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He had, doubtless, a political as well as a religious motive in all he did; for if he succeeded in winning the allegiance of the priests by the prodigality of his pious gifts, he could count on their gratitude in securing for him the people’s obedience, and thus prevent the outbreak of a revolt.  He had, indeed, before him a difficult task in attempting to allay the ills which had been growing during centuries of civil discord and foreign conquest.  The irrigation of the country demanded constant attention, and from earliest times its sovereigns had directed the work with real solicitude; but owing to the breaking up of the country into small states, their respective resources could not be combined in such general operations as were needed for controlling the inundations and effectually remedying the excess or the scarcity of water.  Khammurabi witnessed the damage done to the whole province of Umliyash by one of those terrible floods which still sometimes ravage the regions of the Lower Tigris,* and possibly it may have been to prevent the recurrence of such a disaster that he undertook the work of canalization.

* Contracts dated the year of an inundation which laid waste Umliyash; cf. in our own time, the inundation of April 10, 1831, which in a single night destroyed half the city of Bagdad, and in which fifteen thousand persons lost their lives either by drowning or by the collapse of their houses.

He was the first that we know of who attempted to organize and reduce to a single system the complicated network of ditches and channels which intersected the territory belonging to the great cities between Babylon and the sea.  Already, more than half a century previously, Siniddinam had enlarged the canal on which Larsa was situated, while Bimsin had provided an outlet for the “River of the Gods” into the Persian Gulf:* by the junction of the two a navigable channel was formed between the Euphrates and the marshes, and an outlet was thus made for the surplus waters of the inundation.  Khammurabi informs us how Anu and Bel, having confided to him the government of Sumer and Accad, and having placed in his hands the reins of power, he dug the Nar-Khammurabi, the source of wealth to the people, which brings abundance of water to the country of Sumir and Accad.  “I turned both its banks into cultivated ground, I heaped up mounds of grain and I furnished perpetual water for the people of Sumir and Accad.  The country of Sumer and Accad, I gathered together its nations who were scattered, I gave them pasture and drink, I ruled over them in riches and abundance, I caused them to inhabit a peaceful dwelling-place.  Then it was that Khammurabi, the powerful king, the favourite of the great gods, I myself, according to the prodigious strength with which Merodach had endued me, I constructed a high fortress, upon mounds of earth; its summit rises to the height of the mountains, at the head of the Nar-Khammurabi, the source of wealth to the people.  This fortress I called Dur-Sinmuballit-abim-ualidiya, the Fortress of Sinmuballit, the father who begat me, so that the name of Sinmuballit, the father who begat me, may endure in the habitations of the world.”