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Updated: June 23, 2025
Even the description of the moon as the bull of heaven falls within the domain of popular fancy. It is different in the days after Hammurabi, when political concentration leads to the focussing of intellectual life in the Euphrates Valley, with all the consequences that the establishment of a central priesthood, with growing powers over ever-increasing territory, involves.
The laws are engraved on a great stele of diorite in no less than forty-nine columns of writing, of which forty-four are preserved,* and at the head of the stele is sculptured a representation of the king receiving them from Shamash, the Sun-god. * See King, Letters and Inscriptions of Hammurabi, 3 vols.
We have seen that we are justified in passing beyond the period of Hammurabi for these beginnings, but exactly when and precisely how the literary spirit first manifested itself in Babylonia will probably remain for a long time, if not for always, a matter of conjecture.
Here the break in the tablet begins and, when the text again becomes intelligible, a deity is praised in such extravagant terms that one is tempted to conclude that Hammurabi has added to an old hymn a paean to his favorite Marduk . To Bel is given the honor of having granted royal dignity to the king.
Chederlaomer, Amraphel and the other three kings were fulfilling their annual obligation in the Jordan valley when Hebrew tradition believed that they met with Abraham; and if, as seems agreed, Amraphel was Hammurabi himself, that tradition proves the custom of the razzia well established under the First Babylonian Dynasty.
The testimony of Hammurabi is therefore as direct as that of Sargon, who calls the sun-god of Sippar, Shamash.
Hammurabi therefore fixed a scale of compensation to be paid to the owner by a detected thief, which varied according to the class and value of the machine he stole. The rivers and larger canals of Babylonia were used by the ancient inhabitants not only for the irrigation of their fields, but also as waterways for the transport of heavy materials.
Sin has given the king his princely glory; from Ninib, the king has received a powerful weapon; Ishtar fixes the battle array, while Shamash and Ramman hold themselves at the service of the king. With this list, however, we are far from having exhausted the pantheon as it had developed in the days of Hammurabi.
This misfortune would naturally have been ascribed by the king and the priests to the anger of the Elamite goddesses at being detained in a foreign land, and Hammurabi probably arrived at his decision that they should be escorted back in the hope of once more securing victory for the Babylonian arms.
Here the historian can, from the spirit or the text, perhaps construct a connexion with the Law of Hammurabi, the friend of Abraham, and perhaps logically enough; but that would no way lessen the importance of the fact that God suggested it to Moses and in so far revealed Himself to the Israelite people.
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