Great Fire of Rome

 

Great Fire of Rome

Source: Wikipedia Free encyclopedia

Rome (Latin: incendium magnum Romae) began on the evening of 18-19 July 64 AD.[1] The fire started in the merchant shops around Rome's chariot stadium, Circus Maximus. After six days, the fire was brought under control, but before the damage could be assessed, the fire reignited and burned for another three days. In the aftermath of the fire, nearly three quarters of Rome had been destroyed (10 out of 14 districts).[2]

 

According to Tacitus and later Christian tradition, Emperor Nero blamed the devastation on the Christian community in the city, initiating the empire's first persecution against the Christians.[3] Other contemporary historians blamed Nero's incompetence but it is commonly agreed by historians nowadays that Rome was too densely populated and inadequately prepared to effectively deal with large scale disasters, including fires, and that such an event was inevitable.

 

Background

Previous recorded fires in Rome

Fires in Rome were common, especially in houses,[4] and fires that had occurred previously in Rome and destroyed parts of major buildings include:

 

AD 6, which led to the introduction of the Cohortes Vigiles[5]

AD 12 which destroyed the Basilica Julia[4]

AD 14 at the Basilica Aemilia[4]

AD 22 at the Campus Martius[4]

AD 26 at Caelian Hill[4]

AD 36 at the Circus Maximus[4]

Nero

Nero was proclaimed Roman emperor in AD 54 at the age of 17.[2] His rule has commonly been associated with impulsiveness and tyranny but was, for the most part, liked by the general populace and disliked merely by the aristocracy. Early in his reign, he was heavily advised, but he slowly became more independent. In AD 59, encouraged by his mistress Poppaea, Nero murdered his mother Agrippina. His leading adviser, Seneca, was discharged and forced to commit suicide.[6]

 

After the Great Fire of Rome occurred in July AD 64, it was rumored that Nero had ordered the fire to clear space for a new palace, the Domus Aurea.[7] At the time of the fire Nero may not have been in Rome but 35 miles away at his villa in Antium,[8] and possibly returned to the city before the fire was out.[9]

 

Tacitus

Publius Cornelius Tacitus was a senator and historian of the Roman Empire. His exact birth date is unknown, but most sources place it in either AD 56 or 57. His two main works, the Annals and the Histories, covered the history of the empire between AD 14 and AD 96. However, much of the work has been lost, including the books covering events after AD 70. Tacitus was only eight years old at the time of the fire, but he was able to use public records and reports to write an accurate account.[10]

 

Vigiles

In 22 BC, Augustus funded a fire brigade.[11] In AD 6, he introduced the Vigiles ("cohorts of the watchmen"). The cohortes vigilum, run by freedmen, were tasked with guarding Rome at night. The cohortes urbanae were tasked with guarding Rome during the day.[5] By the time of the Great Fire of Rome, there were thousands of Vigiles in the city, and they went to work trying to stop the flames by pouring buckets of water into buildings, trying to move flammable material from the fire's path, and even demolishing buildings to attempt to make a fire break.[12]

 

Rome's water system

Before the fire, Rome's water was brought in by nine aqueducts, which were not set up with equipment to fight fires. Carrying out repairs to the aqueducts was an ongoing task for the Curator Aquarum or Water Commissioner of Rome. The Curator Aquarum was also in charge of investigations into those who were illegally piping water away without paying a license fee to the state.[13] Firefighters relied on blankets, buckets of water, vinegar, and demolition of buildings to put fires out.[14]

 

Outbreak and progress of fire

According to Tacitus, the fire began in shops where flammable goods were stored, in the region of the Circus neighboring the Caelian and Palatine Hills of Rome. The night brought strong winds and the flames rapidly spread along the full length of the Circus. The fire expanded through an area of narrow, twisting streets and closely located apartment blocks. In this lower area of ancient Rome, there were no large buildings such as temples, or open areas of ground, to impede the conflagration. It then spread along the Palatine and Caelian slopes.[15]

 

The population fled first to areas unaffected by the fire and then to the open fields and rural roads outside the city. Looters and arsonists were reported to have spread the flames by throwing torches or, acting in groups, hindering measures being made to halt or slow the progress of the flames. Some groups responsible for throwing torches and stopping those from fighting the fire were reported to have claimed they were under orders to do so. The fire stopped after six days of continuous burning. It then reignited and burned for another three days.[16]

 

Tests into how fires spread have shown that large fires are able to create their own wind and this, combined with embers being blown to new buildings, could have caused the fire to spread further and could account for witnesses claiming that random fires started in houses that were away from the flames.[17] As well as wind playing a factor in fire spread, those who had claimed to be under orders to stop people from fighting the fires never named the one who ordered them and they were also reported to have looted buildings.[18]

 

Aftermath

 

Nero's Torches by Henryk Siemiradzki. According to Tacitus, Nero targeted Christians as those responsible for the fire.

