When was nippur founded

On the staff in that first season was Dr. Robert F. Harper, who a few years later founded Assyriological studies at the University of Chicago. The expedition worked at Nippur until , finding more than 30, cuneiform tablets and hundreds of other objects. Limited funds for the early seasons forced the field directors at the time, Donald McCown and Richard C.

Haines, to carry out each season as if it were the last. Therefore, effort was concentrated on the religious quarter to which Nippur owes its historical importance. The layer-by-layer excavation of three temple areas and private houses resulted in the finding of thousands more tablets.

Just as important was the establishment of two archaeological sequences that remained the standard for Mesopotamia until recent work at Nippur showed that they needed changes and additions. The season saw a new approach to Nippur. The new field director, McGuire Gibson, committed the expedition to a long-term program of excavation in the whole city. Emphasis shifted to the West Mound, a predominantly residential and administrative quarter of the city which had not been investigated since Shifting from the religious area was designed to give a more balanced view of the city.

Nippur was sacred, but that was only one aspect of a thriving urban complex. Several seasons were spent in excavating bakers' houses, a palace, and a sequence of temples on the West Mound. After Anu, Enlil, Enki, and Ninhursag had fashioned the black-headed people, Vegetation sprang from the earth, Animals, four-legged creatures of the plain, Were brought artfully into existence [37 lines are unreadable] After the He founded the five cities in pure places, Then did Nintu weep like a The gods of heaven and earth uttered the name of Anu and Enlil Then did Ziusudra, the king, the priest of Attending daily, constantly he By the word commanded by Anu and Enlil After, for seven days, the flood sweeps over the cult centers.

After, for seven days and seven nights, The flood had swept over the land, And the huge boat had been tossed About by the windstorms on the great waters, Utu came forth, who sheds light on heaven and earth, Ziusudra opened a window of the huge boat, The hero Utu brought his rays into the giant boat.

Ziusudra, the king, Prostrated himself before Utu. The Sumerians formulated lists of their ancient kings, and gave them extremely long reigns. The time before the flood was said to be a period of , years. Two kings from after the flood that are listed were Gilgamesh and Tammuz. Legends told about these two kings were so impressive that Tammuz entered the pantheon of Babylon and later became known as Adonis to the Greeks.

Gilgamesh became the hero of the Babylonian epic poem which bears his name, and which also contains an account of the flood. Until recently, these king lists and the names in them were thought to be purely fanciful.

But in the 's, Sir Leonard Woolley, while excavating a building at Ur on the Ubaid level, found an inscription indicating that the structure had been erected by the son of the founder of the First Dynasty of Ur, a person up till that time regarded as fiction. Gilgamesh, too, has been found to be a real person, with inscriptions telling of the buildings he built.

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 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.

This ancient clay tablet is dated to the 14thth century BCE, and on it is inscribed a map of the countryside around the Mesopotamian city of Nippur, located in the middle of the southern Mesopotamia floodplain, near the modern city of Diwaniyah. The inscription on the tablet is in cuneiform. Other Examples of Prehistoric Cartography.

This fact may indicate that although Akkadians were deeply involved in all aspects of life in the area just north of Nippur, government affairs may have remained predominantly the preserve of Sumerians in the pre-Sargonic period. For Nippur, we do not know as yet what percentage of scribes had Akkadian names in Early Dynastic III, but Biggs [] has suggested that the percentages at Nippur would be more like those of Shuruppak than like those of Abu Salabikh.

I would suspect, however, that the percentages for non-governmental texts were closer to those at Abu Salabikh, with a good number of Akkadian scribes in evidence. As is the case with the world's other holy cities, such as Jerusalem, Mecca, and Rome, Nippur was a vibrant economic center. Besides the economic benefits derived from gifts and on-going maintenance presented by kings and rich individuals, there was probably a continuing income from pilgrims. Nippur was the center of an agricultural district, with much of the land in the possession of temples.

The temples produced manufactured goods, predominantly textiles and finished items, some of which were meant for export. But the temples were only part of the economic picture [Maekawa ]. Even though it was more dominated by religion than other towns, Nippur, like them, had a mixed economy, with governmental, religious, and private spheres see, e.

