This concept of an ordered society and the king’s responsibility govern centuries
of Babylonian ideology, down to Nabonidus ( 555 – 539 BC), and it was already ancient
when Hammurabi drafted his famous Laws. The Laws themselves are embedded within
a larger pro- and epilogue. From the viewpoint of a literary historian, the whole text
is basically an elaborated example of a typical Mesopotamian ‘votive inscription’. This
is much in the third-millennium (Sumerian) tradition, where neither Gudea of Lagash
nor the kings of the subsequent Third Dynasty of Ur had paid special attention to
their military campaigns. In their often very lengthy inscriptions, they had focused
— Gebhard J. Selz —Figure 19. 1 Detail of the Code of Ur-Nammu, showing the measuring rope.