Middle Babylonian

After the Hittite raid of 1595 BCE, southern Mesopotamia falls under the rule of the Kassites — a foreign dynasty whose own language is barely attested, who adopted Babylonian culture so thoroughly that scholars sometimes forget they were not Babylonian. They reign for four centuries, longer than any native Mesopotamian dynasty before or after. The history of the period is, paradoxically, one of remarkable stability.

The Late Bronze Age, into which the Kassites enter, is the first time the major civilisations of the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East operate as a coherent international system. Egypt under the New Kingdom, the Hittite Empire in Anatolia, the kingdom of Mitanni in northern Mesopotamia, Assyria rising in the upper Tigris, and Kassite Babylon — these are five great powers in regular contact. They marry off princesses to one another, exchange ambassadors and gifts, and write letters.

The letters are written in Akkadian. Across the entire diplomatic world — from Pharaoh's court at Amarna to the Hittite capital at Hattusa, from Cyprus to the Persian Gulf — Akkadian is the diplomatic lingua franca. Rulers who do not speak Akkadian employ scribes who do. The cuneiform script, born in Sumer, has become the international standard.

The Amarna archive — found by chance in 1887 at the abandoned Egyptian capital of Akhetaten — preserves over three hundred letters between Pharaoh and his vassals and peers, all in Akkadian on clay. We hear vassals in Canaan begging Pharaoh for troops against rebellious neighbours. We hear the king of Babylon complaining that his sister, sent to Egypt as a bride, has not been seen or heard from. We hear small-time Levantine kings flatter, threaten, and lie, in formal phrases that are still recognisable as the formal phrases of diplomacy today.

In Babylonian intellectual life, the period is one of consolidation. The literary canon of the Old Babylonian schools is recopied, sometimes edited. The Epic of Gilgamesh approaches its Standard Babylonian form. Astronomical and mathematical traditions deepen. The Kassite kings build temples and patronise scholars; they call themselves šar kiššati, "king of the universe," and mean by it the small set of recognised civilised powers.

The Bronze Age system collapses around 1200 BCE — for reasons still debated, including drought, migration of "Sea Peoples", and cascading political failures. Mitanni falls. The Hittite empire dies. Egypt retreats. The Kassite dynasty in Babylon survives the immediate crisis but is weakened, and by 1155 BCE it too has fallen, to the Elamites coming down from the Iranian highlands.

The tablets from this period, more than from any other, give us a view of the world beyond Mesopotamia itself: the diplomatic web, the names and complaints of distant courts, the workings of an international order in cuneiform.