Deity · Mesopotamian · c. 2500 BCE
Shamash
Also called Utu
The sun sees everything, so the sun is the god of judges. Hammurabi's law code is carved beneath an image of the king receiving it from him.
Well sourced
Shamash is the clearest statement in the ancient record of why a sun god ends up presiding over law. What sees everything can judge fairly, so the god who crosses the sky daily is the one who witnesses oaths and sees injustice done in private. The stele of Hammurabi puts this beyond inference by carving it: the king stands receiving the law from Shamash enthroned, and the text below is a law code. The same association runs on into figures the corpus carries elsewhere — the all-seeing eye, the angel who records — and it is worth noting that it is an argument rather than a decoration, made from a fact about the sun.
Identity
Where does the name come from?
Where it was actually worshipped
Larsa and Sippar, at temples both called Ebabbar, 'the white house' — the sun's, at either end of the country.
A figure with temples and a figure that only ever existed on a page are different kinds of thing, and the difference is easy to lose once both are entries in a list.
At a glance
Vitals
Vitals
Also known as
- First attested
- The Code of Hammurabi · c. 1750 BCE
- Rank
- Sun and Judge
- Pantheon
- Mesopotamian
- Order
- Mesopotamian pantheon
- Base of operations
- Larsa and Sippar, at temples both called Ebabbar, 'the white house' — the sun's, at either end of the country.
- Era
- c. 2500 BCE
- Traditions
- Mesopotamian
- Placed in
- The Assembly of the Gods
Traits
- Domain
- The sun, justice, oaths, divination
- Traditional form
- Rising between mountains with a saw-toothed blade
1 site
Where was it worshipped?
Attested cult sites, located against the Pleiades gazetteer of the ancient world where it reaches and against Wikidata everywhere else. An absence here is not evidence that no cult existed: a good number of figures never had one, and the entry above says so where that is the case.
now Tell Sinkara
An Ebabbar of the sun god, matching the one at Sippar in the north.
31.283, 45.852 · Pleiades 912897
4 attributed
What is it said to do?
Where these powers cluster
The 4 offices attributed to Shamash, grouped by kind. Segment width is the share of powers falling in each category.
A bar dominated by one colour means a specialist; an even spread means a figure the sources credit with almost anything.
- divination2
- martial1
- knowledge1
1 mark
Which marks is it attached to?
A mark a figure carries and a mark used against a figure are opposite claims, so each link says which it is.
2 texts
Which texts say so?
When these texts were written
Each dot is one of the 2 texts that names Shamash, placed at that text's approximate date.
A wide spread means the figure was carried across many centuries and traditions; a tight cluster means a single period produced the whole record.
2 texts spanning roughly 550 years
The stele shows Hammurabi receiving the law from him enthroned. What sees everything is what can judge fairly, so the sun is the god of judges.
The god who backs the expedition against Humbaba, sends the thirteen winds to pin the guardian down, and afterwards has to answer Enlil for it. A sun god who takes a side in a quarrel and is called to account for the judgment is a long way from the impartial witness of the law code, and the corpus now carries both.
Connections
What is it connected to?
Placement
Where does it sit in the hierarchies?
Answered from the sources
Common questions
Which texts mention Shamash?
Is Shamash the same as Apollo?
What rank is Shamash?
How else is Shamash spelled?
What is Shamash said to do?
How old is Shamash?
Nearest in the corpus
If Shamash is what you came for, these are next
Chosen by proximity rather than by popularity: the same pantheon first, then the same rank, then the same kind of figure.
Ereshkigal
Queen of the Great Below · Mesopotamian
Sovereign of the underworld who strips Ishtar of a garment at each of the seven gates and hangs her on a hook.
Ishtar
Queen of Heaven · Mesopotamian
Goddess of love, war and the planet Venus, whose descent into the underworld is among the oldest recorded narratives.
Marduk
King of the Gods · Mesopotamian
Splits Tiamat and builds the world from her body, and is voted fifty names and supreme authority for doing it.
Nergal
God of the Underworld · Mesopotamian
God of plague, war and the underworld, consort of Ereshkigal — and one of the few Mesopotamian gods the Bible names directly.
Anzu
Storm Bird · Mesopotamian
The lion-headed eagle who steals the Tablet of Destinies and is shot down for it — a rebellion against divine order predating any biblical account by a millennium.
Enki
Lord of the Sweet Waters · Mesopotamian
God of the abzu and of cunning, who repeatedly saves humanity by finding the loophole in another god's decree.
The books behind Shamash
Every claim on this profile is attributed to one of these. They are public domain, listed oldest first, and each links to a full text where one is freely available.
The Code of Hammurabi
Hammurabi of Babylon; tr. L. W. King · c. 1750 BCE · Akkadian
Read The Code of Hammurabi in full ↗Cover: CC BY 3.0 · Mbzt · Wikimedia file page
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Standard Babylonian version, attributed to Sin-leqi-unninni · c. 1200 BCE, from older Sumerian material · Akkadian
Read The Epic of Gilgamesh in full ↗
Corpus last revised 29 August 2026. A reference site’s credibility rests on being maintained, so this is the date the sourced records last changed — not the date the page was rebuilt.