Old Babylonian

The Ur III collapse fragments Mesopotamia again. For three centuries, no single power dominates. Cities like Isin, Larsa, Mari, and Eshnunna fight, ally, and absorb one another. The Amorites — once the western "barbarians" — settle and assimilate; their rulers take Sumerian throne-names and rule in the Sumerian style. Akkadian becomes the dominant spoken language across Mesopotamia, while Sumerian survives as the language of religion, scholarship, and high literature — a "classical" tongue, like Latin in medieval Europe.

In 1894 BCE, on the middle Euphrates, an Amorite dynasty founds a small city-state at a place called Babylon. For most of two centuries it is unremarkable. Then, in 1792 BCE, its throne passes to a king named Hammurabi.

Hammurabi reigns for forty-three years. By the end of his reign Babylon controls almost all of Mesopotamia, from the Persian Gulf to the upper Euphrates. He is patient: he waits decades, allowing rivals to weaken, before striking. He is administrative: his correspondence with provincial officials, the so-called Mari Letters and the Hammurabi Letters, shows a king micromanaging irrigation, food supply, and judicial cases. And he is the author of one of the most famous legal monuments in human history: the diorite stele inscribed with the Laws of Hammurabi, two hundred and eighty-two clauses ranging from murder to professional malpractice to the proper price of a barber's services.

The period is a high point of Mesopotamian literature. Scribal schools — the é-dub-ba, "the tablet house" — flourish in cities like Nippur and Ur. Students copy out classics: the Lament for Ur, the Sumerian King List, the early forms of what will become the Epic of Gilgamesh. The mathematical tradition reaches astonishing heights. Tablets like Plimpton 322 record Pythagorean triples a thousand years before Pythagoras — though scholars still debate exactly what the tablet was used for (Robson 2002; Mansfield & Wildberger 2017).

This is also the period in which the Sumerian King List takes the form we know. Compiled by scribes at Isin to legitimise their dynasty, then copied and edited elsewhere, it stitches the deep past into a single political narrative: kingship has always been here; it has only moved from city to city; it is here now.

The dynasty of Hammurabi does not long survive him. His son holds on; his grandsons lose territory; by 1595 BCE the city is sacked by Hittites raiding down from Anatolia and then promptly leaving. The dynasty falls. But Hammurabi's code is recopied for centuries in the schools, and Babylon's prestige outlasts its power. For the rest of cuneiform history, "Babylonian" will be the prestige dialect, the language of learning.

The tablets from this period are everything: laws, letters, mathematics, literature, school exercises, omens, hymns. It is the moment when Mesopotamian culture is most fully visible to us.