Hammurabi and Babylon

The Amorite conqueror, Hammurabi, created an empire in Mesopotamia, centered at the city of Babylon. Hammurabi made laws he claimed he had received from Babylon's sun-god and god of justice, Shamash. People saw order as the work of gods, and the people of Babylon saw Hammurabi as wise for having associated himself with the order and justice of Shamash. Shamash appeared to be interested in contracts between people being witnessed and ratified and the deeds of partnership being maintained. His laws also included the registration of properties and wills being recognized as law. Shamash's laws included protecting landholders from the landless. His laws regulated the treatment of women and slaves. A law made a doctor liable if the doctor made his patient worse, and an architect might be executed if his negligence resulted in the collapse of a house he had designed.

In Hammurabi's time, among the religious practices common to ancient peoples, Babylonians were looking to the movement of stars to discern the intentions of the gods. Their calculations were an astronomy, which, associated with the intentions of the gods, was another instance in the practice of astrology among ancient people. With gods permeating everything, there was as yet no distinction made between astronomy and astrology.

There were ritual specialists, something beyond the voluntary shamanism that had preceded civilization. Among them were healers and experts in magic, building from the belief in magic and the ever-presence of gods that had been a part of Stone Age religion. There were oracles -- people believed to have an unusual ability to communicate with a certain god and thought to be a mouthpiece for that god. People consulted the oracles. It was verbal communication, and the oracles sometimes communicated in riddles. With gods associated with events, any event that could be matched by imagination with something someone said was easily attributed to that person having prophesied. The gods were already seen as selective in whom they were to leak their secrets, and very stingy in that leaking.

Kassites invaders from the mountainous region just east of Mesopotamia overran Babylon when it was ruled by Hammurabi's descendants. The Babylonians believed that the gods were punishing people for lack of respect for god-given laws. Then came another wave of Kassites, who occupied Babylon and briefly overran other parts of Mesopotamia.

Kassite warriors settled down, adopted Mesopotamian culture and made themselves warrior-aristocrats. The Kassites accepted Babylon's literature as sacred. Sumerian writings had been preserved in modified form. This included versions and copies of the creation story that was to become known as the Enuma Elish, a story the elevated the Babylonian god Marduk above the other gods of Mesopotamia. Contact between cultures had been creating cultural diffusion, which was to persist in West Asia with more contacts between different peoples.

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Religion in Babylon