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.Later Assyr-ian kings, in the 900s and 800s b.c., brag in words and picturesof impaling enemies on stakes, cutting off people s hands, arms,or noses, gouging out their eyes, and burning teenaged boys andgirls to death.We do not have a record of Hammurabi braggingabout torturing people.War is never kind, people are mutilatedand tortured, and there is no doubt that some of the victimsof Hammurabi s wars would be surprised at his reputation forpeace.Still, Hammurabi was proud of being a fierce king, buthe did not seem to take pleasure in killing.He did not ask to beremembered as someone who mutilated people.HAMMURABI S SONIn 1750 b.c., the kingdom of Babylon passed to Hammurabi sson Samsuiluna.Hammurabi had died or, possibly, was too sickto rule.We have only a tantalizing fragment of a letter that hisson sent to an official in Larsa.The letter said that  the king is[missing word] and so I have taken my place on the throne ofmy father. So Hammurabi leaves us with one more mysteryabout his life.Still, there is no evidence of any difficulty inthe transfer of power from the old king to his son.We mustassume that Hammurabi died if not then, soon after andwas buried, as were Mesopotamian kings, in a family vault,with funeral rites.His family would have buried him in a tomb,probably within the palace, and tended it with ceremony andrespect.100 HAMMURABIBlessed by the gods as king, Hammurabi was able to fulfill hisresponsibilities by providing necessities to his subjects and buildingtemples to the gods.His worship of the higher powers, particularlythe gods Marduk and Shamash, is often depicted in carvings (above),showing Hammurabi in the classic gesture of Babylonian respect.HOW HAMMURABI IS REMEMBEREDHammurabi was recognized by the people of his time asunusual.Although we have no record of his having identifiedhimself as a god instead he credits his successes to the gods,The Babylonian Empire and Hammurabi s Legacy 101as he should we do know that some people considered hima god, naming their children Hammurabi-ili, which means Hammurabi is my god, explains Marc Van De Mieroop.Hammurabi lived in a time that did not write history and ifthere are legends of him, as there are for Sargon, for instance, we donot have them.So Hammurabi was remembered in two ways.Onewas specific: Scribes had made copies of his law collection before itwas removed by the Elamites in 1158 b.c.Those laws and the pro-logue and epilogue continued to be copied and these copies werekept in all the major libraries.So what was remembered of Ham-murabi after his death was not the specifics of how he carried outhis battles or the history of his reign, but that same text that wasexcavated between 1901 and 1902.Even after people had forgottenexactly when he lived, they remembered him as a great king whospoke with authority of justice and of the unification of the land.Although or because later peoples did not rememberHammurabi as a historical figure, his name was evoked as anauthority on almost any subject.His name seems to have beensort of a seal of approval.A thousand years after Hammurabi sdeath, a king will still claim to be descended from Hammurabi,even though he was not, and was not even sure when Hammu-rabi had lived.These examples tell us what Hammurabi s nameand kingship meant to people after his death.THE CONTINUING RISE OF BABYLONThe most important part of Hammurabi s legacy was how hechanged Mesopotamian history for the next 1,200 to 1,400years.Some historians have said, with truth, that his empiredid not long survive him.His son Samsuiluna maintained it foranother ten years, but then lost control of southern Babylon.Still, the dynasty held northern Babylon for another 155 years,only then losing control of the throne.But it was not the end of Babylon as a city.Although therewere waves of invasions by different peoples, Babylon remained102 HAMMURABIthe most important city in the region.So it is not that Hammu-rabi created a dynasty or a Babylonia that survived unchangedas a kingdom under his successors.And yet the region did notever return to its 2,000-year history as a land of competing city-states, and invaders continued to (at least in part) adopt the cus-toms and gods of the land.Without summarizing another 1,500 years of history, it isstill possible to talk about how Babylon s importance can bemeasured.It was the city invaders most wanted to rule.It wasthe city that grew larger and more elaborate as older cities likeUr disappeared.Although at times another city would gain inpower, such as the city of Nimrud, in the north, in the 800s b.c.,power always returned to Babylon.It was, in the words of theKing Lists,  the seat of kingship. When Alexander the Greatconquered it in 331 b.c., he began to restore the temple and thegreat ziggurat.He wanted to make the city of Babylon the capitalof his empire, the capital of the world.Instead he died there, in323 b.c.The Greek culture spread.Only then did the knowledgeof cuneiform die out, not to be rediscovered until the middle ofthe nineteenth century, when scholars were again able to readsome inscriptions about a great king named Hammurabi.Another way to identify Babylon s continuing importance isthrough the rising importance of its patron god, Marduk.Origi-nally Marduk was a minor god, as Babylon was a minor city.Theimportant gods, the national gods of Sumer, were patrons of theoriginal important Sumerian cities.As Babylon rose in power,Marduk did too, and this rise in power continued after Hammu-rabi s death.Marduk was understood as having more and morepowers that had once belonged to other gods, although the othergods were still worshipped.In the  Epic of Creation, our earli-est copy of which is from about 1200 b.c., a different version ofcreation is told than the one that the Sumerians and Akkadianshad known.In this story, the world is created through Marduk svictory over the goddess Tiamut [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]