NIPPUR
![](nippur.jpg)
Nippur
![](640px-Ruins_from_a_temple_in_Naffur.jpg)
Ruins
of a temple platform in Nippur - the brick structure on top was
constructed by American archaeologists around 1900
Nippur |
Location |
Nuffar,
Afak District, Al-Qadisiyyah Governorate, Iraq |
Region |
Mesopotamia |
Coordinates |
32°07'35.2
N 45°14'0.17 E |
Type |
Settlement |
|
Nippur
(Sumerian: Nibru, often logographically recorded as EN.LÍLKI,
"Enlil City;" Akkadian: Nibbur) was an ancient Sumerian
city. It was the special seat of the worship of the Sumerian god
Enlil, the "Lord Wind", ruler of the cosmos, subject to
An alone. Nippur was located in modern Nuffar in Afak, Al-Qadisiyyah
Governorate, Iraq.
History
:
Nippur never enjoyed political hegemony in its own right, but its
control was crucial, as it was considered capable of conferring
the overall "kingship" on monarchs from other city-states.
It was distinctively a sacred city, important from the possession
of the famous shrine of Enlil. [citation needed] Ninurta had his
main cult center, the E-shumesha temple, in the city-state.
According
to the Tummal Chronicle, Enmebaragesi, an early ruler of Kish, was
the first to build up this temple.His influence over Nippur has
also been detected archaeologically. The Chronicle lists successive
early Sumerian rulers who kept up intermittent ceremonies at the
temple: Aga of Kish, son of Enmebaragesi; Mesannepada of Ur; his
son Meskiang-nunna; Gilgamesh of Uruk; his son Ur-Nungal; Nanni
of Ur and his son Meskiang-nanna. It also indicates that the practice
was revived in Neo-Sumerian times by Ur-Nammu of Ur, and continued
until Ibbi-Sin appointed Enmegalana high priest in Uruk (c. 1950
BCE).
Inscriptions
of Lugal-Zage-Si and Lugal-kigub-nidudu, kings of Uruk and Ur respectively,
and of other early 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. On their votive offerings, some of these rulers designate
themselves as ensis, or governors.
Pre-Sargonic
era :
![](522px-Indus_Civilisation_Carnelian_bead_with_white_design,_ca._2900%962350_BC_Found_in_Nippur,_Mesopotamian_(detail).jpg)
Indus
Civilisation carnelian bead with white design, ca. 2900 –
2350 BCE. Found in Nippur. An example of early Indus-Mesopotamia
relations
Originally a village of reed huts in the marshes, Nippur was especially
prone to devastation by flooding or fire. For some reason, settlement
persisted at the same spot, and gradually the site rose above the
marshes – partly from the accumulation of debris, and partly
through the efforts of the inhabitants. As the inhabitants began
to develop in civilization, they substituted, at least in the case
of their shrine, mud-brick buildings instead of reed huts. The earliest
age of civilization, the "clay age", is marked by crude,
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 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 the 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 early Aegean pottery more closely than any later
pottery found in Sumer.
This
people gave way in time to another, markedly inferior in the manufacture
of pottery, but apparently superior 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. At some point, Sumerian inscriptions began to be written
on clay, in an almost linear script. The shrine at this time stood
on a raised platform, and apparently contained a ziggurat.
Akkadian,
Ur III, and Old Babylonian periods :
![](615px-Incised_plaque,_Nippur.jpg)
Incised
devotional plaque, Nippur
![](640px-Nippur_vase_of_Lugalzagesi.jpg)
The
vase of Lugalzagesi, found in Nippur
Late in the 3rd millennium BCE, Nippur was conquered and occupied
by the Semitic rulers of Akkad, or Agade, and numerous votive objects
of Sargon, Rimush, and Naram-Sin testify to the veneration in which
they also held this sanctuary. Naram-Sin rebuilt both the Ekur temple
and the city walls, and in the accumulation of debris now marking
the ancient site, his remains are found about halfway from the top
to the bottom. One of the few instances of Nippur being recorded
as having its own ruler comes from a tablet depicting a revolt of
several Mesopotamian cities against Naram-Sin, including Nippur
under Amar-enlila. The tablet goes on to relate that Naram-Sin defeated
these rebel cities in nine battles, and brought them back under
his control. The Weidner tablet (ABC 19) suggests that the Akkadian
Empire fell as divine retribution, because of Sargon's initiating
the transfer of "holy city" status from Nippur to Babylon.
![](640px-Hammurabi%27s_Babylonia_1.svg.jpg)
Babylonia
in the time of Hammurabi
This Akkadian occupation was succeeded by occupation during the
third dynasty of Ur, and the constructions of Ur-Nammu, the great
builder of temples, are superimposed immediately upon those of Naram-Sin.
Ur-Nammu gave 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, towards the western corner, he built a ziggurat of three stages
of dry brick, faced with kiln-fired bricks laid in bitumen. On the
summit stood, 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 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
oriented with the corners toward the cardinal points of the compass.
Ur-Nammu
also rebuilt the walls of the city 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 east of
the Shatt-en-Nil canal. This quarter 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, and from
the country to the north and east, by canals on all sides, with
broad quays along the walls. A smaller canal divided this quarter
of the city itself into two parts. In the south-eastern part, 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 inner court, each covering approximately 8 acres
(32,000 m2), surrounded by double walls, with a 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. At the same time it
seems 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 BCE, the religious,
as well as the political center 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.
