Faculty: Abul Hossain Ahmed Bhuiyan, Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology
 A. Babylonian Civilization
 B. Assyrian Civilization
 5000 BC: The Sumer
 4000 BC: Powerful City-State
 3500 BC: Numerous City-states (Ur, Uruk, Eridu, Kish, Lagash, and Nippur)
 3300 BC: The Sumerians invent the first writing (Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform)
 3200 BC: Use of wheel on vehicles
 2800 BC: Legendary Ruler Gilgamesh
 2300 BC: Sumerian cities united by King Sargon
 1900 BC: Akkadian (spoken and written form – modern Hebrew and Arabic)
 18oo BC: Hammurabi (united much of Mesopotamia)
 1200 BC: Assyrians conquer much of Mesopotamia
 500 BC: Persian Empire (Turkey, Egypt, India)
 400 BC: Alexander
 600 AD: Islamic conquest
 1200 AD: Bagdad destroyed by Mongol (29. 1. 1258 – 10. 2. 1258; 13 days, during
Abbasid Caliphate; Destroyed by Hulagu Khan, a grandson of Chengish Khan)
 1500 AD: Ottoman Empire
 1900 AD: Countries of Iraq and Syria
 Babylon means the Gate of God. (p. 63)
 The land and its resources
 Peoples
 Natural boundaries are: on the west the
Arabian Desert, on the north the high plain of
Mesopotamia, on the east the last outpost of
the hills which form the present frontier of
Persia, on the south the Persian Gulf.
 Barley (basis of nourishment), Millet, Sesame (as edible well and
drink), tamarisk (for sugary gum) and date palm were the main
sources of food.
 The date palm is one of the principal riches of the land: Greek
geographer and historian in Strabo’s words: (63 B.C. – A.D. 21?):
 “It suffices for all the needs of the population. From they make a
sort of bread, wine, vinegar, honey, cakes, and a hundred kinds of
tissues; smith use its stone in the form of charcoal, and the same
stones crushed and soaked are used in feeding cattle and sheep
which are being fattened.”
 The fauna and flora of Babylonia originated and developed on an
alluvial soil formed by the deposits laid down by the Tigris and
Euphrates, and fertilized every year by the beneficent overflow of
the two rivers.
 The plain was inhabited by two distinct races: in
the south by non-Semites, and in the north by
Semites.
 The Semites appear to have subsequently come
from Syria, descending the course of the
Euphrates, as their kinsmen, and Amorites, did
at a later date, and then settled in the northern
region as far as the neighborhood of Nippur.
 The non-Semites are called Sumerians from the
name, Sumer, by which their Semitic neighbors
designated their territory.
 The State
 The Family
 The Army
 Its foundation was a religious work which could not be
undertaken without the orders of the great gods; for
the city was above all a centre of cult. The god was
real lord of the city. The god inhabited the city with his
wife, his children, and his servitors. The temple was
his house, the richest of all.
 The god did not administer the city or kingdom by
himself. He chose a vicegerent to whom he entrusted
pastorate of his people.
 Fortress, canals named after gods (god shamash, god
adad).
 However, the central power was consolidated, and
recourse to religion was less necessary.
 The army was one of the most important
institutions of society. The King marches to
battle at the head of his soldiers.
 The warriors form two bodies of troops. The
shock troops, who fight a pitched battle with the
king on foot, advanced in files of seven. The first
carries the defensive arm, an enormous
rectangular shield: the rest are equipped with
lances and hold them with both hands almost at
the end of the shaft.
 The family, rigidly constituted in society in Sumer and Akkad, was
founded from the earliest times on a limited monogamy. A man
could not in principle possess more than one legitimate wife, but
law and custom allowed one or more concubines.
 The “Law of Nisaba and Hani” in use in Sumer before the
establishment of the Babylonian empire, declared that the
seducer of an unmarried girl was obliged to ask her in marriage
from her parents; if he had seduced her after his suit had been
rejected, he was liable to death penalty.
 The husband had certain rights over his wife. The husbands, as a
punishment, and under certain conditions, sell his unfaithful wife.
 If there were no issue of the marriage, the husband had a choice of
two alternatives: to take another wife or to divorce his spouse.
 Whether she were a mother herself or no, a wife might
give her husband a concubine chosen from among her
own personal slaves or bought in agreement with him.
 The husband, who had thus received a concubine from his
wife and had children by her, was no longer permitted to
introduce another person into the conjugal domicile.
