The city of Nippur (Sumerian Nibru, Akkadian Nibbur) (now it is in Afak town, Al Qadisyah Governorate) was one of the most ancient (some historians date it back to 5262 B. Mesopotamia (from the Greek meaning "land between the rivers" is an area geographically located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers largely corresponding The Euphrates ( ( Arabic: ar نهر الفرات; Turkish: tr Fırat Syriac: syr ܦܪܬ; Hebrew: he פרת The Tigris is the eastern member of the two great Rivers that define Mesopotamia, along with the Euphrates, which flows from the mountains of southeastern Sumer ( Sumerian: sux-Latn [[Ki (earth ki]]-[[EN (cuneiform en]]-'''ĝir15''', Akkadian: Šumeru; possibly Biblical Shinar Eridu (URUNUNKI; Sumerian:eridug Akkadian: ?) from the Sumerian for 'mighty place' is modern Tell Abu Shahrain, Iraq Uruk ( URU UNUG, Sumerian: unug Akkadian: uruk) from the Akkadian rendering of the Sumerian Toponym 'unug' is modern Ur ( Sumerian:urim; Akkadian: ?) is modern Tell el-Mukayyar, Iraq, and was a city in ancient Sumer. Lagash ( is modern Tell al-Hiba, Iraq. Located northwest of the junction of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers and east of Uruk Ngirsu (cuneiform? Sumerian:Ĝirsu Akkadian: ?) is modern Tell Telloh, Dhi Qar Governorate, Iraq, and it was a city of Elam is the name of an ancient civilization located in what is now southwest Iran. Susa ( Biblical שושן ( Shushan) also Greek: Σοῦσα Transliterated as Sousa; Latin Susa) Mari (modern Tell Hariri, Syria) was an ancient Sumerian and Amorite city located 11 kilometers north-west of the modern town of Amorite ( Sumerian MARTU, Akkadian Tidnum or Amurrūm, Egyptian Amar, Hebrew ’emōrî Isin (modern Ishan al-Bahriyat was a city of lower Mesopotamia, which flourished during the 20th century BC. Larsa (also Larag or Larak, modern Tell as-Senkereh, Iraq, possibly the Biblical Ellasar) was an important city of Babylonia was an Amorite state in lower Mesopotamia (modern southern Iraq) with Babylon as its capital Babylon was a City-state of ancient Mesopotamia, the remains of which can be found in present-day Al Hillah, Babil Province, Iraq Chaldea (from Greek grc Χαλδαία Chaldaia; Akkadian akk māt Kaldu Hebrew כשדים Kaśdim, "the Chaldees" of the The Hittites were an ancient Anatolian people who spoke a language of the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family and established The Kassites were an Ancient Near Eastern tribe who gained control of Babylonia after the fall of the Old Babylonian Empire after ca The Hurrians (also Khurrites; cuneiform Ḫu-ur-ri 𒄷𒌨𒊑 were a people of the Ancient Near East, who lived in northern Mesopotamia Mitanni ( Hittite cuneiform, also Mittani) or Hanigalbat ( Assyrian Hanigalbat Khanigalbat cuneiform) Early history The most Neolithic site in Assyria is at Tell Hassuna, the center of the Hassuna culture Assur also spelled Ashur, from Assyrian Aššur, was one of the capitals of ancient Assyria. Nimrud is an ancient Assyrian city located south of Nineveh on the river Tigris. Dur-Sharrukin ("Fortress of Sargon" present day Khorsabad, was the Assyrian capital in the time of Sargon II of Assyria. Nineveh ( Akkadian: Ninua; Aramaic: ܢܝܢܘܐ Hebrew נינוה Nīnewē; Arabic نينوى Naīnuwa) See Short chronology for a timeline in absolute dates The Chronology of the Ancient Near East is a framework of dates for Ancient Mesopotamia was settled and conquered by numerous ancient Civilizations. The history of Sumer, taken to include the prehistoric Ubaid and Uruk periods spans the 5th to 3rd millennia BC ending with the downfall of the Third The Sumerian king list is an ancient text in the Sumerian language that lists kings of Sumer from Sumerian and foreign dynasties The following is a list of the kings of Babylonia, a major city and empire in ancient lower Mesopotamia, compiled from the traditional Babylonian king lists and modern Mesopotamian mythology is the collective name given to Sumerian Akkadian Assyrian and Babylonian mythologies from the land between the Tigris The akk Enûma Eliš is the Babylonian Creation myth (named for its Incipit) Gilgamesh was the son of Lugalbanda and the fifth king of Uruk (Early Dynastic II first dynasty of Uruk ruling circa 2600 BC according to the Sumerian king The pre- Christian religions of Babylonia and Assyria are the earliest attestation of Ancient Semitic religion, in particular