Westenholz []. Steadily accumulating evidence indicates that the public spheres were closely integrated, with final control in the hands of government officials see esp. Maekawa []. The work-force for much of the large-scale manufacture was probably connected with the major institutions, especially the temples.

As in most countries until modern times, the temples in Mesopotamia had an important function as social welfare agencies, including the taking in of widows and orphans who had no families or lineages to care for them [Gelb ]; temples also were the recipients of war prisoners, especially those from foreign lands, who worked in agricultural settlements belonging to temples or in other temple service [Gelb ].

All institutions, whether the governor's palace, a government-sponsored industry, or a temple, were not just buildings and not just abstract bureaucratic hierarchies or economic establishments, but were social organizations within a broader social network. As happens in most societies, large institutions in ancient Mesopotamia tended to be dominated by families, lineages, and even larger kinship groups and I would argue that it is this web of kinship that furnishes the long-term, underlying continuity for civilizations, making it possible to reassemble the pieces even after disastrous collapses.

For Mesopotamia, the role and power of such kinship organizations is best observed ironically in the Ur III Period, the most centralized, bureaucratized period in Mesopotamian history. The abundance of records of administrative minutiae allows the reconstruction not just of the administrative framework, but of the social network underlying and imbedded within it. The best reconstruction of such a kin-based organization within an institution is Zettler's [] work on the Inanna temple.

One branch of the Ur-me-me family acted as the administrators of the temple, while another dominated the governorship of Nippur and the administration of the temple of Enlil. It is important to note that the Ur-me-me family remained as adminstrators of the Inanna temple from some time within the Akkadian period to at least as late as the early years of the Isin dynasty.

Thus, while dynasty replaced dynasty and the kingship of Sumer and Akkad shifted from city to city Akkad to Ur to Isin the family remained in charge of the Inanna temple. From the listing of members of two and three generations as minor figures on the temple rolls, it is clear that it was not just the Ur-me-me family that found long-term employment within the temple's economic and social skucture.

Through the continued association of families with the institution, not only were generations of people guaranteed a livelihood, but the institution was guaranteed a cadre which would pass on the routines that made the institution function. The temple could add key personnel not only through a kind of birth-right family or lineage inclusion , but also through recruitment; important individuals within the institution's adrninistration would have acted as patrons not just for nephews, nieces, and more distant relatives but also for unrelated persons.

By incorporating clients of its important men and women, an institution could forge linkages with the general population in the city as well as in the supporting countryside and in other cities; these recruits, in taking up posts within a temple, a municipal establishment, the royal bureaucracy, or in a large family business, would ensure that the patron had loyal adherents.

We know from cuneiform texts found at Nippur and elsewhere that the temples, rather than controlling the cities through a "Temple Economy," as was proposed earlier in this century, were under supervision by a king or a royally appointed governor, even in the Early Dynastic III period c.

In the Akkadian period c. During the Ur III period c. The situation was much the same in the Isin-Larsa period, with texts from one agency presumably the governor's office recording distribution of goods to several temples; it is unfortunate that a recent article [Robertson ] revives, again, the notion of "temple economy" to cover these transactions.

The characteristics of administration and support that can be reconstructed from texts for a few temples at Nippur must be assumed to have been operative in the rest of Nippur's temples. The relationship of those temples to governmental institutions and to private entities and individuals is only beginning to be worked out.

To reconstruct life in ancient cities one cannot rely on written documents alone, since they do not cover the entire range of ancient activity. Often, crucial insights can be obtained by the correlation of non-inscribed evidence, for instance the repeated co-occurrence of a set of artifacts in one type of find-spot.

Especially valuable are correlations that illustrate human adaptations to natural environrnental conditions. When one can bring texts into such correlations, truly innovative syntheses can be made. Whenever possible, documents must be viewed in their archaeological contexts, treating them as an extraordinarily informative class of artifacts to be studied in relationship to all other items.

When such relationships are studied, a much more detailed picture emerges. Although that procedure would appear to be self-evidently valuable, it is rare that texts have been treated in this manner. At Nippur, we have made a concerted effort to combine all kinds of information in our interpretations of the site, and we think that we have made some important discoveries by so doing.

