Chart of Central Events in the Ancient Near East 
Old Testament Life and Literature (1968)
Gerald A. Larue

CHART XVIII. Chart of Central Events in the Ancient Near East
Aegean and GreeceEgyptAsia MinorSyria and PalestineAssyriaBabyloniaIran
2800Egyptian writingEarly Bronze Walled CitiesCuneiform writing2800
2600Old Kingdom PyramindsEarly city states2600
24002400
2200Sargon of Agade2200
2000First Intermediate PeriodMiddle BronzeUnder BabylonAmorite 
invasionsUnder Babylon 2000
1900Middle KingdomLipit-Ishtar1900
1800Assyrian trade colonies foundedCommercial expansionRise of BabylonOld 
Elamite Kingdom 1800
Minoan Linear A 1700HyksosOld Hittite KingdomHammurabi Cassite 
Invasions1700
16001600
1500New KingdomHittites sack Babylon1500
Minoan Linear B 1400Mitanni KingdomNuzi1400
1300Amarna Period: Akhenaten
The ExodusNew Hittite EmpireUgarit 'Apiru1300
1200Rameses IIHittite hieroglyphic writingHebrew conquest1200
Trojan War 1100XX DynastySea PeoplesPhilistines
JudgesTiglath Pileser INebuchad- rezzar I1100
Dorian invasion 1000Saul1000
Greek alphabet 900David
Solomon
Kingdom dividesAssyrian domination900
800Israel and JudahAshurnasir- pal II800
Homer 700Ethiopian dominationFall of SamariaSargon IIMerodach- Baladan 
II700
600Assyrian invasionKing Gyges of LydiaHezekiahSennacherib
Ashurbanipal
Fall of NinevehAssyrian domination
Chaldean DynastyMedes
Rise of Achaemenids
600
Solon 500Persian conquestCyrus defeats King Croecus of LydiaFall of 
Jerusalem
Babylonian Captivity
Return to JudahPersian domination
Cyrus rulesNebuchad- rezzar II
Nabonidus
Persian capture of BabylonCyrus

Darius I
500
Persian Wars Age of Pericles 400Rebuilding Judah Nehemiah, EzraXerxes I
400
Alexander 300Alexander
PtolemiesAlexander
SeleucidsAlexander
Seleucids- PtolemiesAlexander
SeleucidsAlexander
SeleucidsAlexander
300
200200
Roman domination 100Seleucids forced out of Asia MinorMaccabeesParthians 
capture Babylon100
Roman provinceSeleucids collapse
Pompey takes Jerusalem
Judea formed

Old Testament Life and Literature is copyright © 1968, 1997 by Gerald A. Larue. 
All rights reserved.
The electronic version is copyright © 1997 by Internet Infidels with the written 
permission of Gerald A. Larue. 



Internet Infidels 1995-1999. All rights reserved.
Last updated: Monday, 30-Nov-98 07:56:48 MST 

Kassites 

History has been unkind to the Kassites, a people who come onto the 
stage of history in the one of the most chaotic periods in the Middle 
East. In the middle of the second millenium BC, Indo-European peoples 
began vast and chaotic migrations out of Europe towards Persia and India; 
this migration was powered by a stunning new technology: the military use 
of horses and chariots. These invasions displaced many peoples who began 
to migrate in many directions, and some headed towards Mesopotamia and 
Palestine. These were Asian people who had adopted Indo-European authority 
and military structures, and many of them were invaders who set up 
miniature kingdoms dotting the landscape of the Middle East and Asia 
Minor. The Hittites were the most successful of these new invaders. But 
they didn't control the center of Mesopotamia, the city of Babylon, for 
very long before another Indo-European people, the Kassites, roared in and 
dominated a large part of Mesopotamia. The Hittite empire continued for 
several hundred years, but the Kassites would dominate the center of 
Mesopotamia both militarily and commercially.

