Code of Hammurabi

Hammurabi was the 6th king of the First Dynasty of the Old Babylonian Empire. He was part of an ethnic group known as the Amorites, which had begun in the Levant and gradually expanded into Mesopotamia at the beginning of the 2nd millennium BCE. They built several city-states in lower Mesopotamia, including Babylon, which sat in the fertile northwest quarter of that region, and gradually displaced the earlier imperial city-states of Sumer, Ur, and Akkad. In Hammurabi’s time, Babylonians spoke Akkadian, which was the lingua franca of Mesopotamia in the 2nd millennium BCE and a member of the Semitic language family (of which Arabic, Hebrew, and several others still persist). Like the preceding civilizations in the Mesopotamian basin, they used a writing system based on cuneiform script.

At the beginning of the Amorite First Dynasty, Babylon was not yet a major regional power. It was situated on the fertile floodplain where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers meandered close to one another before separating out again, and so it was in an advantageous position for agriculture. Babylonians became experts in the use of canals to water their fields, adding new levels of technical prowess in the field of irrigated agriculture.