Babylon
Hammurabi is quite possibly the most famous of the Mesopotamian kings, reigning about 1792-1750 BCE. He was the sixth Amorite king of Babylon, after that Semitic group of people invaded Mesopotamia and founded their own dynasty in the region.
He conquered the Elamite city of Larsa and destroyed the city of Mari, which lay on the main trade route between Babylon and Syria. He reunified Mesopotamia nearly back to its borders under Sargon the Great, from the Persian Gulf to Assyria. But he is most well-known because of the collection of legal decisions made under his royal prerogative and named for him - the Code of Hammurabi. He decreed that this code be used by judges throughout Babylonia, and had it copied in clay and stone and set up in the courtyards of temples for everyone to consult.
Hammurabi's empire did not last long after his death, and control was gradually lost over the south. A series of revolts led to Babylonia being divided into three parts: the center remained under the control of the city of Babylon and Hammurabi's successors; the southern section was now held by a dynasty known as the Sealanders, and the northeast portion and the middle Euphrates was held by invading Kassites. The Kassites came from the Zagros Mountains to the east, like the Gutians had before them.
Around 1595 BCE, the Hittites surged out of Anatolia and down the Euphrates, capturing Babylon in about 1595 BCE, plundering and burning it, ending Hammurabi's dynasty. But they withdrew shortly thereafter and the Kassites renewed their attacks against both Babylon and the Sealand kingdom. The Kassites ruled Babylonia for more than four hundred years, the longest dynasty in Babylonia. Then around 1160 BCE, the Elamites struck and ended Kassite rule. Babylonia returned to the rule of local dynasties for the next several hundred years.
These local dynasties were weaker than their predecessors, and they could not stop future waves of invaders. The Chaldeans took possession of the extreme southern part of Babylonia, and called their kingdom Chaldea. They frequently moved north through Babylonia to attack Assyria, which was rising steadily and increasing in power. By about the middle of the sixth century BCE, Assyria's king Tiglath-pileser began to intervene in Babylonian affairs. He captured Babylon and declared himself its king. Babylonia was now part of the Assyrian empire.
For another century or so, Babylon was governed by Chaldeans and other Assyrian appointees. Then in 626 BCE, Naboplassar, a Chaldean who was acting as the Assyrian governor of southern Babylonia, seized kingship of Babylonia, establishing the final Babylonian dynasty and the Chaldean, or neo-Babylonian, empire. For the next eleven years, the Assyrians and Chaldeans attacked each other, but Naboplassar allied himself with the powerful king Cyaxares of the Medes. Supported now only by Egypt, the Assyrians were desperate. The Meds destroyed the ancient Assyrian capital of Assur in 614 BCE, and the Chaldeans and Medes, aided by Scythians in the north, attacked the city of Nineveh, burning its palaces and temples too in 612 BCE.
The Babylonians decisively finished off the Assyrian empire and their Egyptian allies under King Necho II at the Battle of Carchemish on the upper Euphrates in 605 BCE. The conqueror allies divided the empire. The Medes took territories not only in eastern Anatolia but also in the old Assyrian provinces north and east of the Tigris. The Persians, vassals of the Medes, would soon rule ancient Elam and eventually spread throughout the ancient Near East forming their own empire. The Chaldeans gobbled up the western territories of the old Assyrian empire, ruling a domain stretching from Babylonia to southeast Anatolia and down to the borders of Egypt.
Meanwhile Naboplassar died in 605 BCE, just as the Babylonians had defeated Assyria at Carchemish. The crown prince Nebuchadnezzar II would have followed the panicking Egyptians but returned home hurriedly to secure the throne of Babylon. It was this Nebuchadnezzar who deported thousands of people from Jerusalem and Judah to Babylonia, where they prospered and developed farmlands and became merchants. Nebuchadnezzar pushed Babylonia's frontiers to the Persian Gulf, the Taurus Mountains and the borders of Egypt. His empire thrived as the principal political power in western Asia until 539 BCE.
Nebuchadnezzar died in 562 BCE. His three immediate successors, ruling until 556 BCE, had brief and disappointing reigns. Two were murdered during rebellions. The second group of assassins made Nabonidus king, although he was not of the royal line of Naboplassar and Nebuchadnezzar. He had served as a competent diplomat under two Chaldean kings and was actually from Harran in Assyria, which had been conquered by the Medes and Chaldeans in 610. The legends of madness attributed later to Nebuchadnezzar should probably be more accurately credited to Nabonidus. Nabonidus preferred the deity of his home to the state god of Babylonia, and his actions during his reign in this regard enraged the priests and weakened the unity of the government. He also abandoned Babylon and moved to a distant oasis in northwestern Arabia, leaving his son Belshazzar as regent. With the king's absence from the capital, the New Year Festival, which required his presence in the religious rites, could not be performed, and this increased the resentment of the people toward Nabonidus.
Meanwhile, trouble was brewing between the Medes and their Persian vassals. The Persians and their king Cyrus the Great had settled in southwestern Iran. After they successfully defeated and annexed Media in 550 BCE, Cyrus then campaigned against Lydia and its king Croesus. Cyrus then moved against Babylonia, and Nabonidus raced home from Arabia to find that the priests and much of the population were now firmly pro-Persian. Cyrus had a reputation for clemency and religious tolerance, and he promised to grant the Babylonian priesthood special privileges in return for their support.
Babylon fell to the Persians, without a battle, when Cyrus appeared before its gates in 539 BCE, and he established Persian rule throughout the old Neo-Babylonian Empire.