its territorial gain and profitable access to the trade routes, Babylon’s prime concern
was now to neutralize Eshnunna. This weakened but still formidable power was
situated close to a strategic knot in the riverine routes of northern Lower Mesopotamia.
Eshnunna’s subjugation was a main objective of Hammurabi’s campaigns in the last
decade of his rule, and would remain a perennial problem throughout the later history
of his dynasty.
We can see that a crucial aspect of Hammurabi’s legacy was thus that an unobstructed
trade route connecting the Persian Gulf and adjacent regions with Syria and the
Mediterranean Sea via the Euphrates river had been fully integrated in the territories
of Babylon and Yamhad. Both states benefited a great deal from this flow of merchan-
dise, as is particularly clear from the sources from the city of Sippar. This Babylonian
mercantile centre on the Euphrates was the home of a group of traders who specialized
in river-borne trade, and whose correspondence allows a glimpse of their business at
the end of the reign of Hammurabi and the first decade of Samsuiluna (van Soldt
1990 : ix–x). Babylon and Yamhad were now united by strong strategic and commercial
ties, and their alliance, as well as the importance of the Euphrates trade artery, would
persist throughout the Old Babylonian period. The final destruction of Mari, a few
years after the Babylonian conquest, liberated the Euphrates allies from a potential
obstacle to free passage. It certainly spelled the end of the land traffic over the Palmyra
route and thereby sealed the fate of the former power Qatna, which now wholly
submitted to Yamhad. The city of Emar, located in the bend of the Euphrates, became
the single most important port of transit for the kingdom of Yamhad and attracted
many Babylonian residents. This had a lasting impact on the local scribal conventions
since as late as fourteenth-century BCtexts of the so-called ‘Syrian type’ from Emar
and nearby sites preserve distinctive Babylonian traits.
However, a negative effect of Mari’s disappearance was that trade caravans passing
through the Euphrates valley were no longer adequately protected. This was already
felt at the end of Hammurabi’s reign, when shareholders of a plundered caravan went
to court about the division of the reimbursement payment that Hammurabi had
obtained for them from the king of Yamhad.^3 This situation led Samsuiluna to
improve military control over the Euphrates valley by building strongholds and
extending his control upstream to Terqa whose local dynasty acknowledged later Old
Babylonian kings as their overlords. Hammurabi, or one of his successors, had set up
colonies of foreign mercenaries, known as the ‘Kassite houses’, to protect the Middle
Euphrates area. Many years later these military settlements developed into semi-
independent polities which ultimately waged war against Ammisaduqa (ca. 1630
BC), an episode that brought Euphrates trade to a temporary stop. When the conflict
settled down, trade was resumed again, and a new type of legal text emerged, invest-
ment loans in ‘Euphrates expeditions’, suggesting that new rules for such trips,
regarding matters such as liability, had been introduced.
The Euphrates can be considered the lifeline of the later Old Babylonian state,
since other routes could no longer sustain a reliable flow of merchandise. This is
readily understood for the trade with Dilmun (the island of Bahrain), a port of trade
for a variety of goods from the Persian Gulf, which had been a long-established
element of the southern Mesopotamian economy. This trade had been highly profitable,
for example, with copper from Oman that was bought at the time of Rim-Sin for
the lowest prices recorded in Mesopotamian history (Powell 1990 : 83 f.), but is no
— Frans van Koppen —