The link between the sun and justice found its most famous expression in stone. At the top of the great stele of Hammurabi, the Babylonian law-collection of the eighteenth century BCE now in the Louvre, the king stands before a seated god, generally identified as Shamash, who hands him the rod and ring, the emblems of just authority, so that Hammurabi presents his laws as sanctioned by the god of justice himself. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Utu-Shamash is the hero's protector, giving him the winds that let him overcome the monster Humbaba and, in the Sumerian poems, opening a hole in the earth so that the shade of Enkidu may return and speak. As the seeing, judging light he is set in this atlas as the Mesopotamian solar deity.
Utu-Shamash's reach extended well beyond Sumer and Babylon. Aramaic-speaking communities of the Roman Near East, at Palmyra and at Hatra, continued to honour a sun god named Shamash into the early centuries CE, carrying the old Mesopotamian solar cult forward long after cuneiform writing itself had died out, and the god's name survives embedded in Semitic personal names across the ancient Near East. Comparative study of Mesopotamian and Egyptian solar religion generally treats Utu-Shamash and Ra as independent traditions rather than versions of a single sun-god idea, since the two civilizations developed their solar theologies with little direct contact in the earliest periods; the resemblance between an all-seeing judge-sun in each is usually read as parallel development rather than borrowing.