According to Tacitus, Nero was away from Rome, in Antium, when the fire broke out. Nero returned to the city and took measures to bring in food supplies and to open gardens and public buildings to accommodate refugees.[19] Of Rome's fourteen districts, three were completely devastated, seven more were reduced to a few scorched and mangled ruins and only four completely escaped damage. The Temple of Jupiter Stator, the House of the Vestals, and Nero's palace, the Domus Transitoria were damaged or destroyed.[20]

 

Also destroyed in the fire was the portion of the Forum where the Roman senators lived and worked. The open space in the middle of the Forum remained a shopping/meeting centre.[21] The accusations of Nero having started the fire were further exacerbated by his quickness to rebuild burned neighbourhoods in the Greek style and to launch construction of his new palace.

 

For the city's reconstruction, Nero dictated new and far-sighted building rules,[22] intended to curb the excesses of speculation [clarification needed] and trace a new urban plan, which still can be discerned from the city layout today.[23] He rebuilt much of the destroyed area, and had the ostentatious building complex known as Domus Aurea (Golden House) built, his personal residence, replacing the Domus Transitoria and including an extension of about 2.5 km2, which came to include the Palatine, the slopes of the Esquiline (Opium) and part of the Celio.[24] This may not have been a possible motive for the fire, as he could have requisitioned the necessary land anyway, and most was already in his possession.[23]

 

To find the necessary funds for the reconstruction, Nero's government increased taxation. In particular, heavy tributes were imposed on the provinces of the empire. To meet at least a proportion of the costs, Nero devalued the Roman currency, increasing inflationary pressure for the first time in the Empire's history.[25][failed verification][better source needed]

 

Debris from the fire was used as in-fill for the nearby malaria-infested marshes.[26]

 

Christians, blamed by Nero for the fire, were identified, arrested, and killed. Some, for the entertainment of spectators, were torn to pieces by hunting dogs, while others were crucified in ways calculated to make them look ridiculous. According to Jerome, the total number of Christians killed by Nero was 979.[2

With affection,

Ruben

 

Arnold Schoenberg

Classical Music Composers of the 20th Century

Arnold Schoenberg

Alexander Zemlinsky and Arnold Schönberg, Prague, 1917

Source:Interlude 

By Georg Predota  July 13th, 2024

“Great art presupposes the alert mind of the educated listener”

I am sure that at one point or another you’ve heard the slant that Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) is the only classical composer who uniquely can empty any concert hall by the mere mentioning of his name on the programme. It is indeed a rather cheeky overstatement that somehow blames Schoenberg for divorcing music from music lovers.

Arnold Schoenberg

 

Fact is, however, that Schoenberg is probably the first great composer in modern history whose music has not entered the repertoire almost a century and a half after his death on 13 July 1951. Schoenberg was a polymath, a fantastically talented individual of substantial complexity, who lived, worked and engaged with one of the most tumultuous political and artistic periods in human history.

 

We primarily know Schoenberg as a serious composer of modern music, whose experimentations with atonality led to the development of the dodecaphonic, better known as the twelve-tone method of composition. However, Schoenberg was also a painter of considerable ability who exhibited alongside Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky. He was also a charismatic teacher and brilliant theorist who authored a substantial number of books and essays.

 

In 1915 he returned to Vienna. During the years of the First World War, he focused

 increasingly on the search for logic and unity in music

Arnold Schönberg (bottom, 2nd on the right) with his regiment, Bruck an der Leitha, 1916

  

Arnold Schönberg, he changed to the anglicised form Schoenberg when he left Germany and re-converted to Judaism in 1933, was born into a lower middle-class Jewish family in Vienna. His mother Pauline, a native of Prague, was a piano teacher, and his father Samuel, a native of Hungary, a shopkeeper. Although he took counterpoint lessons with the composer Alexander von Zemlinsky, Schoenberg was essentially self-taught.

