Before the door is a columnar porch with octagonal columns, in one bay of which is a broad stele a monolithic carved stone with a peaked top like a gable.
There were precursors to Hammurabi's laws, explains Dr Frances Reynolds, Assyriology expert at Oxford University, but the stele and 130, 000 clay tablet documents from the period establish the king as a "fantastic administrator".
Rectangular niches of varying sizes carved into the surface contain ritual objects, Buddhas, deities, human and animal figures, and conic architectural shapes that may represent other temples (possibly the stele is a stone version of the painted maps depicting the Jain sites).