The Ancients - Hammurabi: Rise of the Babylonians

Episode Date: December 15, 2022

2000 BC saw the famed city of Babylon begin to flourish under the rule of a King called Hammurabi. Renowned for his famous law code, the stele of which still survives today, is there anything else to be learnt about this mysterious figure?In this episode Tristan is joined by Professor, and author, Amanda Podany from California State Polytechnic University. Together they discuss the life of this famed Babylonian King, from his origins as a ruthless warlord, to his contributions in helping Babylon ascend to the momentous civilisation we know it as today.Amanda's new book, Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East, is out now!For more Ancients content, subscribe to our Ancients newsletter here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!

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they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not, just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. it's the ancients on history hit i'm tristan hughes your host and in today's podcast we're going back to the ancient near east to mesopotamia and the incredible ancient city one of the most famous cities in the whole of ancient history the the city of Babylon. We're talking about a particular period in Babylon's history, at the start of the second millennium BC, when you really begin to see this city rise under one key figure, the figure of Hammurabi. You'll notice during this podcast episode how I vary in the name that

I give this figure, so I hope you can forgive me for that. We're talking about the life of Hammurabi, what do we know about him, this ruler of ancient Babylon? What has the archaeology revealed not just about himself but also about his reign as a warlord but also as a lawgiver because yes first and foremost we think of Hammurabi today because of his law code that has survived this stele that has survived we talk about all of this and so much more in our episode today because I was delighted to interview a few weeks back Professor Amanda Poddeny. Amanda she's Professor Emeritus of History at California State Polytechnic. She is a wonderful speaker. It was great to get her on the podcast because Amanda has also recently written this titanic new book, Ancient History of the Near East. It is incredible.

It's had a brilliant reception. And for this podcast, rather than talking about it all, we decided that we'd focus in on one particular area of it. And the area that we decided upon was the story of Hammurabi and how he contributes to this rise of the Babylonians. So without further ado, talk all about this and more. Here's Amanda. Amanda, it is great to have you on the podcast today. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you. You're more than welcome. And I love it when on this podcast, we do Mesopotamian history. And before, long before Alexander the Great, we've done the Sumerians in the past,

we've done the scholars of Assyria with your good friends, Eleanor Robson and Paul Collins. And now we're going to Babylon, aren't we, Amanda? This figure called Hammurabi, and it's, forgive me if I'm wrong, but it feels almost like he is the same level as Nebuchadnezzar and Ashurbanipal and all these other big names from ancient Mesopotamian history. He's a familiar name from ancient Mesopotamian history. He's very familiar, but for such a strange reason, I think that he would be very, very surprised at how famous he is, quite honestly. I think in the categories of the kings that you've described, who were such war leaders and conquerors, and Hammurabi wasn't really that person. He's a fascinating figure. Well, let's delve into the figure of Hammurabi. And first of

all, I mean, what sources do we have? What sources did you have to use when studying this figure? There's quite a lot that survives from his reign, actually. He created a number of royal inscriptions, which is sort of the standard place to start. What did he say about himself? But the wonderful thing is a lot of his correspondence survives as well. So we have letters from and to him from his reign, which are much more revealing about who he was in terms of his priorities, his interests, his relationships with other people. We also have

the famous law stealer with his laws on it, and a number of year names. So back in his era, they didn't number the years, they named them. And Hammurabi got to name each year after an important event of the previous year. And so we can see through the full 43 years of his reign, what he thought was important that he had achieved. And that gives us a sense of sort of the political history and the things that he was proud of. So all of these contribute to having quite an elaborate picture of Hammurabi in comparison with a lot of other kings. How interesting. And also, as you say, noticing what was important to him at the time. So let's set the situation. Let's set the background, the context. When in ancient history are we talking with the figure of Hammurabi?

He came to the throne in 1792 BCE. Wow, that's pretty accurate. You know exactly when, that far back. Funnily enough, his reign is the one that everyone uses as the sort of point of chronological discussion. And so I'm giving you what's called the middle chronology, and we just use it for convenience. So yes, he took the throne in 1792, and he ruled until 1750. It may be wrong by eight years, but I'm just going to use those dates because those are the dates that are very, very conventionally used. But yes, 18th century BC. So what's happening in this area of the world at the time that Hammurabi is living?

