Eshnunna

An ancient city under the mound of Tell Asmar, northeast of Baghdad, Iraq. It was a city-state in the Early Dynastic period (early 3rd millennium BC) and there are shrines, sculpture, palaces, and private houses. It became politically important in the 19th and 18th centuries BC, when it was involved in a struggle for power with Assur, Mari, Elam, and Babylon. It is rarely mentioned in history after its conquest by Hammurabi of Babylon, c 1761 BC.

The ancient name of a city under the mound of Tell Asmar, excavated by an American team led by Henri Frankfort in the 1930s. Situated in the Diyala area, to the northeast of Sumer proper, Eshnunna was nonetheless to all intents and purposes a Sumerian city. Although it was occupied from the Early Dynastic Period onwards, politically it was most important in the period after the fall of the Third Dynasty of Ur, in the first two centuries of the 2nd millennium BC, when it was the centre of an independent kingdom of some size and importance. Subsequently it was conquered by Hammurabi and absorbed into the growing power of Babylon, after which it rarely appears in the texts and presumably declined in importance.