 If a wife conducted herself in a disorderly manner and
turned out a bad housewife, if she neglected her husband,
the latter had two ways out to choose from – to divorce
her before the court, or to declare before the judge that he
would not divorce her, in which case she would remain as a
slave. In either case it was permissible for the husband to
contract a new marriage.
 The most important discovery relating to Babylonian legislation is that of
the “Code of Hammurabi”. This name is given to a block of diorite 2.25
meters high with a circumference of 1.90 meters at the base; it was
found broken into three fragments among the ruins of Susa in December,
1901, and January, 1902.
 Two hundred and fifty articles of law in forty-six columns, comprising
approximately 3600 lines of text.
 A certain order is recognizable in the arrangement of the articles of the
law:
▪ Charms and lots 1-2
▪ Injury to witnesses, subordination of witnesses 3-4
▪ Amendment of a judgment by the man who pronounced it 5
▪ Various categories of theft 6-25
▪ Position and duties of officials 26-41
▪ Cultivation 42-65
▪ …
▪ Trust contracts 100-107
▪ Taverns 108-111
▪ Debts and their recovery 112-121
▪ Deposit contracts 122-127
▪ Family 128-191
▪ Blows and wounds 192-214
▪ Doctors, architects, and builders 215-240
▪ Animals, slaves, and rural property 241-252
 Landed Property
 Industry
 Trade
 Sale
 Exchange
 Hire
 Loan
 Pledges
 Deposit
 The Temple: Imperial Administration
▪ In Sumer and Akkad, from the earliest times, property in land
was vested in individuals, or in social groups.
▪ Landed property was, in fact, subject to servitudes in the
interests of the neighbors, especially for watering the lands.
▪ Under the law of Hammurabi a man who had taken a piece of
land and had not made barley grow on it, was obliged to pay the
owner in proportion to the yield on adjoining farms.
▪ A cultivator who had borrowed at interest, and could not gather
the harvest through circumstances beyond his control, such as
storm, or failure of water in the canals, was not obliged to pay
any interest that year. A field might furthermore be mortgaged.
 A rudimentary organization existed. Weaving was
carried on under overseers appointed by the king. The
Code of Hammurabi regulated and fixed the wages of
workmen employed by the day. It also determined the
fees of the architect and the caulker, without
forgetting to define their civil liabilities in the case of
bad workmanship.
 A man might take a child into his house to bring him
up and teach him a trade. If he made a good workman
of him, his natural parents, after agreeing to
separation from their child, were no longer entitle to
reclaim him; but if the child had learnt nothing, he
might return home.
 Rivers and canals were the natural means of
communication between the various districts of
Sumer and Akkad.
 For trade in distant towns or foreign countries the
businessman formed a sort of share-partnership; he
entrusted sums of money to be employed profitably
in business, or remitted merchandise to be sold to a
commercial traveler who lent him his talents, his
experience, and his credit.
 Partnerships of business were common in Babylon
conducted under certain rules. Rules that included
witness made in front of a temple.
 Sale
▪ Sale was a transfer of property for money or more rarely
for barley. The deed which attested it must include three
essential elements: an indication of the object sold, the
names of the parties, and the price to be paid or the
receipt for payment affected in ready money.
▪ The most interesting contracts of sale from the neo-
Babylonian epoch are those concerning slaves.
 Exchange
▪ In Babylonia, exchange was treated separately. Very often
the value of the objects exchanged was unequal, and the
contractant (first party) favored thereby had to pay an
offset.
 Hire
▪ Hire is a transaction whereby one person gives another the use
of an object for a limited time in return for the payment of an
agreed sum.
 Loan
▪ From the most remote antiquity down to the Persian Empire,
Babylonian legislation on loan had been extraordinarily stable.
The practice recognized loans at interest and fixed a maximum
rate which remained practically unchanged for two thousand
years. Interest was called “sibtu” “growth, increase of capital”.
▪ The contract for a loan at interest to be drawn up in the
presence of the official charged with cognizance of deliveries of
money, cereals, animals and commodities of all descriptions.
 Any property, real or personal, might be
pledged: wife, children, slaves, fields, houses,
credits, household utensils, etc. The pledge
was transferable to a third person.
 Often the pledge related to the interest on
the loan and the principal was guaranteed by
a surety. The debtor who was unable to repay
a loan might on his failure be reduced to
slavery. The insolvent debtor had, moreover,
the right of substituting for himself his wife or
children.
 Deposit, the act whereby one person
entrusted a movable object to another to
take charge of it gratuitously and return it on
the first demand.