Let's say during his early years, what's the context? He came to the throne at a time when there were a lot of small kingdoms in Mesopotamia and there were a number of large ones. And his was not one of the large ones. He was not a ruler of a dominant city or kingdom at the time. There were a number of much more powerful kingdoms. There was a kingdom called Larsa, which was to the south of Babylon. The king of Larsa was a very established king. I think he would have thought he would be a big name in history. His name was Rimsyn. He ruled for 60 years, just incredible length of time for that

period. So I think he would have seen himself as very important. To the north of Babylon, there's a king named Shamshi-Adad, who ruled a kingdom that he didn't give a name to. So we call it the Kingdom of Upper Mesopotamia. And that kingdom was also very large and powerful. And I think Shamshi-Adad would also have had dreams of future glory. And then there were two other major kingdoms at the time as well. There was Eshnunna, which was to the northeast, and a kingdom called Elam, which was to the east. And those four kingdoms were much more powerful than Hammurabi's. His was one of the more minor kingdoms at the time. And so his kingdom at the time, therefore, if you say it's more of a minor kingdom, in regards to land, can we just imagine, therefore, him controlling the city of Babylon and therefore just the

surrounding lands? Not too much. Well, there's an estimate it was 60 kilometres by 160 kilometres in extent. So it's not tiny, but certainly wasn't on the scale of the bigger ones. Yes. But that's important to highlight straight away as we continue our podcast, isn't it, Amanda? These neighbouring powers. I mean, do we know anything, therefore, Amanda, about Hammurabi's background before he becomes ruler? Yes, he was the son of the previous king. There had been a dynasty on the throne of Babylon for some years, and his father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather had been king before him. So he was ascending to the throne after his father had been on the throne for 20 years. We can assume he was fairly young, though, because having a 43-year reign at a time when kings

rarely lived past their sort of mid-60s or 70s, he was probably in his 20s when he came to the throne. So a young man. But legitimately inheriting the throne, I don't think there were any questions that he was the appropriate king. Okay, Hammurabi has become king. And what do we know about his early years on the throne of Babylon? He was a very ordinary king, honestly, for about 28 years. It would have been a long reign. He could have died and nobody would have ever heard of him. And he would have had a perfectly normal... I mean, I say nobody would have heard of him. A seriologist would have heard of him. But he was someone who, when he first came to the throne, did a very normal thing,

which is he released people from debt. It's called proclaiming justice. It wasn't that he was putting out his laws. He was just making a general debt release so that people would be able to recover financially. That was a fairly normal thing to do at the beginning of a reign. And then he built temples, and he built city walls and he did reconstruction projects and he dug canals for his population and he presented gifts to the gods, very sort of normal, small kingdom type things. He did in his year names mention a few military engagements, but nothing major. And so really for this first period, he was a very typical king. There's a number of kings in the same region who were doing very much the same things.

I'd like to ask a bit more about one of those key things which you mentioned there, Amanda, which was one of his tasks, one of the things that he does is digging canals, building canals. Was this quite a big thing for ancient Mesopotamian rulers? It was because it was so important for a number of reasons. They are completely dependent on irrigation, not rainfall, because there wasn't enough rainfall in the south to irrigate the fields. And so they had to have canals, but they also use them for transportation. So really big canals would be dug to make it easier to move across the countryside. You know, imagine the Euphrates, it wiggles all over the place. Tigris wiggles all over the place. So if you're digging a canal

that makes it easier to move from one place to another by boat, that's a big achievement. That's an important construction project. And also it would sometimes open up lands that were previously not agricultural. They were able to farm them because of the bringing of the water from the river.

So yes, canals were seen as really doing something for your people. If you were doing canals, it was a sign that you were a kind king, you were a good king. And one other thing quickly, you mentioned the rivers Tigris and the river Euphrates. So these two rivers, we can also imagine they're the lifebloods of Hammurabi's kingdom. Yes, especially the Euphrates. Brilliant. Well, therefore, let's move on. You hinted at it there, some small military activities early on in Hammurabi's reign. So therefore, as time goes on, when does Hammurabi emerge? When does he partake in his first major military conflict? The first one was sort of imposed from the outside, because the kingdom of Elam attacked the kingdom of Eshnunna. And this became a region-wide

conflict because the kingdom of Eshnunna looked for allies who could help sort of withstand this Elamite attack. And Hammurabi comes in on the side of Eshnunna against Elam. And so it's a defensive war initially. And indeed, in the end, they were able to defeat Elam. They didn't manage to bring any more land into Hammurabi's kingdom at that point, but it was really his first kind of major military engagement. But one of the complications of that was that in the forming of alliances between these kingdoms, the kingdom of Larsa in the south, which was, as I said, big and powerful under its king, Rim-Sin, really resisted coming in on Hammurabi's side. Initially, there was going