After storming into Babylon, they renamed the city, Karanduniash, and 
made their capital in a new city that they built from scratch, 
Durkurigalzu. In this respect, we can see in the dim dust of history an 
attempt to do something new culturally in Mesopotamia. But the Kassites 
are gone within a blink of an eye, as wave after wave of migrations put 
pressure on their fragile hold on power. By 1200, all the great 
Indo-European kingdoms, that great human experiment in transforming 
Mesopotamia into an Indo-European culture, have been weakened by the 
incessant troubles of war and invasion, and the Assyrians, a Semitic 
people angered by Indo-European domination, would return the area to 
Semitic control. Under the Assyrian king, Ashur-Dan, the last Kassite king 
was driven from the Babylonian throne in the twelfth century BC.

History, of course, is written by the winners. We know very little 
about the Kassites except that their conquerors felt that they were 
barbarians and savages. What they intended culturally we will never know, 
whether they would adopt the genealogy of Sumerian culture as so many 
peoples had done before them or whether they would have forged something 
new. But their story was swallowed up in the soil they thought they owned, 
and with dust their paper they left us only their names. 
Richard Hooker 

World Cultures Home Page 
©1996, Richard Hooker 
Updated 9-25-97 

The Chaldeans 

After the fall of Assyrian power in Mesopotamia, the last great group 
of Semitic peoples dominated the area. Suffering mightily under the 
Assyrians, the city of Babylon finally rose up against its hated enemy, 
the city of Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian empire, and burned it to 
the ground. The chief of the Babylonians was Nabopolassar; the Semites 
living in the northern part of Mesopotamia would never gain their 
independence again. 
The Hebrews 

The Exile 
Nabopolassar was succeeded by his son, Nebuchadnezzar II (605-562 BC). 
Nebuchadnezzar was the equal of all the great Mesopotamian conquerors, 
from Sargon onwards; he not only prevented major powers such as Egypt and 
Syria from making inroads on his territory, he also conquered the 
Phoenicians and the state of Judah (586 BC), the southern Jewish kingdom 
that remained after the subjugation of Israel, the northern kingdom, by 
the Assyrians. In order to secure the territory of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar 
brought Jehoiachin and Zedekiah, the two kings of Judah (in succession) 
and held them in Babylon. In keeping with Assyrian practice, the "New 
Babylonians," or Chaldeans forced a large part of the Jewish population to 
relocate. Numbering possibly up to 10,000, these Jewish deportees were 
largely upper class people and craftspeople; this deportation marks the 
beginning of the Exile in Jewish history. 
Under Nebuchadnezzar, the city of Babylon was rebuilt with great 
splendor; it would eventually become one of the most magnificent human 
cities in the area of the Middle East and Mediterranean. But all was not 
perfect beneath the shining surface; there still existed a number of 
cities that were loyal to the Assyrians. The entire period dominated by 
the Babylonians, in fact, is a period of great unrest as Babylonian 
hegemony was continually tested by philo-Assyrians. This conflict slammed 
the door on the Babylonian empire after a dynasty of only five kings. 
Babylon in 555 BC came under the control of a king loyal to the Assyrians, 
Nabonidus (555-539 BC), who attacked Babylonian culture at its heart: he 
placed the Assyrian moon-god, Sin, above the Babylonian's principal god, 
Marduk, who symbolized not only the faith of Babylon but the very city and 
people itself. Angered and bitter, the priests and those faithful to 
Babylon would welcome Cyrus the Conqueror of Persia into their city and 
end forever Semitic domination of Mesopotamia. The center of the Middle 
Eastern world shifted to Cyrus's capital, Susa, and it would shift again 
after the Greeks and then the Romans. For almost two and a half centuries, 
Mesopotamia and Babylon at its center, dominated the landscape of early 
civilization in the Middle East to be finally eclipsed by the rising sun 
of the Indo-European cultures to the north and to the west. 
Richard Hooker 

Amorites 

After the last Sumerian dynasty fell around 2000 BC, Mesopotamia 
drifted into conflict and chaos for almost a century. Around 1900 BC, a 
group of Semites called the Amorites had managed to gain control of most 
of the Mesopotamian region. Like the Akkadians, the Amorites centralized 
the government over the individual city-states and based their capital in 
the city of Babylon, which was originally called Akkad and served as the 
center of the Amorite empire. For this reason, the Amorites are called the 
Old Babylonians and the period of their ascendancy over the region, which 
lasted from 1900-1600 BC, is called the Old Babylonian period.

