THE FAULTS OF THE BABYLONIAN CIVILIZATION

With all their gifts and achievements there were certain great evils
in Babylonian life. For one thing they were inclined to be greedy and
covetous. They lived on a soil almost incredibly rich, and they were
constantly increasing their wealth by trade. Babylonian merchants or
their agents were to be found in almost every city and town of western
Asia and perhaps even as far east as China. Of the vast mass of their
written records which have been collected in our museums, the
majority are business documents and records of contracts. Many of them
tell the story of hard bargains. Professor Maspero declares that these
records "reveal to us a people greedy of gain, exacting, and almost
exclusively absorbed by material concerns."

=Slavery.=--Moreover, the wealth of the nation was not fairly
distributed but was more and more in the hands of the favored few, the
great nobles, and their friends. The fields were not tilled by
independent farmers. There were, instead, a few great estates which
were rented out to tenants. The actual work, both on the fields and in
the towns, was more and more performed by slaves. Some of these were
captives who had been taken in war. Others were native Babylonians who
had been sold into slavery for debt. So it had come about that
Babylonian society had set like plaster into a hard mold with the king
and the wealthy nobles on top and the poor peasants and slaves below.
This state of things was fastened all the more firmly on the people by
strong kings such as Hammurabi, who lived about B.C. 2000 and who
unified the country under a powerful central government with his own
city, Babylon, as the capital.