to be an alliance between them, and Larsa was going to send troops into this conflict, and the King of Larsa didn't do so. So it created a sort of beginnings of a conflict between Hammurabi and Rimsyn of Larsa, and that was in 1765. So beginning of a conflict, how does it continue from there? Because things don't get better, do they, Amanda? They don't, not for rims in, certainly. Once Elam had been defeated, Hammurabi turns to Larsa and accuses Larsa of having raided Babylon. And we see this in a letter which actually survived in an archive that was far to the north, the Kingdom of Mari. And an archive that was found in the palace at Mari includes this letter in which Hammurabi accuses Rimson

of raiding his lands. And he's using that as a pretext to go in and attack Larsa. And this was really the first major military conflict that Hammurabi instigated against a neighboring power. And he's picking on a really big one. Larsa was powerful. This was in 1763. So he turns around, gets his troops together, and marches south on Larsa. And Rimsyn must have been very elderly. I mean, if you imagine, he's been on the throne for 60 years. Even if he came to the throne as a boy, he was in his 70s. So whether that had an impact on it, I don't know. But there was a siege of the city of Larsa that lasted for six months. And Babylon was victorious. They were able to ultimately conquer the city and therefore the kingdom. It's so interesting from what you're highlighting there for Amanda, because

it almost sounds it's almost from the outset, it initially looks like at the start of this time period of Hammurabi's reign in Babylon, that it's David versus Goliath, that Larsa, as you say, is this huge power to the south. And yet, as you say, Hammurabi is able to conquer Larsa. I'm guessing this must set in motion even more dreams of military conquest, dare I say, for the man. Absolutely, yes. And again, he's in his 32nd year on the throne at this point, and not a young man himself either, especially not in terms of the life expectancy in Babylon. And it really just does seem to have changed his focus, that having conquered Larsa, he's then interested in conquering further.

And you've got to think, there is this model in their minds, because hundreds of years earlier, 700 years earlier, there had been a king named Sargon who had conquered supposedly all the way from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea. And that model of a conqueror was still in people's minds. They hadn't forgotten Sargon. There was this image that perhaps someone would be able to do this and conquer such an enormous area again. And perhaps that influenced Hammurabi. We don't know. I mean, I'm just guessing. But it wasn't that he was coming up with the idea of being a conqueror for the first time. This was a model that had existed for hundreds of years. And so when he turns around and starts fighting against people who had formerly been his allies, he may have had that idea in mind that he was going to be this great king, not just the king that he'd been already, which is good king, but this great king who was going to be able to conquer. Perhaps he had dreams of getting all the way to the Mediterranean. He

didn't get that far, but he did manage to conquer all the way to the Gulf through having conquered Larsa. And then he moved north and he conquered regions that had previously been subject to other kingdoms. And he got all the way to what is now the border between Iraq and Syria, a little bit further than the border of Iraq and Syria on the Euphrates. And that was as far as he managed to get. Yeah, spoilers, he doesn't get too far to the Mediterranean, as you mentioned there, Amanda. But you mentioned, of course, former allies, former brothers in arms, and I've got one name in my notes of them all, Mari. Now, Mari, what is this in the story of Hammurabi? Because this is also quite interesting in regards to one of his later conquests.

When Hammurabi came to the throne, Mari had been part of the kingdom of Upper Mesopotamia. So it had been ruled by Shamshiyada, that big king of the north. But he had died in 1776. And so his kingdom had split up. Mari was no longer part of that larger kingdom. It was now a kingdom to itself, the kingdom of Mari. And the king there, Zimri-Lim, was an ally of Hammurabi's. They wrote back and forth all the time. And the really nice thing about this is that Mari's archives were found and are extensive. And unfortunately, the archives at Babylon have never been found. So Hammurabi's own palace archive is not known. So we only have correspondence from him if he wrote to these other kings and wrote to other people, and those have been found in other places. So at Mari, there are

letters from Hammurabi, and we know a lot about this relationship. Zimri-Lim and Mari were such good allies that the son of Hammurabi went and stayed in Mari for a while. They were close. And there were some times when there'd be a little friction between them. And for example, at one point, the envoys from Babylon have concerns about how they were treated or something in the Mari court, and vice versa. The Mari people would gripe a little bit, but generally very close allies. And then he turns around and he marches on Mari, apparently without any provocation. And that's one of the more surprising conquests because there were tensions sometimes with some of these other

former allies that you can see in advance. And Mari just doesn't seem to be that way. And yet you look at year 33, you know, in these year names, and Hammurabi says that he overthrew in battle the army of Mari and another kingdom as well. But then he says that Mari dwelled under his authority in friendship. The year name has these two different things. One is he overthrew the army, but then he ruled Mari in friendship. And it's a real puzzle what happened because then at the site of Mari, we can see that the palace was burned down. So it looks like a conquest. It looks as though Hammurabi came of Mari, we can see that the palace was burned down. So it looks like a conquest. It looks as though Hammurabi came into Mari, burned down the palace, took over.