 

Schoenberg composed a considerable quantity of music during his childhood, but as he later explained, “all my composition up to about my seventeenth year were nothing more than imitations of such music as I could become acquainted with.” However, he did start to probe the future direction of Germany music, addressing the legacies of Brahms and Wagner.

Blending Brahms and Wagner

Arnold Schoenberg

 

Beginning with songs and string quartets written around the turn of the century, Schoenberg presented works that simultaneously contained characteristics of both Brahms and Wagner. On one hand we find a clarity of tonal and motific organisation typical of Brahms, with “balanced phrases and an undisturbed hierarchy of key relationships.” Concordantly, he explored bold incidental chromaticism, aspiring to a Wagnerian representational approach to motivic identity.

 

By combining Brahms’ approach to motivic development and tonal cohesion with Wagnerian narrative of motific ideas, Schoenberg was recognised by both Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler as a significant composer. Strauss would eventually turn away from Schoenberg, but Mahler adopted Schoenberg as a protégé. Despite his Jewish background, Schoenberg converted to Lutheranism in 1898. “At no point in my life,” he later wrote, “have I been unreligious, let alone anti-religious.” Schoenberg returned to the faith in which he had been brought up in 1933.

Atonality

Schoenberg married Mathilde Zemlinsky in 1901. The couple initially moved to Berlin, where Schoenberg was active on the cabaret scene. Thanks to the influence of Richard Strauss, Schoenberg returned to Vienna and became a private teacher of composition and theory. In 1904, he was joined by two new recruits, Anton Webern and Alban Berg.

 

Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde had far-reaching effects regarding the emancipation of dissonance, as tonal centres and traditional dissonance-consonance relationships became subservient to dramatic expression. Starting around 1908, Schoenberg’s music began to experiment with a variety of ways to address the absence of traditional keys and tonal centres. His first explicitly atonal piece is identified as the second string quartet, Op. 10, with soprano.

Godowski, Einstein and Schoenberg

The disintegration of functional harmony seemingly destroyed the conditions for large-scale forms. However, as a scholar wrote, “dissonance’s new independence permitted, at least in an orchestral context, unprecedented simultaneous contrasts. It is not. Only novelty of expression but the power to bring seemingly irreconcilable elements into a relation that gives the music its visionary quality.” For a period of time, Schoenberg strongly believed that the dictates of expression would be able to renounce motivic features as well as tonality.

 

However, the way forward was the construction of larger forms on the basis of text. And the texts largely drew on a modernist movement called Expressionism, a poetic style that presented the world from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas. The half-hour monodrama Erwartung features a single female character, full of fear and apprehension, as she wanders through a forest at night in search of her lover. The only dramatic event is her discovery of his murdered body, followed by her monologue recollecting their love, jealousy and “a sense of reconciliation born from exhaustion.”

 

Arnold Schoenberg: Variations for Orchestra, Op. 31 (Chicago Symphony Orchestra; Pierre Boulez,

Alban Berg and Anton Webern

Arnold Schoenberg was 42 when he was called up to the army. He was medically examined in 1915 and rejected, but a second medical examination reversed the decision. With many of his students called up as well, his teaching ceased completely. In addition, he was not able to work uninterrupted or for longer periods of time, and as a result, he left many unfinished works and undeveloped beginnings.

 

One thing is for sure: WWI sped up the deteriorating relationship between contemporary composers and the public. As such, Schoenberg founded the “Society for Private Musical Performances.” The press was excluded and details of programmes not available in advance. Within the period from February 1919 to the end of 1921, 353 performances of 154 works were given in 117 concerts. Once Schoenberg was made president of the International Mahler League, he organised festivals of his own works and gave a series of lectures on music theory. This was the time of the formulation of serialism.

Serialism

After the war, Schoenberg was looking for a musical order that would make his musical texture simpler and clearer. The result was a method of composing with twelve tones which are related only with and to one another. All twelve pitches of the chromatic scale within the octave are regarded as equal, and no one note is given emphasis. For Schoenberg, it was not merely a compositional method but an attempt for music to regain a genuine and valid simplicity of expression, such as in the music of his beloved Mozart and Schubert. Musical language had to be renewed.

 

Serialism, as a method of composition, does not give any indication of musical style. For Schoenberg, this meant a return to Classical forms “in his need to find new scope for the inherently developmental cast of thought.” Schoenberg considered 12-tone composition, later retitled Serialism akin to the discoveries of Albert Einstein in the field of Physics. As he related to a friend, “I have made today a discovery which will ensure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years.”

Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony

 

Between 1920 and 1936, Schoenberg wrote a series of marvellous instrumental works of striking individuality. He serves as Director of a Master Class in Composition at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin, but growing Anti-Semitism and the government’s intention to remove Jewish elements from the academy hastened his departure for Paris. Searching for employment, Schoenberg accepted an appointment in Boston in the autumn of 1933. Struggling with health issues, Schoenberg moved to Los Angeles and eventually became a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

 

Schoenberg enjoyed little peace of mind as he found the alien surroundings hard to accept. Few of his students were able to fully benefit from his knowledge and experience, and his relatives and friends in Europe were under constant threat. Schoenberg continued to compose works, nearly all religious in inspiration, and he revised his vast collection of unpublished essays and articles under the title Style and Idea. His opera Moses and Aron remained unfinished.

 

Schoenberg’s twelve-tone works and the truly revolutionary nature of this new system became “one of the most central and polemic issues among American and European musicians during the mid-to late-twentieth century.” Various ideologies are still hotly debated, and music lovers continue to find difficulty with Schoenberg’s music. Attempts to popularise the music of Schoenberg, despite roughly forty years of advocacy and countless “books devoted to the explanation of this difficult repertory to non-specialist audiences,” have undoubtedly failed. Be that as it may, Schoenberg saw all great music as “expressing the longing of the soul for God, and genius as representing man’s spiritual future.”

 

Arnold Schoeenberg Paints

In around 1907 Schönberg began to paint. His paintings and drawings consist of (self-)portraits, nature pieces, and also impressions and fantasies. In 1911/12 his works were exhibited in Munich as part of “Der Blaue Reiter”, a group of artists with Wassily Kandinsky at its helm.

 

Exhibition of “Der Blaue Reiter”, Moderne Galerie Thannhauser, Munich; Schönberg’s

 “Walking Self-Portrait” can be seen to the left of the door.

Gertrud and Arnold Schönberg on honeymoon, Venice, 1924

 The Schönberg family, Los Angeles, 1948

Arnold Schönberg died in Los Angeles on July 13, 1951.

With affection,

Ruben

                                                                                                                                     

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Code of Hammurabi

 

Code of Hammurabi

Code of Hammurabi

Source: World History Enciclopedia

What is the Code of Hammurabi?

The black stone stele containing the Code of Hammurabi was carved from a single, four-ton slab of diorite, a durable but incredibly difficult stone for carving.

At its top is a two-and-a-half-foot relief carving of a standing Hammurabi receiving the law—symbolized by a measuring rod and tape—from the seated Shamash, the Babylonian god of justice. The rest of the seven-foot-five-inch monument is covered with columns of chiseled cuneiform script.

The text, compiled at the end of Hammurabi’s reign, is less a proclamation of principles than a collection of legal precedents, set between prose celebrating Hammurabi’s just and pious rule. Hammurabi’s Code provides some of the earliest examples of the doctrine of “lex talionis,” or the laws of retribution, sometimes better known as “an eye for an eye.”

Did you know?

The Code of Hammurabi includes many harsh punishments, sometimes demanding the removal of the guilty party’s tongue, hands, breasts, eye or ear. But the code is also one of the earliest examples of an accused person being considered innocent until proven guilty.

The 282 edicts are all written in if-then form. For example, if a man steals an ox, then he must pay back 30 times its value. The edicts range from family law to professional contracts and administrative law, often outlining different standards of justice for the three classes of Babylonian society—the propertied class, freedmen and slaves.

A doctor’s fee for curing a severe wound would be 10 silver shekels for a gentleman, five shekels for a freedman and two shekels for a slave. Penalties for malpractice followed the same scheme: a doctor who killed a rich patient would have his hands cut off, while only financial restitution was required if the victim was a slave.

 

 

 

The Code of Hammurabi was a set of 282 laws inscribed in stone by the Babylonian king Hammurabi (r. 1795-1750 BCE) who conquered and then ruled ancient Mesopotamia. Although his law code was not the first, it was the most clearly defined and influenced the laws of other cultures.

 

The earliest extant set of laws from ancient Mesopotamia is the Code of Ur-Nammu dating from c. 2100-2050 BCE and set down in the city of Ur either by King Ur-Nammu (r. 2047-2030 BCE) or his son Shulgi of Ur (r. 2029-1982 BCE). These laws were written by a king who ruled over a homogenous population and were operating from a standard recognition of what was expected of the citizens. By the time of Hammurabi’s reign, the population was more diverse, and his law code reflects this in its precision to make sure everyone understood what was expected of them.

