When I read about Bronze Age empires there's a period where we see new concepts appearing - law, societal structure, persistent trade routes, organized religion and so on.
However it looks like by the time we're getting to Babylonian Empire it's all... the same. Right up the Bronze Age Collapse. Cities change hands, empires rise - but it's hard to see anything really changing apart from who rules the land.
So is this just difficulties with narrative or was this period static and stagnant?
The Middle and Late Bronze Age spanned nearly a thousand years, and naturally there were quite a few changes during that time period. I wrote about many of these changes from an Egyptian perspective in Ancient Egypt is often described as the longest continuous human civilization, and seems to have maintained a surprising amount of cultural continuity. How accurate is this description?
From the Babylonian perspective, note that Kassite Babylonia has been massively understudied, and the majority of texts from the time period have gone unpublished. For example, the University of Pennsylvania excavated at Nippur back in the late 1800s, and the university's archaeology museum holds about 5000 tablets from the Kassite period. More were found in the excavations done by the Oriental Institute of Chicago, which ran from about 1950 to around 1990. All told, about 12,000 tablets from the Kassite period have been found, about 80% of which have yet to be published. These are mostly official archives, especially texts relating to the governor's activities.