The Sumerian monarchy underwent significant changes; in order to 
justify the enormous power the monarch enjoyed, the Old Babylonians 
believed that the monarch was a god and had a divine origin. This powerful 
new monarchy invented new ways to adminster the state and its resources: 
taxation and involuntary military service. Above all, the greatest 
innovation was centralization. While the Sumerian civilization consisted 
of independent and autonomous city-states, the Old Babylonian state was a 
behemoth of dozens of cities. In order to make this system work, power and 
autonomy was taken from the individual cities and invested in the monarch. 
As a result, an entirely new set of laws were invented by the Old 
Babylonians: laws which dealt with crimes against the state.

It is in the realm of law that the Sumerian state was most dramatically 
changed by the Amorites. While law among the Sumerians was administered 
jointly by individuals and the state, the Old Babylonians allowed the 
state to more actively pursue and punish criminals. The punishments became 
dramatically more draconian: the death penalty was applied to many more 
crimes, including "bad behavior in a bar." 

The Hittites 

Roaring into history from mysterious origins, the Hittites would rule a 
great empire that stretched from Mesopotamia to Syria and Palestine. The 
Hittites are shrouded in fog and mystery; we don't where they came from, 
and for a long time the language they spoke was undecipherable. In the 
end, it turns out they were Indo-European, that is, they spoke a language 
from the Indo-European language family, which includes English, German, 
Greek, Latin, Persian, and the languages of India. Their invasion spelled 
the end of the Old Babylonian empire in Mesopotamia (1900-1600 BC), and 
like so many others before them, the invaders adopted the ways of the 
conquered; after the conquest of Mesopotamia, the Hittites adopted the 
laws, religion, and the literature of the Old Babylonians thus continuing 
the long heritage of Sumerian culture.

Their empire was at its greatest from 1600-1200 BC, and even after the 
Assyrians gained control of Mesopotamia after 1300 BC, the Hittite cities 
and territories thrived independently until 717 BC, when the territories 
were finally conquered by Assyrians and others.

The Hebrew scriptures have little to say about the Hittites, and the 
Egyptians regarded them as barbarians. In fact, from 1300-1200 BC, the 
Hittites waged a war against Egypt that drained both empires tragically. 
The Hittites themselves seem to have left few accounts of their history, 
so until this century no-one really knew their culture or the greatness of 
their political ascendacy

But the Hittites are perhaps one of the most significant peoples in 
Mesopotamian history. Because their empire was so large and because their 
primary activity was commerce, trading with all the civilizations and 
peoples of the Mediterranean, the Hittites were the people primarily 
responsible for transmitting Mesopotamian thought, law, political 
structure, economic structure, and ideas around the Mediterranean, from 
Egypt to Greece. So the Hittites are the great traders in the culture 
built by the Sumerians and adopted and modified by later peoples. Because 
of the Hittites, when the Hebrews migrated to Canaan under Moses they 
found a people, the Canaanites, who were, culturally speaking, 
Mesopotamian.

The Hittites greatly modified the system of law they inherited from 
the Old Babylonians. The most extensive literature that the Hittites have 
left us is, in fact, decrees and laws. These laws were far more merciful 
than the laws of the Old Babylonians, perhaps because the Hittites were 
less concerned about maintaining a rigid, despotic central authority. 
While you could lose your life for just about everything under the Old 
Babylonian system of laws, including getting rowdy in a tavern, under the 
Hittites only a small handful of crimes were capital crimes. Even 
premeditated murder only resulted in a fine—a large fine, to be sure, but 
far preferable than losing your head. They modified the role of the 
monarch in that they gave the king ownership of all the land under his 
control; previously, under the Sumerians and Amorites, private property 
was allowed and the monarch only owned his own private property. 
Individuals were allowed control over land, which belong to the king, only 
by serving in the king's army. So the bulk of the population became tenant 
farmers.