Nippur has been the focus of major excavation since when the University of Pennsylvania opened the first American expedition in the Middle East. Finding the site a rich source for cuneiform tablets, that expedition continued to excavate at Nippur until [Hilprecht ; Peters ].

The main achievements of the expedition were to locate the ziggurat and temple of Enlil and to recover more than 30, cuneiform tablets of extraordinary literary, historical, grammatical, and economic importance. Included were the earliest recognized versions of the Flood Story, parts of the Gilgamesh Epic, and dozens of other compositions. As important in historical terms are royal inscriptions from all periods, especially those of the Kassite Dynasty which ruled Mesopotamia from about to B.

In a special category of Nippur texts are the business archives of the Murashu family, merchant bankers who controlled vast commercial and agricultural interests under the Achaemenid Persian kings c. For almost a half-century after the University of Pennsylvania left the site, Nippur lay unexcavated. It was felt at that time that although Nippur had been inundated by a sea of dunes since the 's, the information to be gained, especially on Sumerian culture, justified the extraordinary expense and difficulty caused by those dunes.

A stated goal of the new excavations was to establish an archaeological context for the extraordinary artifacts, especially the tablets, that the earlier expedition had found.

The counsel of god is full of destruction; who can understand? Where may human beings learn the ways of God? He who lives at evening is dead in the morning;. Quickly he is troubled; all at once he is oppressed; At one moment he sings and plays; In the twinkling of an eye he howls like a funeral-mourner. Like sunshine and clouds their thoughts change; They are hungry and like a corpse;. They are filled and rival their god! In prosperity they speak of climbing to Heaven Trouble overtakes them and they speak of going down to Sheol.

Into the bonds of my flesh are my hands thrown; Into the fetters of myself my feet have stumbled With a whip he has beaten me; there is no protection; With a staff he has transfixed me; the stench was terrible!

All day long the pursuer pursues me, In the night watches he lets me breathe not a moment Through torture my joints are torn asunder;. My limbs are destroyed, loathing covers me; On my couch I welter like an ox I am covered, like a sheep, with my excrement. My sickness baffled the conjurers And the seer left dark my omens.

The diviner has not improved the condition of my sickness- The duration of my illness the seer could not state; The god helped me not, my hand he took not; The goddess pitied me not, she came not to my side The coffin yawned; they [the heirs] took my possessions;. While I was not yet dead, the death wail was ready.

My whole land cried out: "How is he destroyed! But I knew the time of all my family. When among the protecting spirits their divinity is exalted Let thy hand grasp the javelin Tabu-utul-Bel, who lives at Nippur, Has sent me to consult thee Has laid his In life He said: "How long will he be in such great affliction and distress?

What is it that he saw in his vision of the night? A conjurer, too, clad in strength, Marduk indeed sent me; Unto Shubshi-meshri-Nergal he brought abundance; In his pure hands he brought abundance.

By my guardian-spirit he stopped ,". He sent a storm wind to the horizon; To the breast of the earth it bore a blast Into the depth of his ocean the disembodied spirit vanished ; Unnumbered spirits he sent back to the under-world. The sea-flood he spread with ice; The roots of the disease he tore out like a plant. The horrible slumber that settled on my rest Like smoke filled the sky With the woe he had brought, unrepulsed and bitter, he filled the earth like a storm.

The unrelieved headache which had overwhelmed the heavens He took away and sent down on me the evening dew. My eyelids, which he had veiled with the veil of night He blew upon with a rushing wind and made clear their sight. My ears, which were stopped, were deaf as a deaf man's. He removed their deafness and restored their hearing. My nose, whose nostril had been stopped from my mother's womb He eased its defonnity so that I could breathe.

My lips, which were closed he had taken their strength He removed their trembling and loosed their bond. My mouth which was closed so that I could not be understood He cleansed it like a dish, he healed its disease.

My eyes, which had been attacked so that they rolled together He loosed their bond and their balls were set right. The tongue, which had stiffened so that it could not be raised.

He relieved its thickness, so its words could be understood. The gullet which was compressed, stopped as with a plug He healed its contraction, it worked like a flute. My spittle which was stopped so that it was not secreted He removed its fetter, he opened its lock.

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