Samsu-iluna’s suppression of the Great Rebellion did not cause long-term harm to Babylonia. The succession of kings remained stable, defeated cities were not totally destroyed despite the rhetoric of victory. Southern cities adopted organic writing materials, so their activities are unknown to us. An archive that began in the reign of Hammurabi’s father continued to the end of this dynasty. Samsu-iluna’s huge project to divert floodwater from the Euphrates to protect Babylon was extended after the rebellion. Edicts for debt remission and to regulate trade continued to be issued. The use of Kassite and Elamite militias to garrison forts, Kish as a military base for Babylon, and a campaign to the north of Assyria, indicate organization and strength when the Assyrian trading colonies in Anatolia came to an end. Subsequent kings in Babylon won their own fame: Abi-eshuh for his literary works, Ammi-ditana for military achievements, Ammi-saduqa for being acknowledged as a god in Syria and Anatolia, for beating back rebels in the Sealand, for creating wonderful statues, and for recording astronomical observations. The last king of the dynasty enjoyed a long reign but came under pressure from the Hittites and Sealanders.

This chapter revisits the case of the Hurro-Hittite poem formerly referred to (among other titles) as the Song of Kumarbi, now known as the Song of Emergence, which narrates the early history of divine kingship and the birth of the Storm God. This Hittite adaptation of an earlier, now lost but probably Hurrian composition has been recognised as the clearest evidence for the Greek reception of Near Eastern mythology, as proven by numerous aspects of both general structure and narrative detail, that are shared with Hesiod’s Theogony, especially the Succession Myth, which traces the sequence from the earliest divine kings to Zeus’s birth and rise to power. Recent interest in the rich corpus of Hittite ritual texts has yielded important information on the likely ritual contexts of the wider mythological cycle of the Song of Emergence, and possibly indeed of the Song itself: the Song's Hittite cuneiform tablet is discussed, as well as its family and scholarly background, focusing on performance of the Song in festivals at Mount Hazzi (Jebel al-Aqra), the Greek Kasios, on the Mediterranean coast. Such performance offers the most attractive historical context for the transfer of the Storm God narrative to Greece, given the likely presence of Greek traders in the vicinity.

Chapter 2 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho investigates the island of Lesbos, home of Sappho, during the archaic period (sixth and fifth centuries BC), and how its geography – both of the island itself, and of its place within the wider Greek and Mediterranean worlds – is reflected in her poetry and in the poetry of her contemporary, the poet Alcaeus.

This final chapter of Part II reflects on the relationship between kinship and law, both in the Narrative of Transjordanian Tribes and in the biblical corpus more broadly.