Page 137 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

recorded thougms auu uFu«uuu ~ r-“r- -
difference is unreal, it is in us and the state of our knowledge, not
fn the time of which we tell. We should never forget that the

peoples of Europe had their own names for themselves and
dieir lands, that their movements involved actual battles and

treaties between actual people occurring on actual dates. No
controversy raged at the time about the date of the building of

Stonehenge, and the king who ordered its construction was as
real and powerful a person as the king who, less than a hundred

years later, wrote on a tablet that can be seen in the British
Museum: “I am Hammurabi the mighty king, king of Babylon,

king of the world. That which from days of old no king had
built for his lord, I have accomplished gloriously for my lord the

Sun-God.”
A hundred years and more have gone by since the tribal

family of Terah, migrating northward from Ur along the Eu­
phrates to Harran, had encamped a night or so by the little

walled village of Babylon. The grandsons of Abraham are now
the chieftains of considerable nomad tribes in Syria and Palestine,

the length of the desert away. And Babylon has become a

considerable city, carrying weight in the affairs of the valley
of the lower Euphrates and Tigris. There is a new king now sitting
in the palace on the eastern bank of the Euphrates. He is a

young man who succeeded his famous father only two years ago,

and no one knows what he will make of his reign. His name is
Hammurabi.

He comes of a long line of kings. For his great-great-grand-
father was Sumu-la-El, who had usurped the throne of Babylon

from Sumu-abum, in whose reign Abraham had passed by. It
was Sumu-abum who had organized the little confederacy of

Amorite-occupied villages, with Babylon as its capital, and had
t ereby first raised Babylon to something more than an ob-

SCure, vi^age- the dynasty that followed him had been strong,
an ad needed to be, in order not only to preserve the inde­

pendence of the Babylon confederacy but to extend it into a
P°^er °f local, though not negligible, significance. It was Sumu-

imself who had defeated the ancient and neighboring