Babylon

Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization by Paul Kriwaczek, St. Martin's Griffin, 2012. 

Summary

This book is a history of ancient Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The author describes the first cities in the world, founded by the Sumerians.  He continues the story forward to include the Akkadians, Babylonians and Assyrians. He also mentions the Elamites who lived to the east, in Iran, and the Hurrians, who lived to the north. 

Sumerians

The Sumerians were one of the earliest civilizations. Sometime before 4000 BCE, Uruk, the world’s first city was founded. According to its founding myths, Uruk learned civilization from an earlier Sumerian settlement called Eridu, which was 65 km to the south. Uruk is the setting for the Epic of Gilgamesh, set around 2600 BCE. This epic was discovered written on clay tablets in Nineveh in 1853.  The first written language, Sumerian cuneiform, is a language isolate, apparently unrelated to any other known language. It is five thousand years old. The Sumerian King List gives a list of its kings.  Another ancient Sumerian city was Ur. The Royal Graves of Ur were discovered by Leonard Woolley in 1928. They have been dated to about 2600 BCE. The other major Sumerian cities were Kish and Lagash. 

Akkadians

The Akkadians were a Semitic people who used Sumerian cuneiform to record their own language. Their capital was Akkad, north of the Sumerians. Sargon the Great built the Akkadian empire around 2230 BCE. He captured the Sumerian city of Uruk. Together, the Sumerians and Akkadians built the Akkadian-Sumerian empire. 

Amorites

The Amorites were a Western Semitic people. They conquered the Akkadian-Sumerian empire and built a multi-ethnic city called Babylon. Babylon’s King Nebuchadnezza II, a Chaldean, exiled the Jews from Jerusalem to Babylon in 586 BCE. While in Babylon, the Jews compiled their Talmud. Hammurabi, the Amorite King of Babylon, wrote down the Babylonian legal tradition in the Code of Hammurabi. It included sections on marriage, divorce, inheritance, commerce, wages, slavery and crime. 

Babylon

Babylonians spoke a south Akaddian dialect. The people speaking the northern Akaddian dialect became known as Assyrians.

Assyrians

Eventually, the Assyrians became more powerful than the Babylonians, and conquered them. Nineveh and Ashur were the main cities of Assyria. Assyria was a major military power that built an empire, stretching from Iran, to Turkey, Egypt and the Levant. Its King Tiglath-Pileser II tried to conquer the Jewish kingdom of Samaria on the West Bank of the Jordan River. The Assyrian king held off his attack when the Hebrew King Menahem paid him a large tribute in silver, and then Samaria became a client state of Assyria.