The most famous law code in the world was not found in Babylon. It was dug up six hundred kilometres away, in the wrong country-because an ancient king carried it home as loot.The Code of Hammurabi-the black stone pillar millions have photographed in the Louvre-was excavated in 1901 by a French expedition at Susa, in the lowlands of southwestern Iran, a city that was never Babylonian at all. It was carried there around 1158 BC by a king named Shutruk-Nahhunte, who marched into Babylonia, stripped its cities of their monuments and hauled six centuries of Mesopotamian royal art back to his capital. His masons ground a band of Hammurabi's laws smooth to make room for an inscription of his own. It was never carved. That blank panel is the perfect emblem of the power that made it: strong enough to empty Babylon of its history, and missing from ours.That power was Elam. It fought, traded with, married into, and periodically conquered the cities of Mesopotamia for three thousand years-longer than Sumer, Akkad, Babylon, or Assyria lasted. Its armies sacked Ur and carried off the last Sumerian king, a catastrophe Sumerian literature mourned for centuries. Its regents arbitrated between Mesopotamian kings the way a superpower manages its clients. Its kings broke the dynasty of Babylon and took its god. And when Assyria finally crushed it-boasting that no human voice would ever be heard in the land again-the boast held for barely a generation. A dynasty from Elam's highlands built the Persian Empire, ruled it from the Elamite city of Susa, and kept the imperial books, tens of thousands of tablets deep, in the Elamite language.Drawing on royal inscriptions, diplomatic archives, Assyrian annals, and the administrative tablets of Persepolis-and honest at every step about what a fragmentary record can and cannot support-this is an accessible history of the ancient Near East's forgotten superpower.What you'll learn:Why the Code of Hammurabi-and so much of the celebrated Mesopotamian art in Western museums-was excavated from the capital of Mesopotamia's oldest enemyHow the sack of Ur around 2004 BC ended the last Sumerian empire, and why Sumerian literature never forgave itThe strange federal kingship in which power was held by three rulers at once and passed to sisters' sonsWhat the best-preserved ziggurat on earth-abandoned almost as soon as it was built-reveals about Elamite religion and royal ambitionWhy one of Elam's scripts remains undeciphered after a century of effort, and what a language related to nothing else on earth does and does not let us readHow the Persian Empire inherited its capital, its scribes, and its chancery language from the kingdom it absorbedThis book is for you if:You love ancient Mesopotamian history-Sumer, Babylon, Assyria-and want the missing side of the storyYou have stood in front of the Hammurabi stele and want to know how it really got thereYou are drawn to lost civilizations, undeciphered scripts, and history reconstructed from fragmentsYou want to understand where the Persian Empire came fromThree thousand years of history stand behind a blank space on the world's most famous monument. This is the story of what belongs there.
