Page 145 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

removed and replaced by governors, ruling in the name of the
Babylonian king, and themselves for the most part Babylonians.
Hammurabi himself took over the administration and the judi­
cial functions of the displaced kings, ordering personally the

maintenance and repair of canals and the deciding of lawsuits.
The governors collected the taxes, kept the muster rolls of the
conscript army, and witnessed trade agreements. Gradually a

staff of secretaries, messengers, and paymasters was recruited to
manage the detailed work of administration, and a state police
and a corps of excisemen kept watch on the roads.
The city gods had proved a more difficult problem than the

city kings. For as long as they existed, the primary loyalty of
the men of the minor cities was to their own temple and not to the
capital. But Hammurabi had attacked the gods at their weakest
point, by an order that the accounts of all the temples should be

sent to Babylon for auditing. And he followed it by a planned
aggrandizement of Marduk, the god of Babylon, up to now a god
of little account. His temple was set up in every city, and great
festivals in his honor were instituted. Clearly Marduk was now a

great god, and it was wise for all men, and even for the local gods,
to bow circumspectly before him.
In the course of these years, then, the confederacy of Baby­

lon became the centralized country of Babylonia. The older men
doubtless disapproved of the changes. But the young men had
grown up with them.
Hammurabi, reading the tablets sent by his ambassadors

and agents in the countries beyond his frontiers, knew that the
time was ripe for the next step. It was perhaps even overdue.
For beyond the Amorite fringe new things were happening.

The men of the mountains had never been negligible. The
mountains, after all, overhung the whole civilized world. All the
way north from the Persian Gulf through Elam and Eshnunna to
Assyria, the mountains of Persia frowned down upon one’s right

hand. And as one turned west from Assyria by the great trade
route that led through Harran and Carchemish and Aleppo to
the Mediterranean and the ports where the ships from Crete

came in, the mountains turned with one, and still rose on ones
right, the mountains of Armenia and eastern Turkey. Even on the