The main change brought about by this new epoch of Babylonian history was, as we have seen, the superior position henceforth accorded in the pantheon to Marduk as the patron deity of Babylon; but this change entailed so many others, that it almost merits being termed a revolution.

In order to ensure Marduk's place, the relations of the other deities to him had to be regulated, the legends and traditions of the past reshaped, so as to be brought into consistent accord with the new order of things, and the cult likewise to be, at least in part, remodelled, so as to emphasize the supremacy of Marduk.
This work, which was an inevitable one, was primarily of an intellectual order.

We are justified, then, in looking for traces of this activity in the remains that have been recovered of ancient Babylonian literature.
We know from direct evidence that the commercial life of Babylonia had already, in the period preceding Hammurabi, led to regulated legal forms and practices for the purpose of carrying out obligations and of settling commercial and legal difficulties.

The proof has been furnished by Dr.Meissner[139] that syllabaries prepared for the better understanding of the formulas and words employed in preparing the legal and commercial tablets, date, in part, from the period which we may roughly designate as that of Hammurabi,--covering, say, the three centuries 2300 to 2000 B.C.With this evidence for the existence of pedagogues devoted to the training of novices in the art of reading and writing, in order to fit them for their future tasks as official scribes, we are safe in assuming that these same schoolmen were no less active in other fields of literature.

If, in addition to this, we find that much of the religious literature, in the shape that we have it, reflects the religious conditions such as they must have shaped themselves in consequence of the promotion of Marduk to the head of the pantheon, the conclusion is forced upon us that such literary productions date from this same epoch of Hammurabi.