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Updated: June 29, 2025
Under the Sumerians the wife could not obtain a divorce at all, and the penalty for denying her husband was death. These regulations were modified in favour of the woman in Hammurabi's code; for under its provisions, if a man divorced his wife or his concubine, he was obliged to make proper provision for her maintenance.
It is a remarkable code, quickly made available through translation and transliteration by the Assyrian scholars, and justly named, from its royal compiler, Hammurabi's code.
Hammurabi's code, the most ancient known, says "Anna and Bel called me, Hammurabi the exalted prince, the worshiper of the gods; to cause justice to prevail in the land, to destroy the wicked, to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak, to go forth like the sun over the black-head race, to enlighten the land, and to further the welfare of the people."
The epoch of Hammurabi was a crucial one for Babylonia from a religious as well as from a political point of view. Damkina. The consort of Ea figures occasionally in the historical texts of Hammurabi's successors. Agumkakrimi invokes Ea and Damkina, asking these gods, who 'dwell in the great ocean' surrounding the earth, to grant him long life.
Elam, as we have seen, was constantly threatening Babylonia from the East, and shortly before Hammurabi's appearance, succeeded in putting an end to the dynasty of Larsa. It now appears that the inhabitants of the Euphrates Valley were also threatened by an enemy lodged somewhere in the southwest.
Up to the present it has been supposed that Hammurabi's victory marked the end of Elamite influence in Babylonia, and that thenceforward the supremacy of Babylon was established throughout the whole of the country. But from the new chronicle we gather that Hammurabi did not succeed in finally suppressing the attempts of Elam to regain her former position.
But this would be particularly in harmony with the character of the Semitic Babylonians of the First Dynasty, whose genius for method and organization produced alike Hammurabi's Code of Laws and the straight streets of the capital.
A great body of them are grammatical and represent compilations made by Semitic scribes of the period of Hammurabi's dynasty for their study of the old Sumerian tongue.
In addition to this, the antiquity of the literary productions in which her name appears justifies us in reckoning her among the gods of Babylonia of Hammurabi's time. Her name signifies 'lady of the earth, and there is evidently a theoretical substratum to this association of Ea, the water-god, with an earth-goddess.
That Ashur should be referred to at this period is what we might expect, inasmuch as it was known to have been the earliest capital of Assyria; more striking is the reference to Nineveh, proving as it does that it was a flourishing city in Hammurabi's time and that the temple of Ishtar there had already been long established.
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