The Kingdom of Babylon and the Kingdom of the Sealand

Abstract

AbstractThe Old Babylonian kingdom of Babylon emerged in the fragmented political landscape of the early second millennium, as one among other states under Amorite rulership, reaching its short-lived zenith in the eighteenth century bc with Hammurabi’s sweeping conquests. At the time, it controlled most of the Mesopotamian plain, the Diyala valley, and northeastern Syria. Its kings elevated Babylon to the status of royal capital, laying the ideological and political foundations of the later metropolis that entered the Bible and Greek sources. This chapter presents a survey of the political and social history of the kingdom, explores its ideological underpinnings, and discusses aspects of its intellectual history. During the three centuries of its existence, the kingdom was part of a complex and unstable web of shifting vassalage and alliances. The rulers of Babylon implemented a palace-centric tributary economy, in which entrepreneurs played an important role. Scribal activity blossomed, and several of the main literary works constituting the corpus of cuneiform literature were composed in that period. The kingdom disintegrated gradually, beginning with the loss of southern Babylonia, where the kingdom of the Sealand arose in the latter part of the eighteenth century bc. From then on, the history of Babylonia is a history of two kingdoms, Babylon in the north and the Sealand in the south. This chapter discusses also how the Sealand rulers maintained power over their dominion after the collapse of Babylon in ca. 1595 bc, before falling prey to the new Kassite dynasty of Babylon.