 The temple was not only a place of worship and
pray, it was also an important organ of temporal
administration.
 It was from these temples, in which princes were
proud to fulfill sacred functions, that the high
officials of the State were recruited. It was in the
shadow of the temples that the schools which
trained scribes were gathered, it is definitely to
the clergy that writing and that collection of
texts of all sorts which allow Babylonian
civilization to be reconstituted were due.
 The Babylonians admitted the existence of great
number of deities who were all celestial beings.
 Three deities divided the universe between them:
Anu, the supreme god, reigned in the heaven; Enlil
was lord of the atmosphere and the earth; Ea called
Enki in Sumerian, ruled the waters of the primordial
ocean. Each of them had his own special path on the
ecliptic and their dwellings were on the summit of the
skies.
 The priesthood was divided into three orders: the
magicians made the gods propitious and drove way
demons, the soothsayers foretold the future, and the
singers performed the office of deacons. Some forty
different functions are known.
 About the necessity of religion: Sumero-
Akkadians agreed on one essential point: he had
been fashioned by the deity from a lump of clay
and created for the service of the gods.
 Every human being was in dependence on a god,
his guardian angel, and he called himself the
“son” of that god.
 The first duty in religion was the fear of the
deity.
 The second duty of religion was prayer and
sacrifice.
 After death: Privation/honourable of burial.
▪ Historical & Geographical Outline
▪ The State and the Family
▪ The Army
▪ Legislation
▪ Economic Organization
▪ Religion
▪ The Arts
▪ A Babylonian king Vs. An Assyrian King
 Assyria lies to the north of Babylonia. To the
west it does not reach the Euphrates. On the
east the Zagros forms a natural frontier. On the
north, terrace is piled on terrace, buttressing
the Armenian massif. To the south the alluvial
plain is inhabited by the Babylonians.
 The god ASHUR was the true master of the land and
the city which bore his name. The king of Assyria was
his vicegerent. King used to carry-out his activities in
the name of god Ashur. For example: in a place of
defeated people:
▪ “I have subdued them to Ashur, my master … I have counted them
among the subjects of Ashur, my master”.
 At the head of the social hierarchy the king, the
queen, and the heir apparent each had their own
houses with numerous officials. The king was
eponym of the year following his accession.
 The commander-in-chief gave his name to the next
year; then the commandant of the palace, the chief
cup-bearer, and a score of other officials succeeded
to this honor in turn.
 The people were divided into two classes: men of
free status and slaves. As in Babylonia, the family
was held in such high esteem in Assyria that it was
customary to treat a family of slaves as a unitary
whole, and not an aggregate of individuals.
 An important class of slaves was composed of the
serfs bound to the soil. When the property to which
they belonged changed hands, they were included in
the deed of sale, and as a rule designated by families.
▪ If a property was mortgaged, the serfs would be handed
over at the same time, and were restored as soon as the
repayment of the loan had been effected.
 Marriage among the people of free status was in Assyria
as in Babylonia a modified monogamy, but the family
there constituted a less firmly organized cell.
 Besides the legitimate wife the law allowed one or more
concubines called esirtu.
 A married woman of free birth was not allowed to go out
into the street without covering her head with a veil (at
least a certain period in the second millennium). Her
daughters also wore head-dresses prescribed by custom;
by this means they were distinguished from temple
prostitutes, harlots, and slaves.
 A concubine was not entitled to wear the veil; if her
husband wished to raise her to the position of wife, he
had to veil her in the presence of five or six witnesses
and declare: “This is my wife”.
 Abortion was a crime punishable in all cases
under the Assyrian law.
 The right of selling a child involved that of
giving it as a pledge. The father might also
devote it to the service of the temple.
 A temple prostitute’s son, consecrated to the
service of the same deity by his mother’s
family. However, in Babylonia, women
attached to the temple service could not have
legitimate offspring.
 The Assyrian heavy infantry wore a conical
helmet equipped with side pieces to protect
the ears; the bust and the upper part of the
arms were covered with a cuirass formed of
scalloped scales worn over the tunic.
 The heavy infantry was made up of two
bodies of troops: archeries and pike men,
both armed with a short sword for close
fight. A light infantry also included archers
and pike men.
 The god Ashur, above the king, is taking a hand
in the combat.
 On the ground the plants trampled under the
horses’ hoops are symbols of the ruined crops
and hay.
 On another level a warrior, armed with sword
and protected by a rattan shield, is transfixing
a foe-man, who is sinking down and is being
helped by a comrade.
 The garrisons have exhausted all their arrows
and have only stones left to hand.