And then there's another puzzle, which is that when the palace burned, it was empty. They'd already taken everybody out, had been evacuated. All the treasures had been taken. They'd even gone through the palace archives and taken out the most important documents and left notes to say that they were gone. It's a very strange conquest. It doesn't look like sort of the fighting, having a siege and fighting

and coming in and destroying the palace. It looks much more thought out. And one theory, and this is Jack Sasson's theory, not mine, but I think it's a very interesting one, is that perhaps Zimri-Lim, the king of Mari, died and we know that he didn't have a grown son at the time of his death, the time when the palace burned down. His one surviving son seems to have been a child. And so perhaps the people of Mari, knowing Hammurabi was an ally, said, could you come in and take care of things for us,

or at least help defend us for a while, because we don't have a clear ruler. And that Hammurabi did, in fact, come in as an invited king, perhaps. And once he got there, he decided that it was going to be his. Because in his 35th year, he has another year name, in which he says he destroyed the city walls of Mari and Malgium. But he says he did it by order of the gods. So Mari's city wall is destroyed, because the gods wanted him to. So after coming in, perhaps as an ally, decided that he was, in fact, the true and rightful ruler of Mari, and therefore he destroys the city wall.

But it's very speculative. And I think Sasson makes a good case for it. It's certainly a puzzle, though, because it just doesn't make a lot of sense that he would have come in and destroyed a kingdom with which he was so closely allied. Yeah, it is a fascinating mystery that you've got there. No doubt theories will abound and there'll be debate for the years ahead.

I mean, okay, therefore, we've talked about the military stuff for long enough because, Amanda, there's so much more to his story, isn't there? He's now created this large empire in ancient Mesopotamia and a bit further as well. He mentioned the Persian Gulf and one day Iraq and that kind of area. The big next question is, he's got it. How does he maintain it? How does he administer this large empire that he's now got? He seems to have actually come up with quite a successful system.

Because unlike some other kings, he doesn't seem to have wanted to be feared and hated. Hammurabi really put an emphasis on that he was a good guy, that he was a shepherd of all of his people. And so when he came in and conquered a city, he didn't raise it to the ground. He didn't imprison the people. He seems to have very much kept the local administration intact. So a city that was ruled by Hammurabi would probably have the same mayor that it had under its previous king. The local administration tended to stay the same. And then he brought in overseers and governors, officials from his own administration to rule over this region. But he seems to have been very concerned with making sure that there was a system that was not oppressive to the people who were living there. And it seems to have been

really effective in that, at least throughout his reign, we don't see signs of rebellions and rejection of Babylonian rule. It didn't last after his reign, as we'll probably talk about later, but the previous kingdom would be a province, so Larsa became a province. They changed its name to Yarmut Bal, but it was still the province that had been Larsa. And he simply introduced administrators who would oversee what was going on there, but who weren't trying to overtax the people or enslave them or anything like that, that they continued to be farmers, they continued to do the kind of work they'd done before. Before we focus in on a case study of some of these particular officials that you just highlighted there, Amanda, something you also mentioned during your answer there was the idea of the shepherds looking after his flock. Now, I remember having a chat not too long ago with

Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, and he mentioned, I remember him talking about how so many of these ancient Near Eastern, Middle Eastern cultures, they go back to that idea of the shepherd and the flock. Do we therefore see this also with Hammurabi in his, in surviving texts, this idea regurgitated of him being the shepherd and looking after his people as the flock? Yes, exactly. And it was already an old model of kingship. And one that I think was, especially in a culture where you have a lot of herding, an image that would have resonated with people because the shepherd watches out for his sheep. He leads them, but he doesn't want them to die. He doesn't want them to stray. He's protecting them. And I think that becomes such a powerful

image for kingship, but not throughout all of Mesopotamian history. There are periods, certainly later on, when there's much more of a sort of sense of wanting to sort of terrorize the population into submission rather than to be warm and fuzzy, you know, the way that Hammurabi, I think, wanted to present himself. And when you look at his letters, it's not all fiction. I mean, he really does seem to have cared about the concerns of the people that wrote to him and that he governed. Yeah. Join me twice a week as I explore the past to help us understand the United States today. You'll hear how codebreakers uncovered secret Japanese plans for the Battle of Midway, visit Chief Poetin as he prepares for war with the British,

