Old Babylonian Empire Founded

Overview

In about 1894 BC an Amorite chieftain named Sumu-abum took the small town of Babylon and made it the seat of an independent kingdom. That is the conventional start of the Old Babylonian Period, and the first time Babylon appears in history as a state rather than a provincial town.

Historical Context

For its first century the new kingdom was minor, overshadowed by Isin, Larsa, Assyria and Elam during the Isin-Larsa Period. What changed that was its sixth king, Hammurabi, who reigned about 1792-1750 BC and turned Babylon into the dominant power of Mesopotamia by war and diplomacy. His law collection, the Code of Hammurabi, survives as the fullest legal text of the age. The dynasty he built outlived him by little more than a century, ending with the Hittite sack of Babylon in about 1595 BC.

Biblical Significance

Nothing in the Old Testament narrates this founding, and no biblical figure appears in it. It matters as the frame around the patriarchal narratives: Babylon becomes a kingdom in roughly the centuries the Old Testament assigns to Abraham and his household, which is why a reader meets Mesopotamian city-states rather than a Babylonian empire in Genesis. The city's own origins are treated in Genesis 11:1-9. An older proposal identified Amraphel of Shinar (Genesis 14:1) with Hammurabi; the equation of the two names was shown to be linguistically untenable, and Amraphel's identity is now regarded as unresolved. This event is not the rise of the Babylon the prophets confront: that is the Rise of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, more than twelve centuries later.

Archaeological Evidence

The First Dynasty is known from date lists, year names, royal inscriptions and a large body of administrative and legal tablets, along with the Hammurabi stele now in the Louvre. Babylon's own Old Babylonian levels are largely unreachable: the water table has risen over them, so much of what is known about the city in this period comes from texts and from other sites rather than from its own ruins.