Sumerian Timeline
Fifth millennium: Early developments in Sumer
Fourth millennium: Protoliterate period
Third millennium: Rival kings & periods of unification includes Early Dynastic, Sargonic, & Ur III periods
Second millennium’s first half: Ascendancy of Amorite dynasties of Isin, then Larsa, then Babylon. This period ends with devastating Hittite raid around 1600 BC
5000 Early development of Sumer
4000 High civilization developing
3000 Political & military rivalries
2750 Legendary Gilgamesh rules Uruk, Enmebaragesi & Agga rule Kish
2550 Mesalim rules Kish
2475 Ur-Nanshe rules Lagash, Meskalamdug rules Ur, military conflict between Lagash & Umma continues a long time.
2375 Lugalzagesi of Umma unifies Sumer briefly
2350 Sargon of Agade defeats Umma & takes over Sumer & Akkad & creates significant political & economic empire
2230 Gutian invasion disrupts unity of Sumer & Akkad
2175 Gudea rules Lagash
2110 Ur-Nammu of Ur unifies Sumer & Akkad
2030 Elamites disrupt unity of Sumer & Akkad
2020 Ishbi-Erra the Amorite ruler of Isin seeks to rebuild unity in the land
1795 Rim-Sin of Larsa defeats Isin & takes over Sumer & Akkad
1760 Hammurapi of Babylon defeats Larsa & takes over Sumer & Akkad
1720 Shift of Euphrates River & collapse of life at Nippur & some other cities of Sumer
1595 Hittite raid disrupts unity of Sumer & Akkad
Sumerian Territorial States
More difficult than describing its external relations is the task of shedding light on the internal structure of a state like Lagash. For the first time, a state consisting of more than a city with its surrounding territory came into being, because aggressively minded rulers had managed to extend that territory until it comprised not only Girsu, the capital, and the cities of Lagash and Nina (Zurghul) but also many smaller localities and even a seaport, Guabba. Yet it is not clear to what extent the conquered regions were also integrated administratively. On one occasion UruKAgina used the formula “from the limits of Ningirsu [that is, the city god of Girsu] to the sea,” having in mind a distance of up to 125 miles. It would be unwise to harbour any exaggerated notion of well-organized states exceeding that size. For many years, scholarly views were conditioned by the concept of the Sumerian temple city, which was used to convey the idea of an organism whose ruler, as representative of his god, theoretically owned all land, privately held agricultural land being a rare exception.
The concept of the temple city had its origin partly in the overinterpretation of a passage in the so-called reform texts of UruKAgina, that states “on the field of the ensi [or his wife and the crown prince], the city god Ningirsu [or the city goddess Baba and the divine couple's son]” had been “reinstated as owners.” On the other hand, the statements in the archives of the temple of Baba in Girsu, dating from Lugalanda and UruKAgina, were held to be altogether representative. Here is a system of administration, directed by the ensi’s spouse or by a sangu (head steward of a temple), in which every economic process, including commerce, stands in a direct relationship to the temple: agriculture, vegetable gardening, tree farming, cattle raising and the processing of animal products, fishing, and the payment in merchandise of workers and employees. The conclusion from this analogy proved to be dangerous because the archives of the temple of Baba provide information about only a portion of the total temple administration and that portion, furthermore, is limited in time. Understandably enough, the private sector, which of course was not controlled by the temple, is scarcely mentioned at all in these archives. The existence of such a sector is nevertheless documented by bills of sale for land purchases of the pre-Sargonic period and from various localities. Written in Sumerian as well as in Akkadian, they prove the existence of private land ownership or, in the opinion of some scholars, of lands predominantly held as undivided family property. Although a substantial part of the population was forced to work for the temple and drew its pay and board from it, it is not yet known whether it was year-round work. It is probable, if unfortunate, that there will never exist a detailed and numerically accurate picture of the demographic structure of a Sumerian city. It is assumed that in the oldest cities the government was in a position to summon sections of the populace for the performance of public works. The construction of monumental buildings or the excavation of long and deep canals could be carried out only by means of such a levy. The large-scale employment of indentured persons and of slaves is of no concern in this context. Evidence of male slavery is fairly rare before Ur III, and even in Ur III and in the Old Babylonian period slave labour was never an economically relevant factor. It was different with female slaves. According to one document, the temple of Baba employed 188 such women; the temple of the goddess Nanshe employed 180, chiefly in grinding flour and in the textile industry, and this continued to be the case in later times. For accuracy’s sake it should be added that the terms male slave and female slave are used here in the significance they possessed about 2000 and later, designating persons in bondage who were bought and sold and who could not acquire personal property through their labour. A distinction is made between captured slaves (prisoners of war and kidnapped persons) and others who had been sold. In one inscription, Entemena of Lagash boasts of having “allowed the sons of Uruk, Larsa, and Bad-tibira to return to their mothers” and of having “restored them into the hands” of the respective city god or goddess. Read in the light of similar but more explicit statements of later date, this laconic formula represents the oldest known evidence of the fact that the ruler occasionally endeavoured to mitigate social injustices by means of a decree. Such decrees might refer to the suspension or complete cancellation of debts or to exemption from public works. Whereas a set of inscriptions of the last ruler from the 1st dynasty of Lagash, UruKAgina, has long been considered a prime document of social reform in the 3rd millennium, the designation “reform texts” is only partly justified. Reading between the lines, it is possible to discern that tensions had arisen between the “palace”–the ruler’s residence with its annex, administrative staff, and landed properties–and the “clergy”–that is, the stewards and priests of the temples. In seeming defiance of his own interests, UruKAgina, who in contrast to practically all of his predecessors lists no genealogy and has therefore been suspected of having been a usurper, defends the clergy, whose