see Walt Disney accuse his former colleagues of being communists, and uncover the hidden history that lies beneath Central Park. From pre-colonial America to independence, slavery to civil rights, the gold rush to the space race, I'll be speaking to leading experts to delve into America's past. New episodes dropping every Monday and Thursday. So join me on American History Hit, a podcast by History Hit. speaking about people who would have written to him and he would have written back to let's focus in on a couple of these particular officials and we're going to the city that former great city center of a kingdom of Lhasa, who are these prominent figures who Hammurabi

puts in charge of this city, Amanda? Well, the two that we know about are the two for whom the archive survives. There must have been a number of them, but there's a man named Sinadinam. And Sinadinam was the overseer of the governors. So there's a bunch of governors who were already ruling parts of the former kingdom of Lhasa. And Sinadinam is in charge of all of them. So there's a bunch of governors who were already ruling parts of the former kingdom of Larsa. And Sinedinam is in charge of all of them. So he's the governor general. And the other one is a man named Shamash Hazir. And Shamash Hazir was an overseer of the land, the agricultural land in what was now the province that had been Larsa.

And these two men, their correspondence with Hammurabi survives. And so there's about 350 letters, mostly written by Hammurabi to them, of course, because they were found in their archival materials. And they tell us a great deal about how this particular province was governed. But presumably, there were similar people across the empire, and that there would have been other people even within the province of Larsa who would have been the recipients of Hammurabi's letters. But these ones we know particularly well. Well, let's focus in there for on some of them. Let's focus on Shanash Hazir. What about the

letters that we have between Shanash Hazir and Hammurabi? Well, the letters released show that Hammurabi was amazingly interested in tiny details of Shanash Hazir's work. What Shanash Hazir had to do was he kept track of all of the agricultural land, who owned it, whether it was owned by the state, whether it was privately owned, who it had been allocated to. So state land was allocated to officials for their use. It was allocated to soldiers and workers. They didn't own it, they were allowed to use it. And Shamash Hazir is keeping track of all of these allocations of land across this enormous province. I mean, it's a massive job he had. And he also then would allocate, so if someone needed a plot of land, he would allocate the land to them. He had to do a sort of check of all possible

ownership of that land to make sure it was indeed the states to give out. If there was canal work that had to be done, because once these canals were dug, of course, they had to be maintained and canal maintenance was a big deal. He would make sure that people were hired for canal maintenance. If there were dams that needed to be built, he was in charge of that. He was also in charge of the flocks of sheep, the flocks of sheep, which were enormous, tens of thousands of sheep, maybe hundreds of thousands that belonged to the state. They had to be sheared every year, except that they were actually plucked, not sheared, because this was a time when sheep shed their wool naturally. And he would hire the people who were going to do that. He would keep track of the wool. So he had a very, very big job, Shamash Hazir. One other thing to note

is that a lot of the letters from Hammurabi are the result of people writing to complain about Shamash Hazir. So a person would write and say, my field has been given to someone else. Shamash Hazir did this thing. Please, would you correct this? It's my field. And he would send a note to Shamash Hazir and say, you need to check on this field. So-and-so says that it's his, could you check? So he's getting letters, personal letters from quite sort of low ranking people, taking them seriously and asking Shamash Hazir to check into it. That's so interesting, not just on the reflection of the administration and the officials that he puts in charge, but also of Hammurabi's character himself, isn't it? You know, those letters, these are being written or being ordered to be written by Hammurabi himself. And you can see

his actions, his wording in these letters, his handprint and what's being sent to these officials. It's absolutely incredible when you think that this is more than 3,000 years old, actions, his wording in these letters, his handprint and what's being sent to these officials is absolutely incredible when you think that this is more than 3,000 years old, isn't it, Amanda? Yeah, absolutely. 3,700 years old. He didn't write them himself. This is not actually his handwriting because it would have been dictated to a scribe. Each letter starts with, Tu shamash hazir, thus says Hammurabi. He's spoken it and the scribe has written it down. And that was how letters were generally written by kings throughout Mesopotamian history. We rarely ever have a king's actual handwriting. But yes, it's his voice. It's the actual letter.

