The Achievements of the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and the Canaanites, 2000–1000 B.C.E.

New kingdoms emerged in Assyria and Babylonia in the second millennium B.C.E. At the time, Mesopotamia was experiencing extended economic troubles caused by climate change and agricultural pollution. By around 2000 B.C.E., intensive irrigation had unintentionally raised the soil’s salt level so high that crop yields declined. When decreased rainfall made the situation worse, economic stress generated political instability lasting for centuries.

The Assyrians, who inhabited northern Mesopotamia, took advantage of their geography to create a kingdom whose rulers permitted long-distance trade conducted by private entrepreneurs. Assyrians became prosperous by acting as intermediaries in the trade for wood and metals between Anatolia and Mesopotamia. They exported woolen textiles to Anatolia in exchange for raw materials, which they sold to the rest of Mesopotamia.

Centralized state monopolies in which the government controlled international trade and redistributed goods had previously dominated the Mesopotamian economy. This kind of redistributive economy persisted in Mesopotamia, but by 1900 B.C.E. Assyrian kings were allowing individuals to transact commerce. This market-based system let private entrepreneurs maximize profits in successful ventures. Private Assyrian investors, for example, financed traders to export cloth. The traders then formed donkey caravans to travel hundreds of miles to Anatolia, where, if they survived the dangerous journey, they could make huge profits to be split with their investors. Royal regulators settled any complaints of trader fraud or losses in transit.

To maintain social order, Mesopotamians established written laws made known to the people. Private commerce and property created a need to guarantee fairness in contracts. Mesopotamians believed that the king had a sacred duty to make divine justice known to his subjects by rendering judgments in all sorts of cases, from commercial disputes to crime. Once written down, the record of the king’s decisions became what historians today call a law code. Hammurabi, king of Babylon (r. c. 1792–c. 1750 B.C.E.), became the most famous lawgiver in Mesopotamia. His laws for his kingdom straddling the Euphrates River drew on earlier Mesopotamian codes, such as that of the Ur III dynasty, and reveal details on city life in particular.

Hammurabi proclaimed that he was supporting “the principles of truth and equity” and protecting the weak. His law code was based on an ideal of justice. Its “eye-for-an-eye” principle matched the crime and punishment as literally as possible. The code punished fraudulent prosecutions by imposing the death penalty on anyone failing to prove a serious accusation. It also relied on “nature-decided justice” by allowing accused persons to leap into a river: if they sank, they were guilty; if they floated, they were innocent. As king, Hammurabi emphasized relieving the poor’s burdens as crucial to royal justice. His laws divided society into free persons, commoners, and slaves. These categories reflected a social hierarchy in which some people were assigned a higher value than others. An attacker who caused a pregnant woman of the free class to miscarry, for example, paid twice the fine levied for the same offense against a commoner. Between social equals, the code specified “an eye for an eye.” A member of the free class who killed a commoner, however, was not executed, only fined.

Many of Hammurabi’s laws concerned the king’s interests as a property owner leasing land to tenants. His laws were harsh for offenses against property, including mutilation or a gruesome death for crimes ranging from theft to wrongful sales and careless construction. Women had limited legal rights, but they could make contracts and appear in court. Marriages were arranged between the bride’s father and the groom and sealed with a legal contract. A wife could divorce her husband for cruelty; a husband could divorce his wife for any reason. The law protected the wife’s interests by requiring a husband to restore his divorced wife’s property.

Hammurabi’s laws were not always strictly followed, and penalties were often less severe than specified. The people themselves assembled in courts to determine most cases by their own judgments. Why, then, did Hammurabi have his laws written down? He explained that it was to show Shamash, the Babylonian sun god and god of justice, that he had fulfilled his responsibility as a divinely installed king—to ensure justice and the moral and material welfare of his people: “So that the powerful may not oppress the powerless, to provide justice for the orphan and the widow . . . let the victim of injustice see the law which applies to him, let his heart be put at ease.”

The laws on surgery reveal that doctors treated patients in the cities. Because people believed that angry gods or evil spirits caused serious diseases, Mesopotamian medicine included magic: a doctor might prescribe an incantation along with potions and diet recommendations. Magicians or exorcists offered medical treatment that depended on spells and interpreting signs, such as the patient’s dreams or hallucinations. (See “Document 1.1: Hammurabi’s Laws for Physicians.”)

Babylonian cities had many taverns and wine shops, often run by women proprietors. Contaminated drinking water caused many illnesses because sewage disposal was rudimentary. Citizens found relief from a city’s odors and crowding in its open spaces. The world’s oldest known map, an inscribed clay tablet showing the outlines of the city of Nippur about 1500 B.C.E., indicates a large park.

Cities involved large numbers of people from different places in many different interactions, which stimulated intellectual developments. Mesopotamian achievements in mathematics and astronomy had an enduring effect. Mathematicians devised algebra, including the derivation of roots of numbers. They invented place-value notation, which makes a numeral’s position in a number indicate ones, tens, hundreds, and so on. The system of reckoning based on sixty, still used in the division of hours and minutes and in the degrees of a circle, also comes from Mesopotamia. Mesopotamian expertise in recording the paths of the stars and planets probably arose from the desire to make predictions about the future, following the astrological belief that the movement of celestial bodies directly affects human life. The charts and tables compiled by Mesopotamian stargazers underlay later advances in astronomy.

In Canaan (ancient Palestine), west of Mesopotamia, the population grew by absorbing foreign merchants. The interaction of traders and travelers from many different cultures encouraged innovation in recording business transactions. This multilingual business environment produced the alphabet about 1600 B.C.E. In this new writing system, a simplified picture—a letter—stood for only one sound in the language, a large change from cuneiform. The Canaanite alphabet later became the basis for the Greek and Roman alphabets and therefore of modern Western alphabets.