Though he built many temples and canals his main achievement was building the core of the Ur III Empire via military conquest, and Ur-Nammu is chiefly remembered today for his legal code, the Code of Ur-Nammu, the oldest known surviving example in the world.

[7] In the internegum after the fall of the Akkadian Empire a number of cities became independent and an area in the northeast came under the control of Elam.

Ur-Nammu in his Sumerian language inscriptions reports defeating a coalition of Kutik-Insusinak, Elamite ruler, and some other cities including Tutub and Eshnunna.

There is equal support for the idea that Puzur-Inshushinak with contemporary with Akkad ruler Naram-Sin a century earlier.

The other known daughter was consecrated as the en-priestess of Nanna in Ur, taking the clerical name En-nir-gal-an-na (En-nirgal-ana).

[21] While some translations of Sumerian texts had included the divine determinative before Ur-Nammu's name[4] more recent evidence indicates this was a mistaken addition.

[21] Despite this, the belief that the king was deified after death has been expressed just as recently, demonstrating a lack of certainty on this issue (though these were written during the same year as the new interpretations of the evidence and thus could not refer to them).

[27][28] The main year names are: A portion of the stela fragments were found during excavations at Ur in the 1920s, primarily in 1925, by Leonard Woolley under the auspices of the Joint Expedition of The University Museum and The British Museum in the temple precinct of Nanna.

But our main discovery was made in the courtyard of E-dublal-mah and in the gate-chamber leading to it, Here there were scattered over the pavement quantities of limestone fragments, large and small, which proved to be parts of one, or possibly two, huge stelae measuring five feet across and perhaps fifteen feet high, covered on both sides with finely executed reliefs.

[32] Some fragments had been moved and used for other purposes, including door sockets, and found on the Kassite period (c. 1595-1155 BC) levels, over half a millennium later.

[33] As a few fragments were found in the level from fall of the Ur III Empire the excavator indicated that the stela had been shattered at the end of the reign of the final Ur III ruler Ibbi-Sin (c. 2028–2004 BC) and the pieces later used as convenient construction material by the Kassites.