 

The laws address business contracts and proper prices for goods as well as family and criminal law. Every crime inscribed on the stele is followed by the punishment to be inflicted. No one could claim they were ignorant of the law as the over seven-foot-tall stele was erected publicly. At the top, it was engraved with an image of Shamash, the god of justice, handing the laws to Hammurabi and the following text makes clear that these are laws of the gods, not arbitrary rules created by mortals.

 

Hammurabi’s empire fell apart after his death and Babylon was sacked repeatedly over the years. Around 1150 BCE, Shutruk Nakhunte, King of Elam, sacked the city of Sippar, near Babylon, and is thought to have taken the Code of Hammurabi along with the statue of the god Marduk back to Elam as spoils of war. It was discovered in 1901 in the ruins of the Elamite city of Susa and today is on display at the Louvre Museum, Paris, France.

 

Code of Ur-Nammu

The earliest Mesopotamian law code was the Code of Urukagina (c. 24th century BCE) which exists today only in fragments. The Code of Ur-Nammu, although also fragmentary in the present day, is still cohesive enough to give a clear understanding of what the laws addressed. The laws were written in cuneiform on clay tablets and follow a model possibly first established by the Code of Urukagina which would also influence the later Laws of Eshnunna (c. 1930 BCE), the code of the king Lipit-Ishtar (r. c. 1870 - c. 1860 BCE), and Hammurabi’s.

 

Ur-Nammu claimed the laws came from the gods and Ur-Nammu was only the administrator, passing down to the people the will of their gods.

Mesopotamia had been governed by Sargon of Akkad (r. 2334-2279 BCE) who established his Akkadian Empire beginning in 2334 BCE. The empire fell to the invading Gutians c. 2083 BCE who, according to the records and literature of the time, refused to recognize the gods of the region and the customs. The king of Uruk, Utu-Hegal, led a successful rebellion against the Gutians and defeated them but, soon after, drowned. He was succeeded in the ongoing war by his son-in-law Ur-Nammu who, with his son, drove the Gutians from the land.

 

Although the people of Mesopotamia had repeatedly rebelled against Sargon and his successors, after the fall of the Akkadian Empire and the resulting chaos of Gutian rule, the Akkadian kings were revered as heroes of a golden age. The literary genre known as Mesopotamian Naru Literature regularly featured Sargon or his grandson Naram-Sin (r. 2261-2224 BCE) as central characters who either embody the principles of kingship or serve as cautionary figures in how one should respect and heed the will of the gods in order to prosper.

 

Law Code of King Ur-Nammu

Law Code of King Ur-Nammu

Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin (Copyright)

Ur-Nammu understood the importance of identifying himself with these heroes of the past who, in his time, were no longer remembered as oppressors but as great father figures who had cared for the land and its people. He therefore presented himself as just such a father figure and instituted a patrimonial state, encouraging his subjects to think of themselves as his children and all as members of a family. In order for this model to work, however, the people had to agree to it. Scholar Paul Kriwaczek comments:

 

For a patrimonial state to be stable over time, it is best ruled with consent, at least with consent from the largest minority, if not from the majority. Instinctive obedience must be the norm, otherwise too much effort needs to be put into suppressing disaffection for the regime’s wider aims to be achievable. (149)

 

The Akkadian kings (in reality, not in the fictionalized form Ur-Nammu’s people remembered them) had suffered numerous rebellions precisely because they did not have the consent of the people. To prevent these same problems, Ur-Nammu claimed the laws came from the gods and Ur-Nammu was only the administrator, the middleman, passing down to the people the will of their gods and enforcing their precepts. The laws all follow the pattern of the conditional sentence, if-this-then-that, as in this brief sampling:

 

If a man proceeded by force and deflowered the virgin slave-woman of another man, that man must pay five shekels of silver.

 

If a man appeared as a witness, and was shown to be a perjurer, he must pay fifteen shekels of silver.

 

If a man knocked out the eye of another man, he shall weigh out half a mina of silver.

