Hittites Sack Babylon, Ending the Old Babylonian Empire
A Hittite army under Mursili I marched some 1,500 kilometres down the Euphrates around 1595 BC, sacked Babylon, and went home. It ended the dynasty of Hammurabi, which had ruled for three centuries and had produced the law code, and it is the single most abrupt discontinuity in Mesopotamian history. The raid makes no strategic sense and was not meant to. Mursili had already taken Aleppo, destroying the kingdom of Yamhad that blocked Hittite access to Syria, and Babylon was far beyond anything he could hold. He took the treasure, the statues of Marduk and his consort Sarpanit, and left. The Hittite sources are brief to the point of unhelpfulness, and the Babylonian sources for the period barely exist — the century that follows is the darkest in Mesopotamian chronology, and the date itself is used to anchor competing chronologies that differ by more than a century. What filled the vacuum was the Kassites, a people of uncertain origin from the Zagros who had been infiltrating Babylonia for generations as labourers and soldiers, and who took over the emptied throne and ruled for over four hundred years — the longest dynasty in Babylonian history. They kept the language, the gods, the scribal tradition and the law, and recovered the statue of Marduk. Mursili was murdered by his brother-in-law on returning to Hattusa, and the Hittite kingdom spent a century in dynastic chaos before Suppiluliuma I rebuilt it. The raid is the clearest case in ancient history of a state destroying a rival it had no intention of replacing, and leaving the consequences to someone else.
- Year: 1595 BCE
- Category: Military
