price movements are signs of a food crisis is clear from the explicit evidence for famine
in the later years of Samsuiluna, an episode that may well have inspired the graphic
descriptions of starvation in the contemporary Atrahasis myth (Wilcke 1999 ).
It may be that this period of famine was triggered by the political turmoil at the
time, but the root cause of the declining yields was a change in the Euphrates system
that, perhaps quite suddenly, brought about a permanent failure of the Euphrates
branch that runs through Kish and Nippur to carry sufficient water (Cole and Gasche
1998 : 27 ). This led to the evacuation of the city of Nippur, but also to the decline
of Uhaimir, ancient Kish, an important town until it was largely, if not completely,
deserted under Samsuiluna’s successors, while the archives of nearby Ingharra, known
as Hursagkalama but also as Kish, last until the end of the Old Babylonian period;
no doubt other sites dependent on the same water course suffered as well. Other cities
also declined, with no evident correlation with the failing Kish branch: the built-up
area inside the walls of Abu Habbah, one of the twin cities named Sippar, contracted
under Samsuiluna, whereas Tell ed-Der, the other Sippar, was given up altogether
after its wartime conflagration under Ammisaduqa. These sites had for centuries been
our main source of texts, but when finally, late in Samsuditana’s reign, even the
textual output of Abu Habbah and Ingharra came to an end, all sources fall silent
and a Dark Age begins.
This process of site abandonment has profoundly shaped our perception of the Old
Babylonian period. The archaeological survival of our sources is wholly determined
by it, and their total cessation invokes an image of a cycle coming to an end. We
should, however, realize that the available evidence does not tell the whole story,
because the most prosperous and densely inhabited part of the Babylonian state is
seriously under-represented in the documentary record and unmapped by archaeological
reconnaissance. This is the land along the Arahtum, the branch of the Euphrates that
flowed through Babylon, where second-millennium BCsites are often buried by
sedimentation and only few archives have come to light (Hritz 2004 ). When the
Kish branch stagnated, intensive agriculture continued along the Arahtum and drew
a population shift from the eastern branch, while the growth and prosperity of the
city of Babylon may have attracted even more people from the dwindling towns in
the country.
The strip of alluvial plain north and south of Babylon thus came to be the core of
the later Old Babylonian state, and it is here that urban life almost certainly continued
beyond the end of the First Dynasty. In the early Middle Babylonian period, a grand
programme was carried out to bring the eastern lands, which the clogged Kish branch
had left dry, under cultivation again. To this end canals were dug that irrigated the
hinterlands of Nippur, Isin and Uruk from the Arahtum or other western Euphrates
channels (Armstrong and Brandt 1994 : 261 ); since the cults at these sites had been
restored by the time of Kurigalzu I (Clayden 1996 ), the main effort of this enterprise
can be dated to the fifteenth century BC.
THE ROLE OF BABYLONFirst-hand evidence about Old Babylonian Babylon is solely based on the limited
deep soundings of the German excavations (Pedersén 1998 ), but its paramount role
in the administration of the kingdom is clearly perceptible in the textual record from
— Society and economy in the later Old Babylonian period —