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The Witness of History
steward-king type of theocracy. And another, not unconnected reason was the use to which writing was put. Unlike in Egypt, writing in Mesopotamia was early put to civil use. By 2100 B.C. in Ur, the judgments of gods through their steward mediums began to be recorded. This is the beginning of the idea of law. Such written judgments could be in several places and be continuous through time, thus allowing the cohesiveness of a larger society. We know of nothing similar in Egypt until almost a millennium later. In 1792 B.C., the civil use of writing in this way breaks open an almost new kind of government in that commanding figure of Mesopotamian history, the greatest of all steward kings, Hammurabi, steward of Marduk, the city god of Babylon. His long stewardship, lasting to 1750 B.C., is a pulling together of most of the city-states of Mesopotamia into an hegemony under his god Marduk in Babylon. This process of conquest and influence is made possible by letters and tablets and stelae in an abundance that had never been known before. It is even thought that he was the first literate king who did not need a scribe, since all his cuneiform letters are apparently incised in wet clay by the same hand. Writing was a new method of civil direction, indeed the model that begins our own memo-communicating government. Without it such a unification of Mesopotamia could not have been accomplished. It is a method of social control which by hindsight we know will soon supplant the bicameral mind. His most famous remains are the somewhat overinterpreted and perhaps misnamed Code of Hammurabi.23 Originally, it was an eight-foot-high black basalt stele erected at the end of his reign beside a statue or possibly idol of himself. So far as we can make out, someone seeking redress from another would come to the steward's statue, to "hear my words" (as the stele says at the bottom), and then move over to the stele itself, where the previ23 For a translation I have used Robert Francis Harper, The Code of Hammurabi, King of Babylon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1904).
