CHAPTER FOURTEEN
ASPECTS OF SOCIETY AND
ECONOMY IN THE LATER OLD
BABYLONIAN PERIOD
Frans van Koppen
INTRODUCTIONT
he Old Babylonian period is a convenient designation for the first four centuries
of the second millennium BC, but as the term hints at a prominent role of the
city of Babylon, one could argue that it should be reserved for the period that started
with the unification of Lower Mesopotamia in the later part of the reign of Hammurabi.^1
The kingdom of Babylon, at first just one among several states, rapidly became the
unrivalled overlord of the region between the Persian Gulf and the Jezirah plateau.
This unity was a singular achievement, as it would remain the only instance in a
period of more than five centuries that all of Lower Mesopotamia recognized a single
ruler. Being the product of exceptional circumstances, the expanded state was also
vulnerable, and a series of political and economic problems led to the contraction of
the Babylonian realm within a few decades following the death of its founder.
Even though Hammurabi’s ‘empire’ may be deemed ephemeral, it could be
considered as the beginning of a distinct era in Mesopotamian history. The rise of
Babylon was just one aspect of a more comprehensive geopolitical rearrangement in
the Mesopotamian and Syrian areas, with important consequences for patterns of long-
distance trade. Moreover, when the social and economic factors that had weakened
Babylon’s neighbours and paved the way for Hammurabi’s successes finally afflicted
Babylon itself, the crisis precipitated the emergence of a much smaller and strongly
centralized Babylonian state that survived for centuries and passed with no major
disruption to the Kassite heirs of the throne.
The archival documentation for the Old Babylonian period is rich but also quite
fragmentary, so that current descriptions of its economic system draw on disparate
groups of texts, with each group illuminating particular elements of a system within
specific geographical and historical settings. Diachronic developments and local
particularities are therefore often obscured. While the basic traits of early second-
millennium economy were determined by the timeless constants of the Mesopotamian
landscape and by the enduring managerial strategies of the state institutions as they
are described by Goddeeris in the previous chapter, the purpose of this chapter is to
look more closely at aspects that may be considered distinctive for the period of time