Nippur
Coordinates: 32°7′37″N 45°13′51″E / 32.12694°N 45.23083°E
Nippur (URUEN.LIL 𒂗𒇸; Sumerian: Nibru; Akkadian: Nibbur), from the Sumerian for 'lord wind' (Enlil), is modern Nuffar in Afak Al-Qādisiyyah Governorate, Iraq. Nippur was one of the most ancient of all the Sumerian cities. It was the special seat of the worship of the Sumerian god, Enlil, ruler of the cosmos subject to An alone.
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[edit] History
Nippur never enjoyed political hegemony but was distinctively a sacred city, important from the possession of the famous shrine of Enlil. Inscriptions of Lugal-Zage-Si and Lugal-kigub-nidudu, kings of Uruk and Ur respectively, and of other early pre-Semitic rulers, on door-sockets and stone vases, show the veneration in which the ancient shrine was then held and the importance attached to its possession, as giving a certain stamp of legitimacy. So on their votive offerings some of these rulers designate themselves as ensis, or governors.
[edit] Pre-Sargonic Period
Originally a village of reed huts in the marshes, similar to many in that region today, Nippur underwent the usual vicissitudes of such villages—floods and conflagrations. For some reason habitation persisted at the same spot, and gradually the site rose above the marshes, partly as a result of the mere accumulation of debris, consequent on continuous habitation, partly through the efforts of the inhabitants. As these began to develop in civilization, they substituted, at least so far as their shrine was concerned, buildings of mud-brick for reed huts. The earliest age of civilization, which we may designate as the clay age, is marked by rude, hand-made pottery and thumb-marked bricks, flat on one side, concave on the other, gradually developing through several fairly marked stages. The exact form of the sanctuary at that period cannot be determined, but it seems to have been in some way connected with the burning of the dead, and extensive remains of such cremation are found in all the earlier, pre-Sargonic strata. There is evidence of the succession on this site of different peoples, varying somewhat in their degrees of civilization. One stratum is marked by painted pottery of good make, similar to that found in a corresponding stratum in Susa, and resembling the early pottery of the Aegean region more closely than any later pottery found in Babylonia.
This people gave way in time to another, markedly inferior in the manufacture of pottery, but superior, apparently, as builders. In one of these earlier strata, of very great antiquity, there was discovered, in connection with the shrine, a conduit built of bricks, in the form of an arch. Somewhere, apparently, in the 4th millennium BC, we begin to find inscriptions written on clay, in an almost linear script, in the Sumerian tongue. The shrine at this time stood on a raised platform and apparently contained, as a characteristic feature, an artificial mountain or peak, a so-called ziggurat, the precise shape and size of which we are, however, unable to determine.
[edit] Akkadian, Ur III, and Old Babylonian periods
Late in the 3rd millennium BC the city was conquered and occupied by the Semitic rulers of Akkad, or Agade, and numerous votive objects of Rimush (earlier - Alu-usharsid or Urumush), Sargon and Naram-sin testify to the veneration in which they also held this sanctuary. The last monarch of this dynasty, Naram-Sin, rebuilt both the temple and the city walls, and in the accumulation of debris now marking the ancient site his remains are found about half way from the top to the bottom. To this Akkadian occupation succeeded an occupation by the first Semitic dynasty of Ur, and the constructions of Ur-Nammu, the great builder of Babylonian temples, are superimposed immediately upon the constructions of Naram-Sin.
Ur-Nammu gave to the temple its final characteristic form. Partly razing the constructions of his predecessors, he erected a terrace of bricks, some 12 m high, covering a space of about 32,000 m², near the northwestern edge of which, towards the western corner, he built a ziggurat, or stage-tower, of three stages of dry brick, faced with kiln-fired bricks laid in bitumen. On the summit of this artificial mountain stood, apparently, as at Ur and Eridu, a small chamber, the special shrine or abode of the god. Access to the stages of the ziggurat, from the court beneath, was had by an inclined plane on the south-east side. To the north-east of the ziggurat stood, apparently, the House of Bel, and in the courts below the ziggurat stood various other buildings, shrines, treasure chambers and the like. The whole structure was roughly oriented, with the corners towards the cardinal points of the compass.
