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Updated: June 29, 2025
Any private citizen was entitled to make a direct appeal to the king for justice, if he thought he could not obtain it in his local court, and it is clear from Hammurabi's letters that he always listened to such an appeal and gave it adequate consideration.
Mesopotamian arts and letters now reached the highest point at which they had stood since Hammurabi's days, and the fame of the wealth and luxury of "Sardanapal" went out even into the Greek lands. About 660 B.C. Assyria seemed in a fair way to be mistress of the desirable earth. Strong as it seemed in the 7th century, the Assyrian Empire was, however, rotten at the core.
Although in part contemporary, the next stage in the development of Israelitish law is represented by the civil, social, and humane decalogues in Exodus xx. 28 to xxiii. 19. The best preserved group is found in xxi.1 to xxii.20, and bears the title Judgments, which recalls Hammurabi's title to his code, The Judgments of Righteousness.
We have also, for some years now, possessed two early fragments of the Deluge narrative, proving that the story was known to the Semitic inhabitants of the country at the time of Hammurabi's dynasty.
These conclusions were soon after strikingly confirmed by two passages in the introductory sections of Hammurabi's code of laws which was discovered at Susa.
An early Assyrian ishshakku of this name, who was the son of Ishme-Dagan, is mentioned by Tiglath-Pileser I, but he cannot be identified with the ruler of the time of Hammurabi, since, according to Tiglath-Pileser, he ruled too late, about 1800 B.C. A brick-inscription of another Shamshi-Adad, however, the son of Igur-kapkapu, is preserved in the British Museum, and it is probable that we may identify him with Hammurabi's Assyrian viceroy.
Now Nina may very probably be identified with Nineveh, but many writers have taken it to be a place in Southern Babylonia and possibly a district of Shirpurla itself. No such uncertainty attaches to Hammurabi's reference to Nineveh, which is undoubtedly the Assyrian city of that name.
A subject frequently referred to in Hammurabi's letters is the collection of revenues, and it is clear that an elaborate system was in force throughout the country for the levying and payment of tribute to the state by the principal cities of Babylonia, as well as for the collection of rent and revenue from the royal estates and from the lands which were set apart for the supply of the great temples.
It is after he has succeeded in making Babylon the capital of a great kingdom that he proceeds to improve the temple of Innanna. Bel and the Triad of Babylonian Theology. Among the literary remains of Hammurabi's days we have a hymn in which the chief gods worshipped by the king are enumerated in succession. The list begins with Bel, and then mentions Sin, Ninib, Ishtar, Shamash, and Ramman.
In one of Hammurabi's letters to Sin-idinnam, governor of the city of Larsam, to which reference has already been made, directions are given for the despatch to the king of "two hundred and forty men of 'the King's Company' under the command of Nannar-iddina... who have left the country of Ashur and the district of Shitullum."
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