It's from the time. It's not something that was copied for hundreds of years and we end up getting a version of it that's been edited or whatever. It's the real thing. And I think that's the wonderful thing about these letters is that they are so lively in a way that royal inscriptions aren't. When the king writes a royal inscription, he thinks, this is how I want the future to remember me. This is what I want the gods to know about me. When he's writing to Shah Moshazir, he's just saying, look, you've got to get this thing figured out because so-and-so is upset and it's not right. And he sometimes even says this. He says, someone who has worked the land for so many years, it is their land. You need to get it back to him. He's really quite concerned that the right thing be done and that Shamash Hazir corrects the mistakes he's made. And he

assumes that Shamash Hazir is not abusing his job. I mean, there's no sense in the letters, I think, that he's accusing Shamash Hazir of corruption or anything. Just, you know, you have to get this right because this person deserves to have the land that they have been allocated. It's interesting. It's really interesting. It sounds like the work email of ancient Babylonia, ancient Mesopotamia, where you're working with a colleague and making sure that they get something over in the time. It's fascinating. And I also love that how much attention he has to the administration of his, well, newly won empire. I mean, how successful does this whole administration machine, how does it prove? It seems to be very successful. He seems to have

done a census so that he knew what the lands were that he was now ruling, at least in Lhasa, but probably in other places as well. He imposed taxes, but he made sure this other person, Senedinam, the governor general, was in charge of making sure the taxes were paid. And the taxes were paid always in barley and silver. So if someone needed to pay their taxes in sheep, then that person could pay their taxes in sheep. And there was a system of converting that into barley and silver. And it does seem to have been a smoothly running kingdom during his reign at any rate. Yeah, it seems to have worked well. As much as we love the administration, we now need to move on to the laws, perhaps the most famous part of Hammurabi's legacy. Now, when does he decide

to introduce the famous laws, the law codes that we now so often associate with this figure? Looks as though it was in his 38th year, so very late in his reign, five years before the end of his reign, he put out these laws. But he was not the first king to do so. The first laws had been long before him, probably in the reign of a king named Ornama. Those are the earliest ones we know of anyway. It's because of archaeological accident. It could be that there were earlier ones that simply haven't been found, but Ornama's laws seem to be the earliest. So in this, Hammurabi is following a model that had existed for a long time, hundreds of years of laws being promulgated. I think one of the very common misconceptions about Hammurabi is this idea that he invented law. He didn't at all. He was doing something that was well, well known. But

he chose to have his laws put onto a giant stone stele, seven foot high, you know, stone stele that was set up in the middle of a city. In fact, seven foot high, you know, stone stele that was set up in the middle of a city. In fact, on several of them, one of them survives. But it sounds as though many cities had these stone steles with the laws carved into them. And it was a sort of statement, not just of the laws that he felt should be followed, but it has a long prologue and a long epilogue as well, in which he presents himself as such a good king, as such a kind and pious king in the prologue and the epilogue. And then this long, long, it's called a code.

I don't think it is a code. I mean, we talked about Hammurabi's law code. A code suggests that it was trying to be exhaustive. It isn't exhaustive at all. He doesn't even have a law that says what happens if you murder someone. I mean, you know, there's a lot of things missing in this supposed code of law. It's a collection of laws rather than a code. Okay, well, you've hinted there, therefore, Amanda.

What sorts of laws are included on this stele? Perhaps all of them represent legal precedents. And these are, therefore, things that had actually gone to court. And as you might imagine, the vast majority of them pertain to aspects of daily life. So we talked about irrigation, what happens if someone's canal breaks its banks and floods someone else's field, things about inheritance, adoption, divorce, renting, loans, debts, all kinds of just things that people would encounter in their daily lives that would give them a reason to go to court. And that's most of them. There are some crimes, but not that many, honestly. There's almost 300 laws, and not that many are sort of things like theft and robbery and sexual

assault and murder. There are some, but not a large number of them. Most of them are much more just very sort of quotidian. I mean, so what does that therefore hint at what was important for the daily life of Hammurabi's subjects in cities all around his new empire, whether that is Mari, or that is Lhasa, or that is Babylon itself? What is this incredible archaeological evidence suggesting telling us about life in Hammurabi's kingdom? It tells us that they really cared about justice. They were litigious. They went to court a lot about things that they thought were important. And as a result of that, I mean, this has been true since about 2500 BCE,

the courts were set up really to get at the truth of the case. Long before there were even written laws, there were judges, there were witnesses, there was evidence. They had contracts that were written down. Some of the very earliest documents that were ever written were contracts that you would take to court and you would use to prove your case. You would call in witnesses. It was a very, very, I think, justice-focused society. For example, they had, if you got married, you had a prenuptial agreement in a way that we don't even insist on today. But that was part of getting married. You had your prenup was part of the marriage process.