The Hittites adopted many of the gods of the Sumerians and Old 
Babylonians. The odd thing about the Hittites, though, is that they seemed 
to have recognized that all gods were legitimate gods. Whenever they 
conquered a people, they adopted that people's gods into their religious 
system, in much the same way the uji , or clans, in early Japan would 
adopt the gods of rival uji when they had conquered them. As far as 
history is concerned, this has tremendous consequences for the history of 
the Hebrews. The Assyrians seem to have adopted the same tolerance towards 
other religions, which allowed the Jewish faith to persist after the 
Jewish state was decimated by the Assyrians. And the Assyrians seem to 
have adopted the same tendency to adopt the gods of conquered people, so 
the Assyrian conquerors of Palestine adopted the Hebrew god, Yahweh, into 
their religion. This eventually led to the only major religious schism in 
Hebrew history, the schism between Jews and Samaritans (there are still 
Samaritans alive today). 

Assyria 

The Assyrians were Semitic people living in the northern reaches of 
Mesopotamia; they have a long history in the area, but for most of that 
history they are subjugated to the more powerful kingdoms and peoples to 
the south. Under the monarch, Shamshi-Adad, the Assyrians attempted to 
build their own empire, but Hammurabi soon crushed the attempt and the 
Assyrians disappear from the historical stage. Eventually the Semitic 
peoples living in northern Mesopotamia were invaded by another Asiatic 
people, the Hurrians, who migrated into the area and began to build an 
empire of their own. But the Hurrian dream of empire was soon swallowed up 
in the dramatic growth of the Hittite empire, and the young Hurrian nation 
was swamped. After centuries of attempts at independence, the Assyrians 
finally had an independent state of their own since the Hittites did not 
annex Assyrian cities. For the next several hundred years, the balance of 
power would shift from the north to the south

Mesopotamia Reader 

Sennacherib: The Invasion of Judah 
Beginning with the monarch, Tukulti-Ninurta (1235-1198 BC), Assyria 
began its first conquests, in this case the conquest of Babylon. The 
Assyrian dream of empire began with the monarch, Tiglat-Pileser 
(1116-1090), who extended Assyrian dominance to Syria and Armenia. But the 
greatest period of conquest occurred between 883 and 824, under the 
monarchies of Ashurnazirpal II (883-859 BC) and Shalmeneser III (858-824 
BC), who conquered all of Syria and Palestine, all of Armenia, and, the 
prize of prizes, Babylon and southern Mesopotamia. The Assyrian conquerors 
invented a new policy towards the conquered: in order to prevent 
nationalist revolts by the conquered people, the Assyrians would force the 
people they conquered to migrate in large numbers to other areas of the 
empire. Besides guaranteeing the security of an empire built off of 
conquered people of different cultures and languages, these mass 
deportations of the populations in the Middle East, Mesopotamia, and 
Armenia, turned the region into a melting pot of diverse cultures, 
religions, and languages. Whereas there would be little cultural contact 
between the conquered and the conquerors in early Mesopotamian history, 
under the Assyrians the entire area became a vast experiment in cultural 
mixing. It was the Assyrian monarch, Sargon II (721-705 BC), who first 
forcefully relocated Hebrews after the conquest of Israel, the northern 
kingdom of the Hebrews. Although this was a comparatively mild deportation 
and perfectly in line with Assyrian practice, it marks the historical 
beginning of the Jewish diaspora. This chapter in the Jewish diaspora, 
however, never has been really written, for the Hebrews deported from 
Israel seem to have blended in with Assyrian society and, by the time 
Nebuchadnezzar II conquers Judah (587 BC), the southern kingdom of the 
Hebrews, the Israelites deported by Sargon II have disappeared nameless 
and faceless into the sands of northern Mesopotamia.

The monarchs of Assyria, who hated Babylon with a passion since it 
constantly contemplated independence and sedition, destroyed that city and 
set up their capital in Nineveh. Later, however, feeling that the 
Babylonian god, Marduk, was angry at them, they rebuilt the city and 
returned the idol of Marduk to a temple in Babylon. The last great monarch 
of Assyria was Ashurbanipal (668-626 BC), who not only extended the 
empire, but also began a project of assembling a library of tablets of all 
the literature of Mesopotamia. Thirty thousand tablets still remain of 
Ashurbanipal's great library in the city of Nineveh; these tablets are our 
single greatest source of knowledge of Mesopotamian culture, myth, and 
literature.

