The Babylonian World - Historia Antigua

— Society and economy in the later Old Babylonian period —
successors, required skills that only professional specialists could provide; one may
furthermore assume that foreign mercenaries played a part in the transmission of
these technological innovations (Moorey 1986). This increasing professionalism meant
that the need for untrained conscripted infantry troops decreased, while more money
was needed for the treasury to finance the mercenary forces, and this shift is manifest
since the reign of Abi-eshuh, when the obligatory service time that was linked to
the usufruct of a service field was increasingly replaced by a silver tax.
The source situation dictates that the ethnic newcomers in the Mesopotamian
lowlands who did not enter into state service remain virtually invisible, but their
presence is revealed when one takes note of polities in the peripheral regions, outside
of the Babylonian state, that emerged by the amalgamation of groups of various ethnic
and social backgrounds. This is best observed at the Middle Euphrates, a frontier
region where, under Hammurabi or one of his successors, mercenary forces in
Babylonian pay had been settled in the already mentioned ‘Kassite houses’. What
happened afterwards is not documented, but a few generations later, when the ‘Kassite
houses’ survived only as a toponym, several autonomous powers were found in the
area, with the Samharû as the most prominent constituent, a name that in the Middle
Babylonian period was used by some as the designation for the Kassite dynasty on
the Babylonian throne (van Koppen 2004). A similar course of events can be assumed
to occur in the Diyala region, but here we must largely rely on later evidence, when
we observe that the elite of the Kassite dynasty maintained particularly close ties
with this area, and note that the Nuzi texts (fourteenth century BC) refer to it as the
‘Kassite land’. Nonetheless, there are good reasons to accept that already, under
Samsuditana, the Diyala region, including the city of Eshnunna, constituted a kingdom
whose rulers were counted in later tradition among the ancestors of the Kassite royal
lineage. These peripheral political entities no doubt contributed to the growing
destabilization that was felt towards the end of the Old Babylonian period, and may
be brought forward, in conjunction with incidents of mutiny of the regular mercenary
forces, to explain the allusions to Kassite hostility that occur throughout the Old
Babylonian period.
SETTLEMENT
When Hammurabi conquered the kingdom of Larsa, he took over a country in
economic decline. The high incidence of redress acts under Larsa’s last king, Rim-
Sin, points to widespread impoverishment in his time, which in all probability was
rooted in a drop in agricultural productivity due to diminishing water supplies, a
phenomenon that the major canal repair works of Rim-Sin’s reign evidently failed to
remedy. Hammurabi claims in official statements that he honoured the royal duty
to care for the land’s hydraulic infrastructure, but his correspondence with his servants
in Larsa shows that the situation, in reality, was close to disastrous. Much evidence
has survived about Babylonian economic policy in the newly established ‘Lower
Province’, but its interpretation so far allows only provisional conclusions about its
substance and effects. It is evident that the income from large tracts of state land, so
far enjoyed by the local elite, were now set aside for Babylonian officials. The Babylonians
also tried to cut expenses for rations by increasing the number of subsistence
field holders, which, in the light of the declining yields, may have been unfavourable
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