Ur-Nammu also rebuilt the walls of the city in general on the line of Naram-Sin's walls. The restoration of the general features of the temple of this and the immediately succeeding periods has been greatly facilitated by the discovery of a sketch map on a fragment of a clay tablet. This sketch map represents a quarter of the city to the eastward of the Shatt-en-Nil canal, which was enclosed within its own walls, a city within a city, forming an irregular square, with sides roughly 820 m long, separated from the other quarters of the city, as from the surrounding country to the northand east, by canals on all sides, with broad quays along the walls. A smaller canal divided this quarter of the city itself into twoparts, in the south-eastern part of which, in the middle of its southeast side, stood the temple, while in the northwest part, along the Shatt-en-Nil, two great storehouses are indicated. The temple proper, according to this plan, consisted of an outer and innercourt, each covering approximately 8 acres (32,000 m²), surrounded by double walls, with ziggurat on the north-western edge of the latter. The temple continued to be built upon or rebuilt by kings of various succeeding dynasties, as shown by bricks and votive objects bearing the inscriptions of the kings of various dynasties of Ur and Isin. It seems to have suffered severely in some manner at or about the time the Elamites invaded, as shown by broken fragments of statuary, votive vases and the like, from that period, but at the same time to have won recognition from the Elamite conquerors, so that Rim-Sin I, the Elamite king of Larsa, styles himself "shepherd of the land of Nippur." With the establishment of the Babylonian empire, under Hammurabi, early in the 2nd millennium BC, the religious as well as the political centre of influence was transferred to Babylon, Marduk became lord of the pantheon, many of Enlil's attributes were transferred to him, and Ekur, Enlil's temple, was to some extent neglected.
[edit] Kassite and later history
Under the succeeding Kassite dynasty, however, shortly after the middle of the 2nd millennium, Ekur was restored once more to its former splendour, several monarchs of that dynasty built upon and adorned it, and thousands of inscriptions, dating from the time of those rulers, have been discovered in its archives. After the middle of the 12th century BC follows another long period of comparative neglect, but with the conquest of Babylonia by the Assyrian Sargon II, at the close of the 8th century BC, we meet again with building inscriptions, and under Assur-bani-pal, about the middle of the 7th century BC, we find Ekur restored with a splendour greater than ever before, the ziggurat of that period being 58 by 39 m. After that Ekur appears to have gradually fallen into decay, until finally, in the Seleucid period, the ancient temple was turned into a fortress. Huge walls were erected at the edges of the ancient terrace, the courts of the temple were filled with houses and streets, and the ziggurat itself was curiously built over in a cruciform shape, and converted into an acropolis for the fortress. This fortress was occupied and further built upon until the close of the Parthian period, about AD 250; but under the succeeding rule of the Sassanids it in its turn fell into decay, and the ancient sanctuary became, to a considerable extent, a mere place of sepulture, only a little village of mud huts huddled about the ancient ziggurat continuing to be inhabited. It appears that the city was the seat of a Christian bishopric as late as the 8th century AD.
[edit] Archaeology
Nippur was situated on both sides of the Shatt-en-Nil canal, one of the earliest courses of the Euphrates, between the present bed of that river and the Tigris, almost 160 km southeast of Baghdad. It is represented by the great complex of ruin mounds known to the Arabs as Nuffar, written by the earlier explorers Niffer, divided into two main parts by the dry bed of the old Shatt-en-Nil (Arakhat). The highest point of these ruins, a conical hill rising about 30 m above the level of the surrounding plain, northeast of the canal bed, is called by the Arabs Bint el-Amiror "prince's daughter."
Nippur was first excavated, briefly, by Sir Austen Henry Layard in 1851. [1] Full scale digging was begun by an expedition from the University of Pennsylvania. The work involved four seasons of excavation between 1889 and 1900 and was led by John Punnett Peters, John Henry Haynes, and Hermann Volrath Hilprecht. [2] [3] [4]
Nippur was excavated for 19 seasons between 1948 and 1990 by a team from the Oriental Institute of Chicago, joined at times by University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and the American Schools of Oriental Research. [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]
As at Telloh, so at Nippur, the clay archives of the temple were found not in the temple proper, but on an outlying mound. South-eastward of the temple quarter, without the walls above described, and separated from it by a large basin connected with the Shatt-en-Nil, lay a triangular mound, about 7.5 m in average height and 52.000 m² in extent. In this were found large numbers of inscribed clay tablets (it is estimated that upward of 40,000 tablets and fragments have been excavated in this mound alone), dating from the middle of the 3rd millennium BC onward into the Persian period, partly temple archives, partly school exercises and text-books, partly mathematical tables, with a considerable number of documents of a more distinctly literary character. For an account of one of the most interesting fragments of a literary or religious character, found at Nippur, see below.
Almost directly opposite the temple, a large palace was excavated, apparently of the Seleucid period, and in this neighbourhood and further southward on these mounds large numbers of inscribed tablets of various periods, including temple archives of the Kassite and commercial archives of the Persian period, were excavated. The latter, the "books and papers" of the house of Murashu, commercial agents of the government, throw light on the condition of the city and the administration of the country in the Persian period, the 5th century BC. The former give us a very good idea of the administration of an ancient temple. The whole city of Nippur appears to have been at that time merely an appanage of the temple. The temple itself was a great landowner, possessed of both farms and pasture land. Its tenants were obliged to render careful accounts of their administration of the property entrusted to their care, which were preserved in the archives of the temple. We have also from these archives lists of goods contained in the temple treasuries and salary lists of temple officials, on tablet forms specially prepared and marked off for periods of a year or less.