After Ashurbanipal, the great Assyrian empire began to crumble; the 
greatest pressure on the empire came from their old and bitter enemies, 
the Babylonians. Aided by another Semitic people, the Medes, the 
Babylonians led by Nabopolassar eventually conquered the Assyrian capital 
of Nineveh and burned it to the ground, ending forever Assyrian dominance 
in the region. 

Simply put, the Assyrian state was forged in the crucible of war, 
invasion, and conquest. The upper, land-holding classes consisted almost 
entirely of military commanders who grew wealthy from the spoils taken in 
war. The army was the largest standing army ever seen in the Middle East 
or Mediterranean. The exigencies of war excited technological innovation 
which made the Assyrians almost unbeatable: iron swords, lances, metal 
armor, and battering rams made them a fearsome foe in battle. 

The odd paradox of Assyrian culture was the dramatic growth in science 
and mathematics; this can be in part explained by the Assyrian obsession 
with war and invasion. Among the great mathematical inventions of the 
Assyrians were the division of the circle into 360 degrees and were among 
the first to invent longitude and latitude in geographical navigation. 
They also developed a sophisticated medical science which greatly 
influenced medical science as far away as Greece. 

...a Sumerian proverb goes something like: 


Who possesses much silver may be happy,
Who possesses much barley may be happy,
But who has nothing at all, can sleep.
Sumerians http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/MESO/SUMER.HTM 

World Cultures Glossary 

Civilization 
Mesopotamia 


The Akkadians 
Among the earliest civilizations were the diverse peoples living in 
the fertile valleys lying between the Tigris and Euphrates valley, or 
Mesopotamia, which in Greek means, "between the rivers." In the south of 
this region, in an area now in Kuwait and northern Saudi Arabia, a 
mysterious group of people, speaking a language unrelated to any other 
human language we know of, began to live in cities, which were ruled by 
some sort of monarch, and began to write. These were the Sumerians, and 
around 3000 BC they began to form large city-states in southern 
Mesopotamia that controlled areas of several hundred square miles. The 
names of these cities speak from a distant and foggy past: Ur, Lagash, 
Eridu. These Sumerians were constantly at war with one another and other 
peoples, for water was a scarce and valuable resource. The result over 
time of these wars was the growth of larger city-states as the more 
powerful swallowed up the smaller city-states. Eventually, the Sumerians 
would have to battle another peoples, the Akkadians, who migrated up from 
the Arabian peninsula. The Akkadians were a Semitic people, that is, they 
spoke a Semitic language related to languages such as Hebrew and Arabic. 
When the two peoples clashed, the Sumerians gradually lost control over 
the city-states they had so briliantly created and fell under the hegemony 
of the Akkadian kingdom which was based in Akkad, the city that was later 
to become Babylon. 
But that was not the end of the Sumerians. The Akkadians abandoned 
much of their culture and absorbed vast amounts of Sumerian culture, 
including their religion, writing, government structure, literature, and 
law. But the Sumerians retained nominal control over many of their 
defeated city-states, and in 2125, the Sumerian city of Ur rose up against 
the Akkadians and gained for their daring control over the city states of 
southern Mesopotamia. But the revival of Sumerian fortune was to be 
short-lived, for after a short century, another wave of Semitic migrations 
signed the end of the original creators of Mesopotamian culture. 
But history sometimes plays paradoxical games and human cultures 
sometimes persist in strange ways. For the great experiment of the 
Sumerians was civilization, a culture transformed by the practical effects 
of urbanization, writing, and monarchy. While the Sumerians disappear from 
the human story around 2000 BC, the invaders that overthrew them adopted 
their culture and became, more or less, Sumerian. They adopted the 
government, economy, city-living, writing, law, religion, and stories of 
the original peoples. Why? What would inspire a people to deliberately 
adopt foreign ways? For whatever reason, the culture the later Semites 
inherited from the Sumerians consisted of the following:

