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Hammurabi is not a name that many people will be familiar with but his impact on history is of massive importance. Ruling from 1792-1750BC, he raised the insignificant town of Babylon to a position of pre-eminence that it enjoyed for the next millennium. When he inherited his throne he as the sixth Amorite king he controlled only the towns of Babylon and Sippar but eventually conquered a massive part of what is termed Mesopotamia, the land around the twin rivers of the Euphrates and the Tigris, now roughly Iraq. If it were just for military prowess that Hammurabi is remembered then he would only sit amongst a pile of warmongers and warriors kings, but there is a greater legacy.

Letters found from some of the cities that formed the centre of Hammurabi's Babylonian empire show the contribution to the development of civilization that was made at this early date. The letters give glimpses of the everyday of court life as well as the intrigues and machinations of the political structure of the time. His best monument was the creation of the law code that bears his name. The law was carved onto stone stela and erected publicly for consultation by the population. With the fall of his empire the law stela where taken away by successive cultures and used as a template for their own systems of justice for the next thousand years.

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