provincial sites. The city expanded greatly, and may have reached the dimensions of
the later Nebuchadnezzar city walls in the middle Old Babylonian period.^6 Babylon
benefited from the political successes of its kings, but also from the subsequent urban
crisis, as this led to a concentration of cults and offices of the ruined regional centres
within its walls. Babylon’s victories had shaped the theology of the city god Marduk
(Wiggermann 1989 ), and the reception and embellishment of uprooted cults were,
again, ideologically important, and may have some bearing on the theological elevation
of Babylon and the promotion of Marduk to the head of the pantheon at a later date.
Both organizationally and ideologically, the city thus developed into the only supra-
regional centre of Lower Mesopotamia in the centuries that followed the reign of
Hammurabi.
The palace of Babylon strongly influenced private economic behaviour, as the
prevailing model of kingship was paternalistic – the king being the ‘good shepherd’,
an attitude that materialized in the royal administration of justice. Hammurabi was,
in this respect, again a transitional figure, as his famous Law Code was the last example
of a specific genre of royal proclamations of just rules set on stone monuments. While
earlier examples include legal provisions of universal applicability (nowadays referred
to as ‘laws’) as well as a description of social and administrative reforms, Hammurabi
reserved only the former category for his monument, incorporating the latter in
another type of legal proclamation: a royal decree that was not inscribed in stone but
circulated on clay tablets only (Wilcke 2002 : 301 ). This practice was taken over by
his successors, whose decrees incorporated and expanded Hammurabi’s text, and the
best-preserved issue is now known as the ‘Edict of Ammisaduqa’. Hammurabi’s decree
accompanied the celebration of a redress act, a highly ideological and time-honoured
event that aimed at establishing equity in the country by the redress of wrongs that
had transpired in the past. His successors performed similar acts, and copies of the
redress decree were distributed to announce the occasion. The relation between the
act and the decree is, however, ill-matched, because the act is known to have affected
various kinds of economic activities that are not described in the decree and, conversely,
much of its traditional text lost its validity in the course of time: the ritualistic nature
of the document in the later Old Babylonian period should therefore be emphasized.
The redress acts were, however, entirely real and are an important factor to explain
the composition of the surviving archives (Charpin 2000 ).
These redress decrees must be kept strictly apart from another type of royal decree,
one that introduced specific elements of permanent legislation in response to acute
problems presented to the court (Veenhof 2001 ). These decrees of the second type
had an immediate effect on the day-to-day dealings of the population and affected
the phrasing of legal texts: sometimes explicit reference to them is made in contracts
(‘in accordance with the royal decree’), but more often these regulations can be only
detected through changing patterns in the documentation, as they harmonized legal
forms in the different cities of the kingdom and shaped their development over time.
By means of such regulations, the king interfered in customary law, for example in
the laws of sale and credit, or when a status investigation for chattel slaves was stipu-
lated in order to protect indebted civilians (van Koppen 2004 ), but also when lower
fixed yield rates for field leases appear – presumably in reaction to a declining produc-
tivity. This form of legislation peaked under Samsuiluna and Abieshuh and addressed
social problems that may have worsened because of the recent hydraulic crisis. After
— Frans van Koppen —