Elam: Mesopotamia's Permanent Rival and the Empire Nobody Names

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 wa...