Nippur
Nippur 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 8 kilometers north of modern Afak, Al-Qādisiyyah Governorate, Iraq. It is roughly 200 km south of modern Baghdad and about 100 km southeast of the ancient city of Babylon. Occupation at the site extended back to the Ubaid period, the Uruk period, and the Jemdet Nasr period. The origin of the ancient name is unknown but different proposals have been made.
History
Early Bronze Age
Early Dynastic period
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 Ekur temple of Enlil. Ninurta, son of Enlil, also 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 the Ur III period by Ur-Nammu of Ur, and continued until Ibbi-Sin appointed Enmegalana high priest in Uruk.
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.
File:Indus Civilisation Carnelian bead with white design, ca. 2900–2350 BC Found in Nippur, Mesopotamian.jpg|upright|thumb|Indus Civilisation carnelian bead with white design, ca. 2900–2350 BC. Found in Nippur. An example of early Indus-Mesopotamia relations.
Akkadian period (c. 2350-2150 BCE)
Late in the 3rd millennium BC, Nippur was conquered and occupied by the 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 17.5 meter wide city walls. 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 suggests that the Akkadian Empire fell as divine retribution, because of Sargon's initiating the transfer of "holy city" status from Nippur to Babylon.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 m. 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 III period (c. 2112-2004 BC)
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, surrounded by double walls, with a ziggurat on the north-western edge of the latter.Ur III ruler Shu-Sin, after destroying Šimānum, as noted in a year name, settled the prisoners of that war near Nippur he founded called Šimānum. This practice for disposition of prisoners continued into the first millennium.
Middle Bronze Age
Isin/Larsa period (c. 2020-1820 BC)
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. Rim-Sin I, the king of Larsa, styles himself "shepherd of the land of Nippur".Old Babylonian period (1820-1587 BCE)
With the establishment of the Babylonian empire, under Hammurabi, early in the 2nd millennium BC, 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.The city was taken by Ilī-ma-ilu, the first ruler of the First Sealand dynasty in about the 29th year of the reign of Samsu-iluna, ruler of Babylon. It was retaken by Abī-ešuḫ by his 5th year, after he damned the Tigris river.
Late Bronze Age
The Late Bronze Age was from around 1600/1550 to 1200/1150 BCE. In 1587 BCE, the Fall of the Old Babylonian Kingdom came after Mursili I of Hatti raided Babylon in an event known as the "Sack of Babylon".Kassite period
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. A new temple within Ekur, the Ekurigibarra, was built by Kurigalzu I.Iron Age onwards
After the middle of the 12th century BC follows another long period of comparative neglect due to the river Euphrates changing its course, but with the waters return and the conquest of Babylonia by the Assyrian king Sargon II, at the close of the 8th century BC, we meet again with building inscriptions, and under Ashurbanipal, 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 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. 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.Islamic 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.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 Aramaic 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.
Archaeology
Nippur was situated on both sides of the ancient bed 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 canal bed divides the site into an East Mound and West Mound. 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. 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". The site reached a maximum extent of 130 hectares, this occurring in the Ur III period and again in the Kassite period.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. Thousands of tablets were found at a smaller mound dubbed "tablet hill", about 7.5 meters in average height and 52 square meters in area, southeast of the temple mound. A true arch, one of the world's earliest examples, was also found. In the Parthian layer a box containing fragments of votive axes made of glass from the Kassite period were found. Several late Kassite rulers are represented including Kurigalzu II.
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. Part of the effort involved removing large archaeological dumps from the University of Pennsylvania excavations. In the process Early Dynastic bowls, cuneiform tablets, and brick stamps were found. At the temples of Inanna and at Ekur foundation deposits were found with statues of Shulgi and Ur-Nammu. A temple of Inanna, begun in the Early Dynastic period was completely excavated. Subsequent superimposed new iterations of the temple extended all the way up to Parthian times. Finds included a tablet dated to the 4th year of the Kassite king Shagarakti-Shuriash, one dated to the 44th year of Ur III king Shulgi, and an Indus Valley stamp seal. In 1977 they briefly excavated at the nearby site of Umm al-Hafriyat which was in the process of being heavily looted. Sargonic period tablets found there suggest the ancient name of that site was as Maškan-Ili-Akkade. The excavation is now in the process of being published. Cuneiform tablets from this excavation
are still in the process of being published.
Preliminary efforts to restart work at Nippur began in 2018 under McGuire Gibson. Excavation work at Nippur began in April 2019 under Abbas Alizadeh. Initial focus at Nippur was on a major Parthian period building and a small Late Sassanian house. Work also occurred at the Ekur temple. Permission has also been granted to dig at Dlehim and Drehem. Excavation began in November 2022 for the 21st season which lasted two months. Work began at nearby Drehem but ceased after authorities decided that a police station must first be established there to prevent looting. Work then returned to the Parthian building.
The current excavations are focused on the southern neighborhoods of Nippur. These were first
occupied in the Ur III period when the city expanded from 80 to 135 hectares in area, all
within a new city wall. It was then abandoned and not occupied again until the Kassite period,
abandoned again, and re-used in the early first-millennium BC. New excavation here began in 2024 but were cut short after 1 week due to the security situation. Full excavation resumed in 2025 by a team from the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, Autonomous University of Madrid, and University of Winnipeg. Two sets of trenches were opened. One set examined the
3 meter wide Kassite period city wall which lies on the deliberately flattened
Ur III wall. Outside that wall and before an ancient 50 meter wide watercourse
were a number of substantial buildings associated with bread ovens. Other structures outside the wall appeared
to be shipping related. The other set or trenches was in the southern corner of the city, inside the
wall. A large, at least 200 square meter, early first-millennium BC house was found. There
were several intramural graves including two with "bathtub-shaped" coffins. The southern city corner
also contained some Parthian period graves. A large unexcavated area was surveyed with magnetic gradiometry
though the results were not yet available.