Mesopotamian mythology Assyriology (from Greek grc Ἀσσυρίᾱ Assyriā; and grc -λογία -logia) is the archaeological historical and linguistic study Sumerian ( " native tongue " was the language of ancient Sumer, spoken in Southern Mesopotamia since at least the 4th millennium BC Elamite is an Extinct language, which was spoken by the ancient Elamites. Aramaic is a Semitic language with Hurrian is a conventional name for the language of the Hurrians (Khurrites a people who entered northern Mesopotamia around 2300 BC and had mostly Hittite or Nesili is the Extinct language once spoken by the Hittites, a people who created an empire centered on ancient Hattusas (modern Sumerian ( " native tongue " was the language of ancient Sumer, spoken in Southern Mesopotamia since at least the 4th millennium BC Al-Qādisiyyah (in Arabic: القادسية is one of the Provinces of Iraq. C. [1][2]) of all the Babylonian cities of which we have any knowledge, the special seat of the worship of the Sumerian god, Enlil, ruler of the cosmos subject to An alone. Babylon was a City-state of ancient Mesopotamia, the remains of which can be found in present-day Al Hillah, Babil Province, Iraq Sumer ( Sumerian: sux-Latn [[Ki (earth ki]]-[[EN (cuneiform en]]-'''ĝir15''', Akkadian: Šumeru; possibly Biblical Shinar Enlil ( EN = Lord + LIL = Loft "Lord of the Open" or "Lord of the Wind" was the name of a chief deity listed and written about in ancient Sumerian In Sumerian mythology and later for Assyrians and Babylonians Anu (also An; (from Sumerian *An = sky heaven was a sky-god Indeed, in Sumerian cuneiform, the signs that read 'Nibru' and 'Enlil' are the same.
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Location
It 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. The Euphrates ( ( Arabic: ar نهر الفرات; Turkish: tr Fırat Syriac: syr ܦܪܬ; Hebrew: he פרת The Tigris is the eastern member of the two great Rivers that define Mesopotamia, along with the Euphrates, which flows from the mountains of southeastern Baghdad (بغداد) is the Capital of Iraq and of Baghdad Governorate, with which it is also coterminous 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. "
Early history
Originally a village of reed huts in the marshes, similar to many of those which can be seen 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. You may be looking for the Assyrian kings Sargon I 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. Susa ( Biblical שושן ( Shushan) also Greek: Σοῦσα Transliterated as Sousa; Latin Susa)
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. An arch is a structure that spans a space while supporting weight (e Somewhere, apparently, in the 4th millennium BC, we begin to find inscriptions written on clay, in an almost linear script, in the Sumerian tongue. Sumerian ( " native tongue " was the language of ancient Sumer, spoken in Southern Mesopotamia since at least the 4th millennium BC 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. A ziggurat ( Akkadian ziqqurrat, D-stem of zaqāru "to build on a raised area" was a Temple tower of the ancient Mesopotamian So far as we can judge from the inscriptions, Nippur did not enjoy at this time, or at any later period for that matter, 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. Lugal-Zage-Si ( sux-Latn lugal-zag-ge4-si = sux-Latn [[LUGAL]] Uruk ( URU UNUG, Sumerian: unug Akkadian: uruk) from the Akkadian rendering of the Sumerian Toponym 'unug' is modern Ur ( Sumerian:urim; Akkadian: ?) is modern Tell el-Mukayyar, Iraq, and was a city in ancient Sumer. So on their votive offerings some of these rulers designate themselves as ensis, or governors.
History under Ur
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 Alu-usharsid (Urumush or Rimush), Sargon and Naram-sin testify to the veneration in which they also held this sanctuary. Babylonia was an Amorite state in lower Mesopotamia (modern southern Iraq) with Babylon as its capital Hammurabi ( Akkadian from Amorite ˤAmmurāpi, "the kinsman is a healer" from ˤAmmu, "paternal kinsman" and Rāpi You may be looking for the Assyrian kings Sargon I 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-Gur or Ur-Engur, the great builder of Babylonian temples, are superimposed immediately upon the constructions of Naram-Sin. Ur ( Sumerian:urim; Akkadian: ?) is modern Tell el-Mukayyar, Iraq, and was a city in ancient Sumer.