 

If a man knocked out a tooth of another man, he shall pay two shekels of silver. (Kriwaczek, 150)

 

The fine for infractions served as a deterrent, no harsher penalty required, because Ur-Nammu had the consent of the governed who all understood – at least in theory – what constituted acceptable behavior. Under Ur-Nammu and his successor-son Shulgi, this model worked well and allowed for the great cultural revival known as the Sumerian Renaissance under their reigns. The Laws of Eshnunna seem to have used Ur-Nammu’s as a model but these applied only to the city of Eshnunna and did not have as great an influence as the others.

 

Code of Lipit-Ishtar

It is unclear whether Ur-Nammu wrote and issued his law code or if it was published by Shulgi after his father’s death but the stability it provided continued through the Third Dynasty of Ur until the reign of Ibbi-Sin (c. 1963-1940 BCE) after which it was succeeded by the Dynasty of Isin, founded by Ishbi-Erra c. 1953/1940. The kingdom had grown progressively weaker even before Ibbi-Sin but during his reign was too weak to fend off invasions by Amorites and Elamites who finally brought down the Third Dynasty of Ur.

 

By the time of Lipit-Ishtar, it could no longer be assumed that everyone was operating with the same understanding of what was proper behavior.

Ishbi-Erra had been a clerk under Ibbi-Sin and criticized the king for weakness before the invasions. He defeated both the Amorites and Elamites and restored order but the population the Dynasty of Isin ruled over was not the homogeneous patriarchal state of Ur-Nammu. Although the kings of Isin established and maintained order, by the time of the 5th king, Lipit-Ishtar, a new law code was necessary.

 

Unlike the Code of Ur-Nammu, the Code of Lipit-Ishtar had to be more precise to address the needs of a more complex society. Monetary fines were still in place as deterrents, but more detailed laws were required for family law and commercial contracts. It could no longer be assumed that everyone under the law was operating with the same understanding of what was proper behavior. Lipit-Ishtar’s code is also fragmentary but among the laws were:

 

If the master of an estate or its mistress has defaulted on the tax of said estate, and a stranger has borne it for three years, the owner may not be evicted but, afterwards, the man who bore the tax of the estate will possess said estate and the former owner cannot contest the claim.

 

If a man’s wife has not borne him children, but a harlot from the public square has borne him children, he shall provide grain, oil, and clothing for the harlot. The children which the harlot has borne him shall be his heirs and as long as his wife lives the harlot shall not live with the wife.

 

If a man cut down a tree in the garden of another man, he shall pay one-half mina of silver. (Duhaime, 1)

 

It is unclear what motivated Lipit-Ishtar to draft his law code, but he was honored during the reigns of his successors as a great king who defeated the Amorites and maintained order. Hymns were written praising him and his code provided the necessary stability up through the reign of the last king of the dynasty, Damiq-ilishu who was overthrown by Sin-Muballit (r. 1812-1793 BCE), fifth Amorite king of Babylon, and father of Hammurabi.

 

Code of Hammurabi

Sin-Muballit could not compete commercially with the lucrative trade center of Larsa which was aligned with the Dynasty of Isin, so he attacked it and was defeated by its king Rim-Sin I. The details of the peace are lost but one stipulation was that Sin-Muballit had to abdicate in favor of his son. Hammurabi began his reign quietly by continuing his father’s domestic policies and building programs in and around Babylon, raising temples, and giving Rim-Sin I and the other monarchs of the region no reason to suspect that he was also enlarging and equipping his army and planning the campaigns that would enable him to conquer Mesopotamia.

 

Code of Hammurabi - Detail

Code of Hammurabi - Detail

ctj71081 (CC BY-SA)

He may have instituted his law code c. 1772 BCE in order to ensure the kind of stability he required at home to successfully launch these campaigns though the date could be later. As Kriwaczek observed above, a king needed the consent of the governed for a stable social base if he had any hope of expanding his power and enlarging his territory. The Code of Hammurabi served this purpose by letting the populace know precisely how they should behave to live in peace under the law.

 

Whereas the earlier law codes set fines and other fairly minor penalties for infractions, Hammurabi’s punishments were far more severe:

 

If a man put out the eye of another man, his eye shall be put out.

 

If he break another man's bone, his bone shall be broken.

 

If a man knock out the teeth of his equal, his teeth shall be knocked out.

 

If a builder build a house for someone, and does not construct it properly,

 

And the house which he built fall in and kill its owner, then that builder shall be put to death.

