylonian armies conquered the remaining northern states, including Babylon's former ally Mari, although it is possible that the 'conquest' of Mari was a surrender without any actual conflict. In just a few short years, Hammurabi had succeeded in uniting all of Mesopotamia under his rule. Of the major city-states in the region, only Aleppo and Qatna to the west in Syria maintained their independence.
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When Egyptologists found it necessary to reduce the el-Amarna Age by a quarter of a century, the time of Hammurabi was adjusted accordingly, and placed in the twenty-first century before the present era. It was ... observed: “The period of the First Dynasty of Babylon has always been a landmark in early history, because by it the chronology of Babylonia can be fixed, with a reasonable margin of error.”4 The period of Hammurabi also served as a landmark for the histories of the Middle East from Elam to Syria, and was used as a guide for the chronological tables of other nations.
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Begin by informing students that Hammurabi became the sixth ruler in the First Dynasty of Babylon in the 18th Century BCE. The success of Hammurabi's military operations expanded Babylon north along the Tigris and Euphrates and south to what is now called the Persian Gulf. The empire he created is known as Babylon, while the civilization is often referred to as Old Babylonia.
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