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Ammoura is named after a man who has been dead for about three thousand seven hundred and seventy years.
Hammurabi was the sixth king of Babylon and reigned from around 1792 to 1750 BC. He was an Amorite, and in his own language his name was ʻAmmurāpi. It is built out of two ordinary words.
the kinsman is a healer
Why him
Not for the conquests, though there were plenty — Larsa, Eshnunna, Mari, nearly all of Mesopotamia under one rule by the end. Those are the part of him the centuries quietly dropped.
What they kept is a block of basalt taller than a man, carved with two hundred and eighty-two laws, and set up in public. That last part is the whole of it. Before, the rules lived with the people who enforced them, and you found out what they were by breaking one. Cutting them into stone in the open changed who was allowed to know.
That is the idea this company is named after. The tools for building a business have mostly belonged to people who could already afford them. We would rather put them where you can reach them.
What the marks say
Sixteen of the signs moving behind this page. The rest are the same ones shuffled — a wall of writing, not a sentence.
What happened to the stone
It was looted. The Elamites carried it off to Susa, in what is now Iran, and there it stayed, face-down in the dirt, for something like twenty-six centuries. It was dug up in 1901. It stands in the Louvre today, and the laws on it are still legible.
Two and a quarter metres of basalt. Two hundred and eighty-two laws, and a relief at the head of it showing the king receiving them from Shamash — 𒌓, the sun.
- Reigned
- c. 1792 – 1750 BC
- Sixth king of
- Babylon
- Dynasty
- First Babylonian, Amorite
- Laws
- 282
- Buried for
- ≈ 2,600 years
- The stone now
- Louvre, Paris
The name kept the middle of his and let the rest go. ʻAmmurapi. Ammoura.