 

If it kill the son of the owner of the house, the son of that builder shall be put to death. (Pritchard, 161)

 

Hammurabi’s Code exemplifies the law of retributive justice known as Lex Talionis defined by the concept of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”. This was necessary because the population was now even more diverse than it had been under Lipit-Ishtar. Kriwaczek comments:

 

Hammurabi's laws reflect the shock of an unprecedented social environment: the multi-ethnic, multi-tribal Babylonian world. In earlier Sumerian-Akkadian times, all communities had felt themselves to be joint members of the same family, all equally servants under the eyes of the gods. In such circumstances disputes could be settled by recourse to a collectively accepted value system, where blood was thicker than water, and fair restitution more desirable than revenge. Now, however, when urban citizens commonly rubbed shoulders with nomads following a completely different way of life, when speakers of several west Semitic Amurru languages, as well as others, were thrown together with uncomprehending Akkadians, confrontation must all too easily have spilled over into conflict. Vendettas and blood feuds must often have threatened the cohesion of the empire. (180)

 

To prevent the possibility of such feuds contributing to social instability, Hammurabi made sure his laws were understood to be absolute. In the same way that Ur-Nammu claimed he had received his laws from the gods, so did Hammurabi but, in order for this to be perfectly clear, he had an image of the god of justice, Shamash, engraved at the top of the stele handing the laws down to Hammurabi. The laws which then follow down from that image in rows of cuneiform refer back to their divine origin as well as the greatness of Hammurabi as bani matim (“builder of the land”) who raised majestic temples to the gods, built canals, and irrigated the lands, and who was administering these laws for the good of all the people.

Hammurabi and Shamash

Conquest & Consolidation

Hammurabi had shown himself a good and just king to his people and, having won the consent of the governed through his policies and laws, he was ready to expand his reach. When the Elamites invaded southern Mesopotamia, Hammurabi allied himself with Larsa and defeated them. He then quickly broke the alliance and took the cities of Uruk and Isin, which were under Larsa’s control, and drew on those resources to take others. Hammurabi repeatedly made alliances, kept them as long as they served his purpose, and broke them when he found they were no longer useful.

 

Once he had conquered southern Mesopotamia, he marched north. In the most startling display of his ability to turn on former allies, he attacked the Amorite kingdom of Mari whose monarch, Zimri-Lim (r. 1775-1761 BCE), had supported him from the beginning of his expansion. Throughout his campaigns, Hammurabi would take a city – often by either damming up the water until the defenders surrendered or damming and then releasing the water suddenly to flood the city and create confusion just prior to attacking – and then afterwards rebuild and refurbish it. In the case of Mari, however, he completely destroyed the city and left it in ruins while he continued his campaigns throughout the region and consolidated his control over the whole of Mesopotamia by 1755 BCE.

Babylon at the time of Hammurabi

Conclusion

Hammurabi’s code was instituted throughout the land, unifying the people under law instead of only by conquest. Unlike the Akkadian Empire, which had found it necessary to position hand-picked officials to administrate their conquered cities, Hammurabi controlled his empire through law. In the prologue to his code, he not only makes clear that these are divine laws but that he had only the people’s best interests at heart in administering them:

 

When the lofty Anu, King of the Annunaki and Bel, Lord of Heaven and Earth, he who determines the destiny of the land, committed the rule of all mankind to Marduk, when they pronounced the lofty name of Babylon, when they made it famous among the quarters of the world and in its midst established an everlasting kingdom whose foundations were firm as heaven and earth – at that time Anu and Bel called me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, the worshipper of the gods, to cause justice to prevail in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil, to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak, to enlighten the land and to further the welfare of the people. Hammurabi, the governor named by Bel, am I, who brought about plenty and abundance. (Durant, 219)

 

The concept of the law as an institution that protects the weak from the strong, as a force before which all people were equal, encouraged respect and admiration not only for the laws but also the lawgiver. Even though Hammurabi had taken the cities through conquest, during the last five years of his reign there is no evidence of revolt or dissent. The people recognized the laws of Hammurabi as working in their own interest and so upheld them, encouraging further stability and allowing for cultural advances.

Unfortunately, the empire of laws Hammurabi had created did not survive long after his death. His son and successor, Samsu-Iluna, who had co-ruled with him after 1755 BCE, was not up to the task of becoming a second Hammurabi. The city-states that had been content under Babylonian rule while the great king lived, revolted after his death, and while they may have kept his laws in their individual communities, they seem to have seen no need for the kind of unity Hammurabi had created.