So a number of things where even today we wouldn't necessarily draw up a contract. They would have one. And that tells us a lot. But it also tells us that, you know, people were largely focused on agriculture. This is a culture where everybody is being fed from these farms. focused on agriculture. This is a culture where everybody is being fed from these farms. And even if you were a high official and you couldn't personally farm your land, you had land that you had tenant farmers farming for you. That was a major source of your income. So farming was really, really central to it. Really, really central indeed. And I'm going to go on a tangent

down these law courts of Hammurabi's kingdom now, because in ancient Roman times, the law courts, they were out in the open, in the forum, the central communal area of the city. Can we imagine back in Hammurabi's time that you have these stelae, you know, they are erected in each of these important centres with the code of laws. You say, maybe it's a code, maybe it's not. There's a list of laws there and the prologue. But would the law courts have also been happening outside nearby in a communal open area? Or do we have any idea in what form this justice was delivered? You know, it's really puzzling, but there isn't a clear law court that is the place where they always met. The judges would gather, and you generally had a panel of judges.

And it must have been somewhere near the temple because they would have oaths sworn. of judges. And it must have been somewhere near the temple because they would have oaths sworn. And in order to swear the oath, the symbol of the God, not the actual statue of the God, but the symbol of the God would be brought out. And the people, whether they were witnesses or whether they were the accused or whoever, would swear an oath in front of these symbols. So presumably close to the temple and perhaps in the open air. But you mentioned those steles, not apparently in sight of the stele because they never mentioned the laws. And this is one of the really striking things about the legal system and about Hammurabi's

laws is that they kept track of court cases. We have records of court cases that survive and they describe everything that happens from the oaths that were sworn and the evidence and the names of the witnesses. And they never say the judges consulted the laws ever. the names of the witnesses. And they never say the judges consulted the laws ever. So it seems as though although Hammurabi wanted his laws to be followed, the judges maybe knew about the spirit of the law, but they certainly didn't go checking them out. It's really curious. Very, very curious indeed. Once again, there's another interesting, mysterious insight into the justice, the legal system of Hammurabi's empire during his reign.

I mean, I've got a couple more things I'd like to ask about on the laws before we really start wrapping up. I've got the case study here in front of me. You know the figure I'm going to talk about because he does take part of your book. And he's a fascinating figure. Mashem, Amanda, take it away. Oh, Mashem. So I really wanted to write about a person in Hammurabi's time, a soldier. And I found Mashem in two of Shamash Hazio's letters. And Mashem is just an average

guy. We have his name because Hammurabi cared enough to list a number of men and the fields they were to receive. And Mashem was an average soldier and he got a small field and his field was in the vicinity of some of his fellow colleagues who he fought with presumably and his immediate supervisor and he gets this little field and then I looked at well what would Mashem's life have been like and of course Mashem is illiterate we don't have anything that he wrote we have his name because Hammurabi cared to give him a field, actually give him the use of a field, not to give him one. But based on the laws, we know a lot about what a soldier's life would have been. He would have worked the land most of the year. So he's not on campaign for

more than just about three months a year. But during those three months, if the army needs him, he's called up. And that's the reason he has the use of this land. It's called Ilkum land. And so he has the use of the land because he's a soldier. And he goes off on campaign. And a number of the laws then tell us what he can and can't do. He cannot sell his field. That's not allowed. The field doesn't belong to him, belongs to the state. And when he's off on campaign, there's a recognition that he might be taken prisoner. Interestingly, the law doesn't say what would happen if a soldier like Mashen dies. Don't know.

But if he's taken prisoner and he therefore can't come back to work his land for the rest of the year, his wife loses two thirds of it, but she gets to keep one third of it while he's prisoner so that she can support the family on one third of his Ilkham land until such time as he comes back. of his Ilkham land until such time as he comes back. to be who you're not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. And it was assumed, in fact, that he probably would come back because there are laws about how you redeem, how you ransom an imprisoned soldier who's imprisoned in another land.

And so if Martian was imprisoned, and in my case study, I said, well, what if he was? What we know is that there was a whole mechanism set up by the state to make sure that he would be brought home because there was an assumption that the ransom would be paid. And it starts with merchants.

There were merchants all over the place at this time, traveling between the different lands. And the merchant would redeem the soldier. He would ransom him. But now the merchant wants to be repaid. So Marsham's on his way home. The merchant's like, this isn't out of my pocket. And so there's a whole sort of series of who pays. Well, if Marsham has enough money to pay his own ransom, he pays him back. But if Marsham can't afford it, any soldier can't afford it, then the local temple is going to pay back the merchant for the ransom. And if the temple, for whatever reason, can't afford it, then the king will pay, the state will pay. So there is a guaranteed ransom so that he can get back to his family. And so one imagines Masham's wife,

perhaps with a small child, she isn't able to keep the entire Ilkham land until he returns. And then presumably when he returned, it would have been restored to her. But it sort of gives you a sense of, between the letters and the laws, of what someone's life was like, how much time was spent farming. He might also have been called up to work on those canals that Shamashazir was overseeing. So Mashim would have been a worker most of his time and a soldier part-time. Fascinating, that idea. So there's no law regarding if he actually died in combat, but if he was taken prisoner.

