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III. "To Sin-idinnam thus says Khammurabi: As to the officials who have resisted you in the accomplishment of their work, do not impose upon them any additional task, but oblige them to do what they ought to have performed, and then remove them from the influence of him who has brought them."
Khammurabi became sole king of Babylonia, which from henceforth obeyed but a single sceptre. Are we to see in the Amraphel of Genesis the Khammurabi of the cuneiform inscriptions? The difference in the names seems to make it impossible.
Additionally, from shelves set up in the days of Khammurabi the Amraphel of Genesis Nippur has yielded ghostly tablets and Borsippa treasuries of Babylonian ken. These, the eldest revelations of the divine, are the last that man has deciphered. The altars and people that heard them first, the marble temples, the ivory palaces, the murderous throngs, are dust.
He fled for refuge to the court of the King of Babylon, who still preserved a semblance of authority. Khammurabi or Amraphel, the fifth successor of Sumu-abi, was now on the throne of Babylon. His long reign of fifty-five years marked an epoch in Babylonian history.
He alone was. The rest, like Makhir, were gods of dream. To the savants, that is; to the magi and seers. To the people the sidereal triads and planetary divinities throned in the Silver Sky augustly real, equally august, and in that celestial equality remained, until Khammurabi gave precedence to Bel, who as Marduk, Bel or Baal Marduk, Lord Marduk, became supreme.
Khammurabi, whose name is also written Ammurapi, has left us autograph letters, in one of which he refers to his defeat of Kudur-Laghghamar in the decisive battle which at last delivered Babylonia from the Elamite yoke. The story of Chedor-laomer's campaign preserved in Genesis has thus found complete verification.
Sin-idinnam was restored to his principality, and we now possess several of the letters written to him by Khammurabi, in which his bravery is praised on "the day of Kudur-Laghghamar's defeat," and he is told to send back the images of certain Elamite goddesses to their original seats. They had doubtless been carried to Larsa when it fell into the hands of the Elamite invaders.
There were many more like the latter, so many that their sanctuaries made the realm a holy land, but one which, administratively, was an aggregate of principalities that Sargon, nearly six thousand years ago, combined. Ultimately, from sheer age, the empire tottered. It would have fallen had not Khammurabi surged. What Sargon made, Khammurabi solidified.
On the day of its capture he erected in gratitude a temple to his god Ingirisa, "for the preservation of his life." But the god did not protect him for ever. A time came when Khammurabi, king of Babylon, rose in revolt against the Elamite supremacy, and drove the Elamite forces out of the land. Eri-Aku was attacked and defeated, and his cities fell into the hands of the conqueror.
Paris has the seal of his librarian. Copies of his annals are extant. In these it is related that, when a child, his mother put him in a basket of rushes and set him adrift on the Euphrates. Presently he was rescued. Afterward he became a leader of men. Khammurabi was also a leader. He was a legislator as well. Sargon united principalities, Khammurabi their shrines.
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