World Cultures Glossary 

Legitimation of Authority 
Mesopotamia Glossary 


Patesi 
The Sumerians seem to have developed one of the world's first systems 
of monarchy; the early states they formed needed a new form of government 
in order to govern larger areas and diverse peoples. The very first states 
in human history, the states of Sumer, seemed to have been ruled by a type 
of priest-king, called in Sumerian, a ; among their duties were leading 
the military, administering trade, judging disputes, and engaging in the 
most important religious ceremonies. The priest-king ruled through a 
series of bureaucrats, many of them priests, that carefully surveyed land, 
assigned fields, and distributed crops after harvest. This new institution 
of monarchy required the invention of a new legitimation of authority 
beyond the tribal justification of chieftainship based on concepts of 
kinship and responsibility. So the Sumerians seemed to have at first 
justified the monarch's authority based on some sort of divine selection, 
but later began to assert that the monarch himself was divine and worthy 
of worship. This legitimation of monarchical authority would serve all the 
later peoples who settled or imitated Mesopotamian city-states; the only 
exception were the Hebrews who imitated Mesopotamian kingship but 
construed the monarchy not as a divine election but as disobedience to 
Yahweh, the Hebrew god. 

The principal character of Sumerian government was bureaucracy; the 
monarchy effectively held power over great areas of land and diverse 
peoples by having a large and efficient "middle management." This middle 
management, which consisted largely of priests, bore all the 
responsibility of surveying and distributing land as well as distributing 
crops. For city living greatly changes the human relation to food 
production: when people begin to live in cities, that means a large part 
of the human population ceases to grow or raise its own food, which means 
that all those people who do grow and raise food need to feed all those 
who don't. This requires some sort of distribution mechanism, which 
requires the greatest of all inventions of civilizations, the bureaucrat. 
And to make sure that the entire mechanism works, the newly urbanized 
needs to invent a tool to make the bureaucrat's life easier: 
record-keeping. And record-keeping means writing in some form or another. 
Mesopotamia Glossary 

Patesi 
The first writings, in fact, were records?tons of records: stone 
tablets filled with numbers recording distributed goods. These early 
writings (besides the numerals) were actually pictures, or rough sketches, 
you might say, of the words they represented; this early Sumerian writing 
was pictographic writing. The Sumerians would scrawl their picture words 
using reeds as a writing instrument on wet clay which would then dry into 
stone-hard tablets, which is very good because it's hard to lose your 
records if they are big old heavy tablets. (And more permanent: when all 
the paper in all the books you see around you has gone to dust and ashes, 
the Sumerian tablets will still bear mute witness to the hot days when 
farmers brought grain to city storehouses and bureaucrat-priests parcelled 
out food to their citizens while scratching on wet clay with their reeds) 
Eventually, the Sumerians made their writing more efficient, and slowly 
converted their picture words to a short-hand consisting of wedged lines 
created by bending the reed against the wet clay and moving the end 
closest to the hand back and forth once. And thus was born a form of 
writing that persisted longer than any other form of writing besides 
Chinese: cuneiform, or "wedge-shaped" (which is what cuneiform means in 
Latin) writing. 

All this administration of agriculture required much more careful 
planning, since each farmer had to produce a far greater excess of produce 
than he would actually consume. And all the bureaucratic record keeping 
demanded some kind of efficient system of measuring long periods of time. 
So the Sumerians invented calendars, which they divided into twelve months 
based on the cycle of the moon. Since a year consisting of twelve lunar 
months is considerably shorter than a solar year, the Sumerians added a 
"leap month" every three years in order to catch up with the sun. This 
interest in measuring long periods of time led the Sumerians to develop a 
complicated knowledge of astronomy and the first human invention of the 
zodiac in order to measure yearly time. 
World Cultures Glossary 

Abstract Mathematics 
Record-keeping pushes the human mind in other directions as well. In 
particular, record-keeping demands that humans start doing something all 
humans love to do: calculating. Numbers have to be added up, subtracted, 
multiplied, divided, and sundry other fun things. So the Sumerians 
developed a sophistication with mathematics that had never been seen 
before on the human landscape. And all that number crunching led the 
Sumerians to begin crude speculations about the nature of numbers and 
processes involving numbers?abstract mathematics. 