On the upper surface of these mounds was found a considerable Jewish town, dating from about the beginning of the Arabic period onward to the 20th century AD, in the houses of which were large numbers of incantation bowls. Jewish names, appearing in the Persian documents discovered at Nippur, show, however, that Jewish settlement at that city dates in fact from a much earlier period.
[edit] Drehem
Drehem was a suburb of Nippur. Some of its cuneiform archives are at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto. There are Neo-Sumerian economic texts in the Drehem archives, and enough cuneiform tablets to permit a tentative description of its administration.
[edit] See also
[edit] Notes
- ^ Discoveries among the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon; with Travels in Armenia, Kurdistan, and the Desert: Being the Result of a Second Expedition Undertaken for the Trustees of the British Museum, Austen H. Layard, Harper, 1856 (also in reprint by Kessinger Publishing, 2007, ISBN 0-548-16028-7)
- ^ Nippur, or Explorations and Adventures on the Euphrates; the narrative of the University of Pennsylvania expedition to Babylonia in the years 1888-1921 - Volume 1, John Punnett Peters, G. P. Putnam's sons, 1897
- ^ Nippur, or Explorations and Adventures on the Euphrates; the narrative of the University of Pennsylvania expedition to Babylonia in the years 1888-1921 - Volume 2, John Punnett Peters, G. P. Putnam's sons, 1897
- ^ Explorations in Bible Lands during the 19th Century, H.V. Hilprecht, 1903
- ^ Nippur I, Temple of Enlil, Scribal Quarter, and Soundings: Excavations of the Joint Expedition to Nippur of the University Museum of Philadelphia and the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, Donald E. McCown and Richard C. Haines, Oriental Institute Publication 78, 1967
- ^ Cuneiform Texts from Nippur: The Eighth and Ninth Seasons, Giorgio Buccellati and Robert D. Biggs, Oriental Institute Assyriological Studies 17, 1969
- ^ Excavations at Nippur: Eleventh Season, McGuire Gibson et al., Oriental Institute Communication 22, 1976, ISBN 0-226-62339-4
- ^ Excavations at Nippur: Twelfth Season, McGuire Gibson et al., Oriental Institute Communication 23, 1978, ISBN 0-918986-22-2
- ^ Nippur, Volume 2. The North Temple and Sounding E: Excavations of the Joint Expedition to Nippur of the American Schools of Oriental Research and the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, D. E. et al., Oriental Institute Publication 97, 1978, ISBN 0-918986-04-4
- ^ Nippur, Volume 3: Kassite Buildings in Area WC-1, R. L. Zettler, Oriental Institute Publication 111, 1993, ISBN 0-918986-91-5
- ^ Nippur, Volume 4: The Early Neo-Babylonian Governor's Archive from Nippur, S. W. Cole, Oriental Institute Publication 114, 1996, ISBN 1-885923-03-1
- ^ Nippur V: The Area WF Sounding: The Early Dynastic to Akkadian Transition, Augusta McMahon, Oriental Institute Publication 129, 2006
[edit] References
- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
- Marcel Sigrist, Drehem, CDL Press, 1993, ISBN 0962001368
- McGuire Gibson (Oriental Institute, U. of Chicago) 'Patterns of occupation at Nippur,' 1992
- V.E. Crawford, Nippur the Holy City, Archaeology, vol. 12, pp. 74–83, 1959
- D.P. Hanson and G.f. Dales, The Temple of Inanna Queen of Heaven at Nippur, Archaeology, vol. 15, pp. 75–84, 1962
- [1] Edward Chiera, Cuneiform Series, Volume I: Sumerian Lexical Texts from the Temple School of Nippur, Oriental Institute Publication 11, 1929
- [2] E. C. Stone, Nippur Neighborhoods, Oriental Institute, Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization, vol. 44, 1987, ISBN 0-918986-50-8
- A. L. Oppenheim, Siege Documents from Nippur, Iraq, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 69–89, 1955
- T. Fish, The Summerian City Nippur in the Period of the Third Dynasty of Ur, Iraq, vol. 5, pp. 157–179, 1938
- John P. Peters, The Nippur Library, Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 26, pp. 145–164, 1905
- McGuire Gibson, A Re-Evaluation of the Akkad Period in the Diyala Region on the Basis of Recent Excavations at Nippur and in the Hamrin, American Journal of Archaeology, vol. 86, no. 4, pp. 531–538, 1982