That's amazing, Amanda. It's a wonderful insight, isn't it? Once again, which must be one of the joys writing this book, where Hammurabi's reign and his rule is just a small part of your huge Bible on the ancient Near East. But still, even in this small part, you can get this correspondence, you can get this bureaucracy, you can get these legal documents that give you this incredible, almost first-eye view of life in this ancient Mesopotamian kingdom, as you mentioned earlier,

some 3,700 years ago. And it's true. I mean, as you say in the whole book, there's half a million cuneiform documents that have been found in the Middle East. And they have hundreds of thousands of names. I mean, Mashum is just one of these hundreds of thousands. And as I was writing the book, sort of picking which people I wanted to focus on was difficult, but then great fun. Because once you have them and you start going down the sort of sources into their lives, it's just fascinating. Absolutely, indeed.

Well, come on, as we absolutely wrap up now, Amanda, we've got to ask about the end of Hammurabi's reign. So what happens to this figure? And then what happens after him? Well, he seems to have died of old age, but his son, whose name was Samsu Aluna, was much less successful at keeping the empire together. Almost immediately, begin to be rebellions in the south, especially, and Samsu Luna was unable to maintain control of the south. And so the entire region, including Larsa that we've been talking about, became independent of Hammurabi. And other regions also rebelled so that over the subsequent 150 years after his reign, that the kingdom

continued to survive. It became a smaller and smaller kingdom. It only had its height under the reign of Hammurabi and only in just those last sort of 13 years of his reign. So it was a very short-lived empire, if we can even call it an empire. His successors were successful in terms of ruling their immediate vicinity, but they had terrible troubles with a new kingdom that developed in the south called the Sealand. And the Sealand was a constant thorn in their sides for the rest of that period. Well, there you go. So in regards to his legacy, therefore, how important would you argue Hammurabi really is? That is such a tough question. If he hadn't become famous in 1902, when his stele was found,

I don't know what I would say. When the stele was found, it was a headline in newspapers because it was the first law collection that had been found that seemed to predate the Bible. And so there was a lot of talk about it. Hammurabi was the first lawgiver and he was the predecessor of Moses and all this kind of stuff, which proved to not be true at all. I mean, he's not the first and his significance there is nothing. On the other hand, I wouldn't want him to be forgotten. His laws were copied subsequently after his reign by scribes when they were in school. They His significance there is nothing. On the other hand, I wouldn't want him to be forgotten. His laws were copied subsequently after his reign by scribes when they were in school. They were school exercises.

And so people continued to read the laws and to study them for a long time after his reign, all the way up until the Neo-Assyrian period, there are copies of his laws. So they were seen as important, even though they weren't the first, even by his successors. But in terms of the actual impact he had, as I say, he would be shocked in terms of the extent to which he is a big name and the corresponding career that he had. That said, I kind of like that he's a big name because he's a lot gentler of a king than some of the other big names like Sargon, like Ashurbanipal, who were much more all about conquering rather than about maintaining the empires that they had created and being supportive to the people that they ruled. And I love his micromanaging in this idea, as I said, of this.

The work email of today is what he's writing back, you know, 3,700 years ago. Amanda, it's absolutely fascinating. And, you know, on The Ancients, we always ask the hard, difficult questions. So thank you for picking up the gauntlet and asking that so easily and clearly just now. Last but certainly not least, you've written a book all about Hammurabi and so much more, which is called? It's called Weavers, Scribes and Kings, A New History of the Ancient Near East. And it's from Oxford University Press. And it just came out. And yes, as you say, there are a lot of people in there.

There's a number of these, almost a hundred of these small biographies of people, case studies of people, not just kings, but people like Masham and Shamash Hazir. Brilliant. Well, Amanda, it just goes for me to say, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.

Thank you very much for having me. Well, there you go. There was Professor Amanda Potteny giving an excellent overview of the Babylonian King Hammurabi, or Hammurabi. I hope you enjoyed the episode. And as Amanda mentioned, her new book, Weavers, Scribes and Kings, A New History of the ancients near east is out now it is a titanic book but it's also so so interesting it covers so much ground so if you do enjoy this area of ancient history i thoroughly recommend it it has had glorious reviews and i'm just adding one extra review here to it because it is a fascinating read now last thing from me before i let you all go you know what i'm going to say,

if you'd be kind enough to leave us a lovely rating on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts from, well we, the whole team, would greatly appreciate it as we continue our mission to share these incredible stories from our distant past with you and with as many people as possible. But that's enough from me and I'll see you in the next episode.