Ur-Gur gave to the temple its final characteristic form. Partly razing the constructions of his predecessors, he erected a terrace of unbaked 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 unburned brick, faced with kiln-burned bricks laid in bitumen. A ziggurat ( Akkadian ziqqurrat, D-stem of zaqāru "to build on a raised area" was a Temple tower of the ancient Mesopotamian 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-Gur 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. Isin (modern Ishan al-Bahriyat was a city of lower Mesopotamia, which flourished during the 20th century BC. 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 Eriaku (Sem. Elam is the name of an ancient civilization located in what is now southwest Iran. Rim-Sin, biblical Ariokh), the Elamite king of Larsa, styles himself "shepherd of the land of Nippur. Larsa (also Larag or Larak, modern Tell as-Senkereh, Iraq, possibly the Biblical Ellasar) was an important city of " 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 was to some extent neglected. Hammurabi ( Akkadian from Amorite ˤAmmurāpi, "the kinsman is a healer" from ˤAmmu, "paternal kinsman" and Rāpi Marduk ( Sumerian spelling in Akkadian: AMARUTU 𒀫 𒌓 "solar calf" perhaps from MERI
Kassite 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. The Kassites were an Ancient Near Eastern tribe who gained control of Babylonia after the fall of the Old Babylonian Empire after ca 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, 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, we find Ekur restored with a splendour greater than ever before, the ziggurat of that period being 58 by 39 m. Ashurbanipal ( Akkadian: Aššur-bāni-apli, " Ashur has made a son" or "Ashur created an heir" (b 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. The Sassanid Empire or Sassanian Dynasty or Sassanian Dynasty (ساسانیان) is the name used for the third Iranian dynasty and the second Persian empire
Archeology
As at Telloh, so at Nippur, the clay archives of the temple were found not in the temple proper, but on an outlying mound. Ngirsu (cuneiform? Sumerian:Ĝirsu Akkadian: ?) is modern Tell Telloh, Dhi Qar Governorate, Iraq, and it was a city of 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. The Persian Empire was a series of Iranian empires that ruled over the Iranian plateau, the original Persian homeland and beyond in Western Asia 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 Cossaean period, and in this neighbourhood and further southward on these mounds large numbers of inscribed tablets of various periods, including temple archives of the Cossaean 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, and the discovery on some of the tablets found there of the name of the canal Kabari suggests that the Jewish settlement of the exile, on the canal Chebar, to which Ezekiel belonged, may have been somewhere in this neighborhood, if not at Nippur itself. According to religious texts Ezekiel ((יְחֶזְקֵאל Yehezkel, jəx Hilprecht indeed believed that the Kabari was the Shatt-en-Nil. Of the history and conditions of Nippur in the Arabic period we learn little from the excavations, but from outside sources it appears that the city was the seat of a Christian bishopric as late as the 12th century AD. Christianity ( Greek Χριστιανισμός from the word Xριστός ( Christ)is a monotheistic Religion centered on the life and teachings
The excavations at Nippur were the first to reveal to us the extreme antiquity of Babylonian civilization, and, as already stated, they give us the best consecutive record of the development of that civilization, with a continuous occupancy from a period of unknown antiquity, long antedating 5000 BC, onward to the Middle Ages. But while Nippur has been more fully explored than any other old Babylonian city, except Babylon and Lagash, still only a small part of the great ruins of the ancient site had been examined in 1909. Babylon was a City-state of ancient Mesopotamia, the remains of which can be found in present-day Al Hillah, Babil Province, Iraq Lagash ( is modern Tell al-Hiba, Iraq. Located northwest of the junction of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers and east of Uruk These ruins have been particularly fruitful in inscribed material, especially clay tablets, many of them from the very earliest periods; but little of artistic or architectural importance has been discovered. Excavation at Nippur is particularly difficult and costly by reason of the inaccessibility of the site, and the dangerous and unsettled condition of the surrounding country, and still more by reason of the immense mass of later debris under which the earlier and more important Babylonian remains are buried.
Drehem
Drehem was a suburb of Nippur. Some of its cuneiform archives are at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto. The Royal Ontario Museum, commonly known as the ROM, is a major Museum for world culture and Natural history in the city of Toronto There are Neo-Sumerian economic texts in the Drehem archives, and enough cuneiform tablets to permit a tentative description of its administration.
Sources
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain. The Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition (1910–1911 is a 29-volume reference work that marked the beginning of the Encyclopædia Britannica The public domain is a range of abstract materials &ndash commonly referred to as Intellectual property &ndash which are not owned or controlled by anyone
- Marcel Sigrist, Drehem, 1992.
- McGuire Gibson (Oriental Institute, U. of Chicago) 'Patterns of occupation at Nippur,' 1992
- The Nippur Expedition: the holy city of Nippur; history of excavations.
- Drehem cuneiform tablets at Milliken University
- GeoLocation from Google
- John Punnett Peters, Nippur, or Excavations and Adventures on the Euphrates (two volumes, 1897)
References
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