'IRAQ AND THE PERSIAN GULF' [‎152r] (308/862)

SUMERIAN AND BAYLONIAN PERIOD 211
Hammurabi thus, like Sarrukin, created a temporary unity in
Mesopotamia, but his great fame rests on his skill as an administrator
and his codification of Babylonian law. The very titles of his many
dispatches and letters, preserved in the British Museum, reveal his
activity. Typical are: ‘Orders to finish clearing a canal in the terri
tory of Erech’; ‘Orders for the investigation of a charge of bribery’;
‘Inquiry about the misappropriation of temple revenues’; ‘Orders
for ship captains to proceed to Babylon with their ships’. As a law
giver Hammurabi is of no less importance; he did not invent his
laws but collected in one code and published the ancient Sumerian
laws, which he greatly improved. There was greatness also in his
organization of the Babylonian kingdom, to which he gave a structure
that enabled it for i ,200 years to survive military and political disasters
that would have swept away a weakly organized state.
Kassite and Mitanni Dominance, 1600-1400 B.c. (fig. 50)
One of these disasters came about 1600 when a wave of Anatolian
invaders, the first of the Hittites to penetrate Babylonia, ravaged the
land, sacked Babylon, and disappeared. The blow from the west was
complemented by another from the east. The Kashshi or Kassites,
an Indo-European people, had been pressing down from the Zagros
into Babylonia since about 1740. They eventually displaced the line
of Hammurabi and established a Kassite dynasty at Babylon at the
end of the seventeenth century. The Kassites popularized the horse
in western Asia, and thereby revolutionized warfare. The chariot
and the mounted bowman became the core of the armies of Asia.
Kassite rule at Babylon lasted for 400 years under kings of varying
vigour till about 1180 b.c. This long period is not well documented
until the fourteenth century (p. 212), but it seems that Babylonia
lost the dominant position established by the First Dynasty. The
focus of influence shifts to the north-west of Mesopotamia, where,
while the Kassites were establishing themselves in the delta, another
Indo-European people had intruded and were building up a powerful
state out of the Subarean communities of the Jazira, extending from
modern Iraq into north-eastern Syria. This was the kingdom of
Mitanni. Its strength was not in numbers but in military organi
zation, and its princes were more active than the Kassites. They
made the young kingdom of Assyria tributary in the east, and in the
west they arrested for a time the power of the Hittites, who were
beginning to swarm out of Anatolia Peninsula that forms most of modern-day Turkey. into Syria. The Mitanni also