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Updated: June 23, 2025
The kings of the northern empire vie with their southern cousins in beautifying and enlarging the structures sacred to Marduk and Nabu. In view of the explanation offered for the silence maintained by Hammurabi and his successors regarding Nabu, we are justified in including Nabu in the Babylonian pantheon of those days.
We know from direct evidence that the commercial life of Babylonia had already, in the period preceding Hammurabi, led to regulated legal forms and practices for the purpose of carrying out obligations and of settling commercial and legal difficulties. The proof has been furnished by Dr.
Meissner that syllabaries prepared for the better understanding of the formulas and words employed in preparing the legal and commercial tablets, date, in part, from the period which we may roughly designate as that of Hammurabi, covering, say, the three centuries 2300 to 2000 B.C. With this evidence for the existence of pedagogues devoted to the training of novices in the art of reading and writing, in order to fit them for their future tasks as official scribes, we are safe in assuming that these same schoolmen were no less active in other fields of literature.
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.
The manner in which Agumkakrimi introduces Anu is no less characteristic for the age of Hammurabi and his successors. At the beginning of his long inscription, he enumerates the chief gods under whose protection he places himself. As a Cassitic ruler, he assigns the first place to the chief Cassite deity, Shukamuna, a god of war whom the Babylonian scholars identified with their own Nergal.
When describing his operations at Sippar he speaks of himself as 'doing good to the flesh of Shamash and Marduk. Hammurabi felt himself to be honoring Marduk, through paying homage to a deity having affinity with the patron protector of Babylon. Innanna. We have already come across a deity of this name in a previous chapter.
The recently published letters of Hammurabi and Abêshu' contain directions for the transportation of corn, dates, sesame seed, and wood, which were ordered to be brought in ships to Babylon, and the code of Hammurabi refers to the transportation by water of wool and oil.
Where war was the chief pursuit she became a goddess of war; in this character she appears in Babylonia as early as the time of Hammurabi, and later in Assyria. In the genealogical constructions she was brought into connection, as daughter, wife, or other relation, with any god that the particular conditions suggested.
THE Pyramids were a thousand years old and were beginning to show the first signs of decay, and Hammurabi, the wise king of Babylon, had been dead and buried several centuries, when a small tribe of shepherds left their homes along the banks of the River Danube and wandered southward in search of fresh pastures. They called themselves Hellenes, after Hellen, the son of Deucalion and Pyrrha.
This association of the god with the town points again to a local deity, but possessing a character which leads to the absorption of the god in the solar god, Nergal, whom we have already encountered, and who will occupy us a good deal when we come to the period after Hammurabi.
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