Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a rapid sketch made at the
British Museum.
Ashnunak was a border district, and shared the fate of all the provinces on the eastern bank of the Tigris, being held sometimes by Elam and sometimes by Chaldæa; properly speaking, it was a country of Semitic speech, and was governed by viceroys owning allegiance, now to Babylon, now to Susa.* Khammurabi seized this province, and permanently secured its frontier by building along the river a line of fortresses surrounded by earthworks. Following the example of his predecessors, he set himself to restore and enrich the temples.
* Pognon discovered inscriptions of four of the vicegerents
of Ashnunak, which he assigns, with some hesitation, to the
time of Khammurabi, rather than to that of the kings of
Telloh. Three of these names are Semitic, the fourth
Sumerian; the language of the inscriptions bears a
resemblance to the Semitic dialect of Chaldæa.
The house of Zamama and Ninni, at Kish, was out of repair, and the ziggurât threatened to fall; he pulled it down and rebuilt it, carrying it to such a height that its summit “reached the heavens.” Merodach had delegated to him the government of the faithful, and had raised him to the rank of supreme ruler over the whole of Chaldæa. At Babylon, close to the great lake which served as a reservoir for the overflow of the Euphrates, the king restored the sanctuary of Esagilla, the dimensions of which did not appear to him to be proportionate to the growing importance of the city. “He completed this divine dwelling with great joy and delight, he raised the summit to the firmament,” and then enthroned Merodach and his spouse, Zarpanit, within it, amid great festivities. He provided for the ever-recurring requirements of the national religion by frequent gifts; the tradition has come down to us of the granary for wheat which he built at Babylon, the sight of which alone rejoiced the heart of the god. While surrounding Sippar with a great wall and a fosse, to protect its earthly inhabitants, he did not forget Shamash and Malkatu, the celestial patrons of the town. He enlarged in their honour the mysterious Ebarra, the sacred seat of their worship, and that which no king from the earliest times had known how to build for his divine master, that did he generously for Shamash his master. He restored Ezida, the eternal dwelling of Merodach, at Borsippa; Eturka-lamma, the temple of Anu, Ninni, and Nana, the suzerains of Kish; and also Ezikalamma, the house of the goddess Ninna, in the village of Zarilab. In the southern provinces, but recently added to the crown,—at Larsa, Uruk, and Uru,—he displayed similar activity.
He had, doubtless, a political as well as a religious motive in all he did; for if he succeeded in winning the allegiance of the priests by the prodigality of his pious gifts, he could count on their gratitude in securing for him the people’s obedience, and thus prevent the outbreak of a revolt. He had, indeed, before him a difficult task in attempting to allay the ills which had been growing during centuries of civil discord and foreign conquest. The irrigation of the country demanded constant attention, and from earliest times its sovereigns had directed the work with real solicitude; but owing to the breaking up of the country into small states, their respective resources could not be combined in such general operations as were needed for controlling the inundations and effectually remedying the excess or the scarcity of water. Khammurabi witnessed the damage done to the whole province of Umliyash by one of those terrible floods which still sometimes ravage the regions of the Lower Tigris,* and possibly it may have been to prevent the recurrence of such a disaster that he undertook the work of canalization.
* Contracts dated the year of an inundation which laid waste
Umliyash; cf. in our own time, the inundation of April 10,
1831, which in a single night destroyed half the city of
Bagdad, and in which fifteen thousand persons lost their
lives either by drowning or by the collapse of their houses.