Kassite
through Sassanid periods :
Under the succeeding Kassite dynasty, shortly after the middle of
the 2nd millennium, Ekur was restored once more to its former splendor,
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 BCE follows another long period of comparative neglect,
but with the conquest of Babylonia by the Assyrian king Sargon II,
at the close of the 8th century BCE, we meet again with building
inscriptions, and under Ashurbanipal, about the middle of the 7th
century BCE, we find Ekur restored with a splendour greater than
ever before, the ziggurat of that period being 58 by 39 m. After
the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire Ekur appears to have gradually
fallen into decay, until finally, in the Seleucid period, the ancient
temple was turned into a fortress (Greek: Nippoúr). 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
250 AD; 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 small village of mud huts
huddled about the ancient ziggurat continuing to be inhabited.
Islamic
period and eventual abandonment :
Nippur remained inhabited in Islamic times, and is mentioned by
early Muslim geographers under the name of Niffar. It lay on the
Nahr an-Nars canal, believed to have been built by Narses. By the
late 800s, though, geographers no longer mentioned it, which indicates
that the city had gone into decline by that time. This was part
of a broader decline in settlements throughout Iraq, especially
in the south, as decaying infrastructure and political violence
resulted in large areas being completely abandoned. However, Nippur
remained the seat of an Assyrian Church of the East Christian bishopric
until the late 900s, when the bishopric was transferred to the city
of Nil, further northwest. Nippur itself may have remained occupied
even later, since ceramics found among the ruins display underglaze
sgraffiato drawings, which were not used much prior to the end of
the 10th century. By the time of Yaqut al-Hamawi in the early 1200s,
Nippur had been definitively abandoned, although Yaqut still recognized
its ruins as the site of a famous place.
Archaeology
:
![](517px-Nippur_fr.png)
Map
of the site in French
![](577px-Nippur,_Temple_of_Bel_excavation.jpg)
Nippur,
Temple of Bel excavation, 1896
![](John_Henry_Haynes._The_Nippur_temple_excavation._1893.jpg)
Nippur
excavations, 1893
![](566px-Cuneiform_tablet_in_the_name_of_Shar-Kali-Sharri.jpg)
Cuneiform
tablet from Nippur, in the name of Shar-Kali-Sharri, 2300 - 2100
BCE
![](450px-Babylonian_cuneiform_tablet_with_a_map_from_Nippur_1550-1450_BCE.jpg)
Babylonian
cuneiform tablet with a map from Nippur, Kassite period, 1550 -
1450 BCE
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.
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.
Nippur
was excavated for 19 seasons between 1948 and 1990 by a team from
the Oriental Institute of Chicago, joined at times by the University
of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and the American
Schools of Oriental Research.
The
Oriental Institute resumed work at Nippur in April 2019 under Abbas
Alizadeh.
As
at Tello, 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 BCE 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.[citation needed]
Almost
directly opposite the temple, a large palace was excavated, apparently
of the Seleucid period, and in this neighborhood 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 BCE. The former
gives 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 appendage 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 was 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.[citation needed]
The
Persian conquest of Mesopotamia in 539 BCE resulted in improved
irrigation, and thus immigration increased, drawing Lydians, Phrygians,
Carians, Cilicians, Egyptians, Jews (many of whom were deported
to Babylonia), Persians, Medes, Sacae, etc. to the area. In Nippur,
the house of Murashu's surviving documents are reflective of this
diverse populace as one-third of contracts depict non-Babylonian
names, and they evidently intermingled peaceably. Enduring for at
least three successive generations, the house of Murashu capitalized
on the enterprise of renting substantial plots of farmland having
been awarded to occupying Persian governors, nobility, soldiery,
probably at discounted rates, whose owners were most likely satisfied
with a moderate return. The business would then subdivide these
into smaller plots for cultivation by indigenous farmers and recent
foreign settlers for a lucrative fee. The house of Murashu leased
land, subdivided it, then subleased or rented out the smaller parcels,
thereby simply acting as an intermediary. It thereby profited both
from the collected rents and percentage of amassed credit reflective
of that year's future crop harvests after supplying needed farming
implements, means of irrigation, and paying taxes. In 423/422 BCE,
the house of Murashu took in "about 20,000 kg or 20,000 shekels
of silver". "The activities of the house of Murashu had
a ruinous effect upon the economy of the country and thus led to
the bankruptcy of the landowners. Although the house of Murashu
loaned money to the landowners initially, after a few decades it
began more and more to take the landowners' place, and the land
began to concentrate in its hands."
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 10th 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.
Drehem
:
Drehem or ancient Puzrish-Dagan, a suburb of Nippur, is the best-known
city of the so-called redistribution centers of the Neo Sumerian
period of Mesopotamian history. It is located some 10 kilometers
south of Nippur. Witnessed by thousands of cuneiform tablets, livestock
(cattle, sheep, and goats) of the state was centralized at Drehem
and redistributed to the temples, its officials and the royal palaces
of Sumer. The temples of nearby Nippur, the religious capital of
the Neo Sumerian culture, were the main destinations of the livestock.
The city was founded by Shulgi, king of Ur. Some of its cuneiform
archives are at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto.
Source
:
https://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Nippur