Hammurabi (also translated Hammu-rapi or Khammurabi ) was the sixth king of Babylon, he reigns of 1792 before Jesus-Christ, until her death, towards 1750 before Jesus-Christ. Its reign is one longest of the antiquity of the the Middle East.

It completed the conquest of Sumer and of Akkad, removed the last dynasty sumérienne of Isin. He was the first king of the Babylonian Empire and was the first to ensure the hegemony of Babylon on the Mésopotamie.

Reign

He succeeds his father Sîn-Muballit and thus inherits his modest kingdom which extends along the Euphrate. The first decades of its reign were relatively peaceful. During the 30e year, Hammurabi crushed an army of invasion made up of Élamite and another forces in a decisive battle, which expelled those of Babylon. The two following years it occupied and annexed Larsa, Mari, and Yamutbal with the centralized monarchical kingdom of Babylonia.

After the war, comes time from the unification. It knows that to keep a welded empire, one needs a common culture, thus it makes adopt only one language, the Akkadien, only one religion and especially only one law, it is the Code of Hammurabi. A literary and intellectual revival followed the found independence of the Babylonians, and the rules and laws of Babylon were respected to banks of the Mediterranean. Many signed shelves of contract, gone back from its reign and its successors, were discovered. Among them, one orders 240 soldier sending of the Assyrie and the Situllum, a proof that Assyrie was a Babylonian dependence. It is mainly thanks to these hard copies of these relations that one knows today the history of the first Babylonian Empire.

Hammurabi extended and improved the systems of Irrigation, which reinforced the importance of the city.

Hammurabi extended the rule of Babylon by conquering in first the cities of the south. These conquests soldier arrived tardily in his reign, perhaps started by the fall of the empire of Samsi-Addu.

Hammurabi is probably most known of kings de Babylone by the promulgation of the Code of Hammurabi. These laws were engraved on steles, placed on the public places, in order to be known of all, at least those which could read. These steles were withdrawn and taken along towards the capital élam ite of Suse, where they were redécouvertes in 1901. They are currently with the Musée of Louvre to Paris. The sorrows promulgated by these laws can appear cruel with a modern reader, but the awaited goal was as much as providing a whole of rules that a system of sorrows rigorous and proportioned according to the faults. This is regarded as an important step in the evolution of civilization. A suspect is innocent as long as the culpability is not proven is one of the ideas come from these laws.

After its death, the successors of Hammurabi transfer to exhaust the Empire, as well by the economic crises repeated as by the military pressure of the Hittites, led by their king Mursili Ier. This last seizes the town of Babylon in 1595 before Jesus-Christ and destroys completely it. However they are Kassites, led by their king Agumkakrine, which, finally, reigned on Babylon. In spite of many rebellions of the city, the reign of Kassites lasted 400 years, and respected the code of Hammurabi.

Many school handbooks present the statue in Diorite discovered to Suse like that of king Hammourabi. This statue which one estimates to go back to 2025 with 1594 before Jesus-Christ finds with the Musée of Louvre.

See too

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