 The conquest is over, the Assyrian victorious.
 Ashur-natsir-apla cut off the heads of the
slain and made pyramids thereof. Merciless
to those who had rebelled against his yoke,
he flayed them alive and hung their skins like
a curtain on the city walls.
 A warrior grasps him by the hair with his hand
and pushes him.
 Use of ladder in war
 No collection of laws comparable in scope of the
Code of Hammurabi has been found in Assyria.
However, from the ruins of ASSUR one of the
documents (tablets), written in the later half of the
second millennium, has been retrieved almost
undamaged.
 It gathers into some fifty articles the penalties
awaiting certain delinquents, particularly if a
freeman’s wife had been outraged. Another tablet
of the same epoch, unfortunately broken, deals
with rural law.
 Towards the end of the second millennium a single
judge presided in the court, whereas in Babylonia
there were usually several to try each case.
 Assyrian law punished with severity blows and
wounds, at least when a married woman was the
aggressor or the victim.
 Landed Property
 Agreements
 Sale
 Exchange, Loan, Pledges, Sureties
 Landed property in Assyria, as in Babylonia, falls
under the three heads: fields and farms, garden and
orchards, and building land. The farm included not
only arable land and pasture, but also gardens and
buildings.
 The serfs attached to the land formed part of the
property, and passed with it from one proprietor to
another, or were at the same time given as pledges
to guarantee a loan.
 A farm might belong undivided to several people.
 Water rights have been in all countries, and in all
ages, causes of fraudulent dealings among
neighbors on the land. In principle, Assyrian law
permitted understandings for the use of irrigation
waters and rain-water. If such agreement could
not be reached, it left it to the more industrious
agriculturalist to appeal to the court, to have
rights assigned to him and certified in writing.
 Private agreements usually begin with a mention of the
seals of the persons who bind themselves. These seals,
either cylinders or flat stamps, were alone impressed on the
tablet by the principal himself or, where that was
impossible, by an accredited representative who would be
specifically mentioned so as to avoid any subsequent
difficulty.
 When the contracting party had neither a cylinder nor a
stamp-seal, he used his thumb and dug his nail into the clay.
 The text of the document, drawn up in impersonal
phraseology, was followed by the list of witnesses and the
date by the eponymy. The scribe did not always write in his
own name; if he did, it was at the end of the list of witnesses
generally with the additional note “the scribe who holds the
tablet” or “the scribe who holds the document.”
 In Assyria sales were always for silver, lead, or
bronze paid cash down. The deed began with a
note of the impression of the vendor’s seal or nail
together with a reference to the object of the
contract. The deed ended with list of witnesses.
 In case of houses the deed did not give the surface
area of the land as in Babylonia; sometimes,
however, it gave the measurements of the sides.
 Fruit or vegetable gardens were sold like
building land. Arable land was not valued by its
superficial area, but according to the quantity
of grain requisite for sowing it, as was also the
practice in Babylonia at the same epoch.
 Sale of a slave, treated like that of property.
 An exchange did not, as in Babylonia, form a special
type of contract; it was treated as a deed of sale.
 A loan was scarcely ever granted in Assyria without
the lender exacting real and immediate guarantees, a
substantial pledge which passed into his control at
once, and which he would very often retain without
any further formalities if his money were not restored
to him.
 The pledge demanded by the creditor was a piece of
real or personal property; often it consisted of a farm,
with the serfs attached to the soil.
 Like the Babylonian an Assyrian might pledge his
wife, his sons, or his daughters.
 In its essence Assyrian religion did not differ from the
Babylonian. The supreme god ASHUR, (the well-
wisher). He was identified with Anshar, who,
according to the Babylonian Poem of the Creation,
was earlier than ANU, the god of the sky. He was king
of the whole universe of gods, creator of the heaven
of ANU, and of the infernal regions. He was also the
creator of humanity, and a cosmogony was composed
in his honor.
 After ASHUR, Ishtar (Goddess of fertility) occupied
the most prominent pace in the Assyrian pantheon.
Tale of the Goddess Ishtar:
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCVaC4sfY4A
 The Royal inscriptions are full of prayers: pp. 312, 313.
 A Babylonian king was above all the shepherd
of his people; in his inscriptions he was at
pains to recall all that he had done to
maintain order in his realm, to further its
prosperous development, and to defend it
against enemies when necessity arose.
 An Assyrian king, on the other hand, was a
warrior; his idea was to enlarge the territory
subject to the god ASHUR and to be
considered himself as a conqueror.