Hebrew Reader 

Genesis Introduction 
We know very little about the early Semitic religions, but the Semites 
that invaded Mesopotamia seem to have completely abandoned their religion 
in favor of Sumerian religion. Sumerian religion was polytheistic, that 
is, the Sumerians believed in and worshipped many gods. These gods were 
incredibly powerful and anthropomorphic, that is, they resembled humans. 
Many of these gods controlled natural forces and were associated with 
astronomical bodies, such as the sun. The gods were creator gods; as a 
group, they had created the world and the people in it. Like humans, they 
suffered all the ravages of human emotional and spiritual frailties: love, 
lust, hatred, anger, regret. Among the gods' biggest regrets was the 
creation of human life; the Sumerians believed that these gods regretted 
the creation of human life and sent a flood to destroy their faulty 
creation, but one man survived by building a boat. While the destruction 
of the earth in a great flood is nearly universal in all human mythology 
and religion, we can't be sure if the Semites had a similar story or took 
it over from the Sumerians. This is, of course, a question of contemporary 
significance: according to Genesis, the originator of the Hebrew race, the 
patriarch Abraham, originally came from the city of Ur. 
Although the gods were unpredictable, the Sumerians sought out ways 
to discover what the gods held in store for them. Like all human cultures, 
the Sumerians were struck by the wondrous regularity of the movement of 
the heavens and speculated that this movement might contain some secret to 
the intentions of the gods. So the Sumerians invented astrology, and 
astrology produced the most sophisticated astronomical knowledge ever seen 
to that date, and astrology produced even more sophisticated mathematics. 
They also examined the inner organs of sacrificed animals for secrets to 
the gods' intentions or to the future. These activities produced a steady 
increase in the number of priests and scribes, which further accelerated 
learning and writing. 
Sumerian religion was oriented squarely in this world. The gods did not 
occupy some world existentially different from this one, and no rewards or 
punishments accrued to human beings after death. Human beings simply 
becamse wisps within a house of dust; these sad ghosts would fade into 
nothing within a century or so. 

World Cultures Glossary 

Law 
Among the inventions of the Sumerians, the most persistent and 
far-reaching was their invention of law. While all cultures have some 
system of social regulation and conflict resolution, law is a distinct 
phenomenon. Law is written and adminstered retribution and conflict 
resolution. It is distinct from other forms of retribution and conflict 
resolution by the following characteristics: 
Administration 
Law is retribution that is administered by a centralized authority. This 
way retribution for wrongs does not threaten to escalate into a cycle of 
mutual revenge. Sumerian law sits half way between individual revenge 
and state-administered revenge: it is up to the individual to drag 
(quite literally) the accused party into the court, but the court 
actually determines the nature of the retribution to be exacted. 
Writing 
Law is written; in this way, law assumes an independent character beyond 
the centralized authority that adminsters it. This produces a 
sociological fiction that the law controls those who administer the law 
and that the "law" exacts retribution, not humans. 
Retribution 
Law is at its heart revenge; the basic cultural mechanism for dealing 
with unacceptable behavior is to exact revenge. Unacceptable behavior 
outside the sphere of revenge initially did not come under the 
institution of law: it was only much later that disputes that didn't 
involve retribution would be included in law. 
World Cultures Glossary 

Lex Talionis 
Mesopotamia Reader 


The Code of Hammurabi 
Although we don't know much about Sumerian law, scholars agree that 
the Code of Hammurabi, written by a Babylonian monarch, reproduces 
Sumerian law fairly exactly. Sumerian law, as represented in Hammurabi's 
code, was a law of exact revenge, which we call lex talionis. This is 
revenge in kind: "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a 
life," and reveals to us that human law has as its fundamental basis 
revenge. Sumerian law was also only partly administered by the state; the 
victim had to bring the criminal to court. Once there, the court mediated 
the dispute, rendered a decision, and most of the time a court official 
would execute the sentence, but often it fell on the victim or the 
victim's family to enforce the sentence. Finally, Sumerian law recognized 
class distinctions; under Sumerian law, everyone was not equal under the 
law. Harming a priest or noble person was a far more serious crime than 
harming a slave or poor person; yet, the penalties assessed for a noble 
person who commits a crime were often far harsher than the penalties 
assessed for someone from the lower classes who committed the same crime. 
This great invention, law, would serve as the basis for the 
institution of law among all the Semitic peoples to follow: Babylonians, 
Assyrians, and, eventually, the Hebrews. 
Richard Hooker