Hammurabi
c. 1792 BCE–c. 1750 BCE · Babylon
Hammurabi was the sixth king of the First Dynasty of Babylon, ruling c. 1792–1750 BCE (Middle Chronology), who over a long reign transformed Babylon from a modest city-state into the dominant power of southern Mesopotamia, defeating Larsa, Mari, and Ešnunna. He is best known for the Laws of Hammurabi, a long collection of casuistic rulings framed by a prologue and epilogue in which the king, commissioned by the gods, declares that he has established justice and protected the weak; the stele depicts him receiving his commission from the sun-god Šamaš.
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Babylon
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About Babylon
Babylon, whose ruins lie at modern Hillah in Iraq, about 85 km south of Baghdad, was the great city on the Euphrates that gave its name to Babylonia. Hammurabi made it his capital, and it was capital again under the Neo-Babylonian kings, when Nebuchadnezzar II rebuilt it. After his capture of Jerusalem in 587 BCE many Judeans were deported there, the exile remembered in the Hebrew Bible, and Babylonia remained a major centre of Jewish life for centuries. Cyrus of Persia took the city in 539 BCE. In the early third century BCE the priest Berossus wrote a Greek history of Babylonia. The site is a UNESCO World Heritage Site; the pin marks the excavated city.
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Hammurabi’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Works
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