1792 BC

Hammurabi

Hammurabi’s Reign and Late Conquest of Mari

Mari's conqueror inadvertently preserved its voice: burning and burying the palace left more than 20,000 clay tablets for archaeologists.

A reign filed as a date

The entry sits under 1800 BCE but describes a 42-year reign, 1792–1750, and a conquest late within it. Nothing happened in 1792 that resembles the Mari campaign the title advertises.

Those years are the Middle Chronology, not an independently fixed absolute range; alternative chronologies move the whole reign substantially later.

Hammurabi succeeded his father Sin-muballit as king of Babylon and inherited a comparatively small kingdom centred on the city — "king of Babylonia" is modern shorthand for what he built later.

Larsa, then Mari, in stages

He captured Larsa after a long siege in 1763 BCE, conventionally his 31st regnal year, bringing southern Mesopotamian territory under Babylonian control from his rival Rim-Sin I.

His 33rd-year formula reports that he defeated the armies of Mari and Malgium, after which Mari, its settlements and towns of Subartu submitted. The same formula both claims a battle and describes submission, so it establishes neither a peaceful surrender nor a sack.

Destruction was a separate stage: in the following regnal year he destroyed Mari's palace and fortifications, dated by the French archaeological mission to 1759 BCE.

The 'code' that was not one

Late in the reign, around 1750 BCE, Hammurabi had a large collection of legal judgments inscribed.

The Louvre cautions that this was not a comprehensive statutory code in the modern sense — closer to a sweeping display of case law — and it was not the first Mesopotamian legal collection either.

Nor was Hammurabi straightforwardly worshipped as a living god: personal names such as "Hammurabi-is-my-god" suggest quasi-divine treatment in some contexts, which is not the same as an uncontested general cult.

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 7 sources not yet audited Date disputed

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →

Date disputed. Sources disagree; the research places it at ~-1792.

What the sources leave uncertain

1792–1750 BCE is the Middle Chronology, not an independently fixed absolute range. Alternative chronologies move the entire reign substantially later.
The listed event combines a 42-year reign with several campaigns rather than describing one occurrence in 1792 BCE.
Mari’s year-33 formula mentions both a battle against its army and peaceful submission by its settlements. It therefore does not establish either a wholly peaceful surrender or a full sack in that same year.
Scholarly evidence for Hammurabi’s personal divinity is nuanced: personal names such as “Hammurabi-is-my-god” suggest quasi-divine treatment in some contexts, but this is not equivalent to an uncontested, general cult of a living god.