Code of Hammurabi

Hammurabi was the 6th king of the First Dynasty of the Old Babylonian Empire. He was part of an ethnic group known as the Amorites, which had begun in the Levant and gradually expanded into Mesopotamia at the beginning of the 2nd millennium BCE. They built several city-states in lower Mesopotamia, including Babylon, which sat in the fertile northwest quarter of that region, and gradually displaced the earlier imperial city-states of Sumer, Ur, and Akkad. In Hammurabi’s time, Babylonians spoke Akkadian, which was the lingua franca of Mesopotamia in the 2nd millennium BCE and a member of the Semitic language family (of which Arabic, Hebrew, and several others still persist). Like the preceding civilizations in the Mesopotamian basin, they used a writing system based on cuneiform script.

At the beginning of the Amorite First Dynasty, Babylon was not yet a major regional power. It was situated on the fertile floodplain where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers meandered close to one another before separating out again, and so it was in an advantageous position for agriculture. Babylonians became experts in the use of canals to water their fields, adding new levels of technical prowess in the field of irrigated agriculture. Babylon was also in a strategically advantageous position, with easy access to both upper and lower Mesopotamia via the rivers and the central roadways.

These advantages brought Babylon to its first climax of power during Hammurabi’s reign, as he conquered Mesopotamian city-states both to the north and the south, brought other regional powers like Assyria under tribute obligations, and extended Babylon’s governance into a Mesopotamian empire. This extension of Babylonian power also had an effect on the religion and culture of Mesopotamia as a whole, with Marduk—the patron god of Babylon—rising to an outsized role in the Mesopotamian pantheon after Hammurabi’s time, and inspiring a renewed literary culture, of which the Code was merely one example. 

While Babylon would lose its position of political influence later in the 2nd millennium BCE, its cultural influence remained impressive. It would later gain political supremacy in the mid-1st millennium BCE, under the New Babylonian Empire (sometimes called Chaldean), in which the legacy of Hammurabi was kept alive as an idealized lawgiver and king. Such was the extent of Babylon’s impact that even though the latter Babylonian empire was relatively short-lived, its successor-empires under the Persians and Alexander the Great each tried to harness the mystique of its power and influence for centuries thereafter.