Babylonia

The Mesopotamian kingdom that gave the world its first great law code, its base-sixty arithmetic and, twice over, an empire. Babylon was an unimportant town on the Euphrates until Hammurabi, in the eighteenth century BC, spent most of a long reign uniting southern Mesopotamia by war and diplomacy. His law code, inscribed on a two-metre stone stele now in the Louvre, is not the earliest known but is by far the fullest, with nearly three hundred provisions covering wages, tenancy, surgery, marriage and the famous principle of an eye for an eye - which applied unequally by social class, so that the same injury cost a nobleman his eye and a commoner a payment in silver. The kingdom fell to the Hittites and later the Assyrians, and its second rise came after 626 BC, when the Neo-Babylonian dynasty destroyed Assyria and Nebuchadnezzar II rebuilt the city on a scale that impressed everyone who saw it. He also destroyed Jerusalem in 587 BC and deported its population, an exile that shaped Judaism permanently. Babylonian astronomers kept records over centuries and could predict eclipses, and their sexagesimal system survives in the sixty minutes of an hour and the 360 degrees of a circle. The Ishtar Gate is reconstructed in Berlin. Cyrus of Persia took the city in 539 BC. The Hanging Gardens have never been located. The site in Iraq is a World Heritage site. The kingdom lay in southern Mesopotamia, in what is now central Iraq. Babylon stood on the Euphrates around 85 kilometres south of Baghdad. Hammurabi reigned for roughly 42 years. The Neo-Babylonian empire lasted less than a century. Akkadian was written in cuneiform on clay.

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