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119 ge \ “) a il } J fi Z'\ city-states were first used and then betrayed by the emerging Babylon. After at first attaining the restoration of southern Mesopotamia by the Mari royals, Babylon’s kings—feigning peace and unprovoked—treated Mari as an enemy. In 1760 B.C.E. the Babylonian king Hammurabi attacked, sacked, and destroyed Mari, its temples and its palaces. It was done, Hammurabi boasted in his annals, “through the mighty power of Marduk.” After the fall of Mari, chieftains from the “Sealands’”— Sumer’s marshy areas bordering the Lower Sea (Persian Gulf)—conducted raids northward, and took from time to time control of the sacred city of Nippur. But those were temporary gains, and Hammurabi was certain that his van- quishing of Mari completed Babylon’s political and religious domination of the old Sumer & Akkad. The dynasty to which he belonged, named by scholars the First Dynasty of Baby- lon, began a century before him and continued through his descendants for another two centuries. In those turbulent times, it was quite an achievement. Historians and theologians agreee that in 1760 B.c.E. Hammurabi, calling himself “King of the Four Quarters,” “put Babylon on the world map” and launched Marduk’s distinct Star Religion. When Babylon’s political and military supremacy was thus established, it was time to assert and aggrandize its religious domination. In a city whose splendor was extolled in the Bi- In the Name of God FIGURE 51