manner at or about the time of the Elamite invasions, 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. Rim-Sin,
biblical Arioch), the Elamite king of Larsa, styles himself “shepherd
of the land of Nippur.” With the establishment of the
Babylonian empire, under Khammurabi, early in the 2nd pre-Christian
millennium, the religious as well as the political centre
of influence was transferred to Babylon, Marduk became the
Bel or lord of the pantheon, many of En-lil’s attributes and
myths were transferred to him, and E-kur was to some extent
neglected. Under the succeeding Cossaean dynasty, however,
shortly after the middle of the 2nd millennium, E-kur 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
follows another long period of comparative neglect, but with the
conquest of Babylonia by the Assyrian Sargon, at the close of the
8th century B.C., we meet again with building inscriptions, and
under Assur-bani-pal, about the middle of the 7th century, we
find E-kur restored with a splendour greater than ever before,
the ziggurat of that period being 190 ft. by 128 ft. After that
E-kur 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 A.D. 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 store-house
quarter of the temple town had not been explored as late as 1909.
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 25 ft. in average height and 13 acres 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 B.C. 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.
The great complex of ruin mounds lying S.W. of the Shatt-en-Nil canal, larger in extent and mass than the N.E. complex, had not up to 1909 been so fully explored as the mounds to the N.E. Almost directly opposite the temple, however, 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 B.C. 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 10th century A.D., 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 neighbourhood, if not at Nippur itself. Hilprecht indeed believes 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 A.D.
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 ante-dating 5000 B.C., 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. 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 débris under which the earlier and more important Babylonian remains are buried.
See A. H. Layard, Nineveh and Babylon (1853); John P. Peters, Nippur (1897); H. V. Hilprecht, Excavations in Assyria and Babylonia (1904); Clarence S. Fisher, Excavations at Nippur (1st part 1905, 2nd part 1906); Babylonian Expedition of the University of Pennsylvania, a monumental edition of the cuneiform texts found at Nippur, with brief introductions and notes of a more general character (1893 foll.). For a plan of the Parthian palace see Architecture, vol. ii. p. 381. (J. P. Pe.)
The Nippur Deluge Fragment.—From among the many tablets and fragments of tablets discovered at Nippur one of more than ordinary interest was published in 1910. Though mutilated portions of only a few of its lines have been preserved, and the text contains no proper name, it is clear that the tablet represents part of a Babylonian version of the Deluge Legend.[1] The portion of the story covered by the text relates to the warning given by Ea to Ut-napishtim, the Babylonian equivalent of the Hebrew Noah. The god here states that he is about to send a deluge, which will cause destruction to all mankind, and he gives directions for the building of a great ship in which “the beasts of the field and the birds of heaven” may be saved, along with Ut-napishtim and his family; he fixes the size of the ship and directs that it should be covered with a strong roof or deck. The text bears a general resemblance to the two well-known Assyrian versions on tablets in the British Museum, but it has been claimed that its phraseology presents a closer parallel to the biblical version of the Deluge story in the “Priestly Code.” For several years the existence of Babylonian versions of the legend had been detected among collections of tablets dating from the earlier historical periods. A fragment of one such version belongs to the period of the First Dynasty of Babylon,[2] and part of a still earlier Semitic version of another portion of the Gilgamesh Epic has also been recovered.[3] The new fragment from Nippur has given rise to considerable discussion, in view of the light it
- ↑ See Hilprecht, The Babylonian Expedition of the University of Pennsylvania, ser. D, vol. v. fasc. 1.
- ↑ It is dated in the reign of Ammizaduga; cf. Scheil, Recueil da travaux, xx. 55 ff. For another fragment of the Atar-khasis legend of the same period, see Cuneiform Texts in the British Museum, pt. vi., and cf. Zimmern, Zeits. für Assyr. xiv. 278 f.
- ↑ See Meissner, Mitteil. der Vorderas. Gesellschaft (1902), i. For other Semitic legends of this early period, see Cuneiform Texts in the British Museum, pt. xv. (1902), Pls. I.-VI., and cf. King, The Seven Tablets of Creation, p. lxxvii. f.
