The Alchemy Key.pdf - Veritas File System

instability in the north of Mesopotamia allowed the black-skinned
Dravidian speaking Elamites to enter the south and capture Ur in
2004BCE. The Elamites continued to exert influence over Babylonia for
the next 200 years.
Bitter internecine struggles ensued in Asia Minor until the
Babylonian King Hammurabi emerged as a successful military leader in
1848BCE. He zealously protected his borders from the Persian Gulf to
the Western Mediterranean Sea. Hammurabi was also highly regarded as
a cultural leader. His major achievement was to codify the laws of
Babylonian life. The legal innovations Hammurabi introduced were quite
similar to those that had just occurred in Egypt under Amenemhe I and
his son Sesôstris I. It was also about this time that Sumer became
Babylonia.
Innovative though it was, Hammurabi’s code was still based on
the crude law of retaliation and blood-feud: life for life, eye for eye, tooth
for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound,
bruise for bruise. 164 In this respect it was inferior to King Shulgi’s Ur-
Nammu Code. 165 King Shulgi, who reigned in Sumer from 2095-
2047BCE, introduced a very advanced form of law for Ur-Nammu. It
provided only for compensation to a wronged party. For example, If a
man knocks out the eye of another man, he shall weigh out one-half a
mina of silver.
Indo-Hittite Aryans called Hittites occupied the central plateau of
Anatolia in this same period. The language structure of Anatolia became
extraordinarily complex. Old Anatolian Indo-Hittite groups were
scattered into small pockets such as the Lydians to the West, the Palaic in
the North, and the Carians, Luvians of the South. The powerful Hittites
and Hurrians together with the Western Semitic peoples controlled the
prosperous east of Anatolia, which was developing mineral resources for
Bronze Age trade throughout the Middle East. We shall see in the next
two chapters that their wealth brought an avalanche of trouble to the
region. Enter the Egyptians.
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