Nippur

Nippur is the clearest ancient case of religious authority deliberately held apart from political power.

It was never a capital. No dynasty of Nippur ruled Sumer. What it held was Enlil, and Enlil's temple the Ekur, the mountain house, was where the assembly of the gods was held to meet and where kingship was granted. A ruler who wanted the title king of Sumer and Akkad needed Enlil at Nippur to have given it to him, and that could not be arranged anywhere else or manufactured at home.

The practical consequence was unusual. Cities that fought each other constantly tended not to sack Nippur, because destroying it would have destroyed the thing that made their own victories legitimate. Successive conquerors instead competed to endow it, rebuild its temples and record their piety there. It was, in effect, protected by being useful to everyone.

The second reason it matters is accidental. Nippur was the great scribal centre, and its schoolrooms, the edubba, are where students copied texts as exercises. Because those exercises were thrown out as rubbish and buried, they survived. The large majority of what can be read of Sumerian literature comes from Nippur: the city laments, the hymns, the debate poems, the wisdom texts, much of the Gilgamesh material, and the flood account. Royal libraries preserved what kings wanted kept; Nippur preserved what children were made to write out, which turns out to be a far better sample.

American expeditions from the University of Pennsylvania worked there in four campaigns between 1889 and 1900 and removed tens of thousands of tablets, which is why the modern study of Sumerian was effectively founded in Philadelphia and Istanbul rather than in Iraq. Among the finds is a clay tablet carrying a measured plan of the city with its walls, canal and gates marked, the oldest known city map.

Nippur's temple archive turned out to hold more Sumerian literature than any other single findspot, including some of the oldest flood stories in the world.

A god's house and a mountain of tablets

Nippur's central temple, the Ekur, dedicated to the god Enlil, anchored a religious complex that, when excavated by University of Pennsylvania expeditions beginning in the late nineteenth century, yielded one of the largest collections of cuneiform tablets ever recovered from a single site, providing the basis for a substantial share of everything scholars now know about Sumerian literature, law and administration.

Flood stories older than familiar ones

Among the literary tablets recovered at Nippur are early versions of Sumerian flood narratives, texts that predate and likely influenced later Mesopotamian and biblical flood accounts, giving Nippur's archive outsized importance for understanding the literary prehistory of stories that eventually appear in vastly more widely known later texts.

As this entry's companion article covers

Nippur's unusual historical position as Sumer's primary religious centre, one whose blessing was required to legitimise a king's rule even though the city itself apparently never held direct political or military dominance over other city-states, is addressed directly in this entry's companion article rather than repeated here.