The Super Summary of World History - Alan Dale Daniel [21]
Walled cities were common in Mesopotamia, and the larger the city the higher the wall. The open nature of the area and its nearness to the Caspian Sea, either side of which was a common incursion route from the plains of southern Russia, caused it to endure constant raids and outright invasions. Picture this roll call of changing kingdoms: the old Babylonian empire (1792 BC) was overthrown by Hittites (1595 BC), the Hittites departed after being vanquished by the Peoples of the Sea (1200), the Assyrians (694 BC) eventually filled the void left by the Hittites; the Assyrians were overthrown by the Chaldeans (neo-Babylonians or Medes) (626 BC), which were replaced by the Persians (539 BC), who were conquered by the Greeks (331 BC). And we have not listed all the empires, just the major ones. The Romans came later, then the empire of Parthia, and on and on. It never really ends. More than a little of this turmoil came from nomads around the Caspian and Black Sea.
For about three hundred years, Assyria was the dominant military and political power in the Middle Eastern region. Assyria began to expand in 911 BC and held on to an empire reaching from the northern Tigris River (Turkey) to the Persian Gulf (Mesopotamia), including Egypt, until its defeat by Babylonian Nabopolassar in 626 BC. The Assyrian capitol at Nineveh fell in 612 BC. The Assyrians used iron weapons, much harder than bronze, and excelled at siege warfare and the use of cavalry. The Assyrians were ruthless beyond compare. An area refusing their demands for subjugation had their cities razed and every inhabitant butchered. For example, the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal boasted he overthrew a city, skinned some leaders alive, walled some of them up alive, impaled others, beheaded some and had their heads hung from tree branches around the city, burned the young men and women alive, and the rest, he bragged, were driven into the desert to die of thirst. Not the kind of fellow one chooses to have over for tea. Walled cities often refused demands by invaders because sieges commonly failed; however, the Assyrians invented siege machines that breached the walls and brought cities down quickly. Nevertheless, all the empires, whether benign or ruthless fell one after the other. Whether Babylonian, Egyptian, Hittite, Persian, or Greek, no one could gain power and hold it indefinitely.
Figure 5 Babylon, The Hanging Gardens
In Babylonia, King Hammurabi (1792-1750 BC) set forth a code of 282 laws governing his empire. His were not the first laws, nor were they the first written down; however, they are the most complete set of laws found from this era. Most of the laws would make sense in the twenty-first century because they deal with common problems and have common-sense solutions. For example, if a person injured another’s property, restitution was in order; or if a builder constructed a house that fell down, he was to pay the homeowner for damages. Obviously, people in the ancient world had problems similar to ours, and their solutions were exactly like ours, in that the governing body took steps to reach equity in disputes. In our modern world law continues to play a critical part in our societies, showing some things never change. Hammurabi’s Code, chiseled into stone and placed in a prominent public place, gave notice to all what the laws were so his subjects knew the rules and the punishment for breaching the rules. It might show that the king would settle all