 

This lack of unity made the city-states easy prey for invaders. The Hittites invaded in 1595 BCE and the Kassites shortly after and then the Elamites c. 1150 BCE under their king Shutruk Nakhunte. At this time, it is thought, the stele of the Code of Hammurabi was taken back to Elam where it would be found in 1901 CE broken in pieces. Its influence is notable, however, in the creation of later law codes such as the Middle Assyrian Laws, the Neo-Babylonian Laws, and the Mosaic Law of the Bible, all of which follow the same model as Hammurabi’s code in providing people with an objective, universal directive on how to treat others and how one should expect to be treated in a civilized society.

 

Did you like this definition?

Babylon is the most famous city from ancient Mesopotamia, whose ruins lie in modern-day Hillah, Iraq, 59 miles (94 km) southwest of Baghdad. The name is derived from bav-il or bav-ilim, which in Akkadian meant "Gate of God" (or "Gate of the Gods"), given as Babylon in Greek. In its time, it was a great cultural and religious center and, at its height, the largest city in the world.

 

The city was referenced with awe by ancient Greek writers and was reportedly the site of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Its reputation has been tarnished by the many unfavorable references to it in the Bible, beginning with Genesis 11:1-9 and the story of the Tower of Babel, associated with the Etemenanki ("House of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth"), the great ziggurat of Babylon.

 

The city also appears unfavorably in the books of Daniel, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and, most famously, the book of Revelation. Scholar Paul Kriwaczek notes that Babylon "can blame her evil repute squarely on the Bible" (167). Although none of these narratives speak well of the city, they were ultimately responsible for its fame (or infamy) in the modern age, which led to its rediscovery by the German archaeologist Robert Koldewey in 1899.

 

Babylon was founded at some point prior to the reign of Sargon of Akkad (the Great, 2334-2279 BCE) and seems to have been a minor port city on the Euphrates River until the rise of Hammurabi (reign 1792-1750 BCE), who made it the capital of his Babylonian Empire. After Hammurabi's death, his empire quickly fell apart. The city was sacked by the Hittites in 1595 BCE and then taken by the Kassites, who renamed it Karanduniash.

 

The earliest mention of the city comes from an inscription from the time of Sargon of Akkad.

It was briefly ruled by the Chaldeans (9th century BCE), whose name became synonymous with Babylonians to later Greek writers (notably Herodotus) and biblical scribes, and then was controlled by the Neo-Assyrian Empire (912-612 BCE) before being taken by Nabopolassar (reign 626-605 BCE), who established the Neo-Babylonian Empire. Babylon fell to the Persians under Cyrus II (the Great, reign circa 550-530 BCE) and was the capital of the Achaemenid Empire (550-330 BCE) until it fell to Alexander the Great in 331 BCE.

 

It continued as a trade center under the later Seleucid Empire (312-63 BCE), Parthian Empire (247 BCE to 224 CE), and Sassanian Empire (224-651), but it never attained the heights it had known under Hammurabi or the Neo-Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II (reign 605/604-562 BCE). The city declined after the Muslim Arab conquest in the 7th century and was finally abandoned.

 

It was known only through biblical narratives and classical writers until its discovery in the 19th century. In the 1980s, restoration attempts were made under then-president Saddam Hussein, including a reconstruction of the Ishtar Gate (the actual gate is presently in the Pergamon Museum of Berlin, Germany). In 2019, the ruins of the great city were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site

Bibliography

1860 BC: The Code of Lipit Ishtar by Lloyd Duhaime, accessed 23 Jun 2021.

Bertman, S. Handbook to Life in Ancient Mesopotamia. Oxford University Press, 2005.

Bottéro, J. Everyday Life in Ancient Mesopotamia. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Durant, W. Our Oriental Heritage . Simon & Schuster, 1997.

Kriwaczek, P. Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization. St. Martin's Griffin, 2012.

Leick, G. The A to Z of Mesopotamia . Scarecrow Press, 2010.

Pritchard, J. B. The Ancient Near East: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures, Volume I. Princeton University Press, 2010.

Van De Mieroop, M. A History of the Ancient Near East ca. 3000 - 323 BC. Blackwell Publishing, 2006.

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About the Author

Joshua J. Mark

Joshua J. Mark

Joshua J. Mark is World History Encyclopedia's co-founder and Content Director. He was previously a professor at Marist College (NY) where he taught history, philosophy, literature, and writing. He has traveled extensively and lived in Greece and Germany.

With affection,

Ruben