plight he describes somewhat tearfully. If the foregoing passage about restoring the ensi’s fields to the divinity is interpreted carefully, it would follow that the situation of the temple was ameliorated and that palace lands were assigned to the priests. Along with these measures, which resemble the policies of a newcomer forced to lean on a specific party, are found others that do merit the designation of “measures taken toward the alleviation of social injustices”–for instance, the granting of delays in the payment of debts or their outright cancellation and the setting up of prohibitions to keep the economically or socially more powerful from forcing his inferior to sell his house, his ass’s foal, and the like. Besides this, there were tariff regulations, such as newly established fees for weddings and burials, as well as the precise regulation of the food rations of garden workers. These conditions, described on the basis of source materials from Girsu, may well have been paralleled elsewhere, but it is equally possible that other archives, yet to be found in other cities of pre-Sargonic southern Mesopotamia, may furnish entirely new historical aspects. At any rate, it is wiser to proceed cautiously, keeping to analysis and evaluation of the available material rather than making generalizations. This, then, is the horizon of Mesopotamia shortly before the rise of the Akkadian empire. In Mari, writing was introduced at the latest about the mid-26th century BC, and from that time this city, situated on the middle Euphrates, forms an important centre of cuneiform civilization, especially in regard to its Semitic component. Ebla (and probably many other sites in ancient Syria) profited from the influence of Mari scribal schools. Reaching out across the Diyala region and the Persian Gulf, Mesopotamian influences extended to Iran, where Susa is mentioned along with Elam and other, not yet localized, towns. In the west the Amanus Mountains were known, and under Lugalzagesi the “upper sea”–in other words, the Mediterranean–is mentioned for the first time. To the east the inscriptions of Ur-Nanshe of Lagash name the isle of Dilmun (modern Bahrain), which may have been even then a transshipment point for trade with the Oman coast and the Indus region, the Magan and Meluhha of more recent texts. Trade with Anatolia and Afghanistan was nothing new in the 3rd millennium, even if these regions are not yet listed by their names. It was the task of the Akkadian dynasty to unite within these boundaries a territory that transcended the dimensions of a state of the type represented by Lagash.
Ubaid period
The tell (mound) of Ubaid near Ur in southern Iraq has given its name to the prehistoric Pottery Neolithic to Chalcolithic culture, which represents the earliest settlement on the alluvial plain of southern Mesopotamia. The Ubaid culture had a long duration beginning before 5300 BC and lasting until the beginning of the Uruk period, c. 4100 BC. The invention of the wheel and the beginning of the Chalcolithic period fall into the Ubaid period.The Ubaid period is divided into three principle phases:
- Early Ubaid — sometimes called Eridu, (5300–4700 BC) a phase limited to the extreme south of Iraq, on what was then the shores of the Persian Gulf. This phase, showing clear connection to the Samarra culture to the north, saw the establishment of the first permanent settlement south of the 5 inch rainfall isohyet. These people pioneered the growing of grains in the extreme conditions of aridity, thanks to the high water tables of Southern Iraq.
- Middle Ubaid — sometimes called Hadji Muhammad, (4800–4500 BC) after the type site of the same name, saw the development of extensive canal networks from major settlements. Irrigation agriculture, which seem to have developed first at Choga Mami (4700–4600 BC) and rapidly spread elsewhere, from the first required collective effort and centralised coordination of labor.
- Later or “Classic Ubaid” — In the period from 4500–4000 BC saw a period of intense and rapid urbanisation with the Ubaid culture spread into northern Mesopotamia replacing (after a hiatus) the Halaf culture. Ubaid artefacts spread also all along the Arabian littoral, showing the growth of a trading system that stretched from the Mediterranean coast through the Dilmun civilization based in Bahrain to Oman.
Ubaid culture is characterized by large village settlements, characterized by multiroomed rectangular mud-brick houses and the appearance of the first temples of public architecture in Mesopotamia, with a growth of a two tier settlement hierarchy of centralized large sites of more than 10 hectares surrounded by smaller village sites of less than 1 hectare. Domestic equipment included a distinctive fine quality buff or greenish coloured pottery decorated with geometric designs in brown or black paint; tools such as sickles were often made of hard fired clay in the south. But in the north, stone and sometimes metal were used.The Ubaid period as a whole, based upon the analysis of grave goods, was one of increasingly polarised social stratification and decreasing egalitarianism. Bogucki calls this a phase of “Trans-egalitarian” competitive household in which some fall behind as a result downward social mobility. Thus Ubaid culture would seem to be one in which Morton Fried and Elman Service have hypothesised the rise of an elite of inherited chieftains, perhaps heads of kin groups (a sheikdom?) linked in some way to the administration of the temple shrines and their granaries, were responsible for mediating intra-group conflict and maintaining social order. It would seem that various collective methods, perhaps through what Thorkild Jacobsen called primitive democracy, in which disputes were previously resolved through a council of one’s peers, were no longer sufficient to the needs of the local community.
The Ubaid culture was clearly intrusive into southern Iraq, though it has clear connection to earlier cultures in the region of middle Iraq. The appearance of the Ubaid folk, has sometimes been linked to the so-called Sumerian problem, related to the origins of Sumerian civilization. Whatever the ethnic origins of this group, we here see for the first time a clear tripartite social division between intensive subsistence peasant farmers, with crops and animals coming from the north, tent-dwelling nomadic pastoralists dependent upon their herds, and hunter-fisher folk of the Arabian littoral, living in reed hut.
S?marr? Culture
S?marr? is a town in Irak. It stands on the east bank of the Tigris in the Salah ad Din Governorate, 125 kilometers (78 mi) north of Baghdad and, in 2002, had an estimated population of 200,000. Medieval Islamic writers believed that the name “Samarra” is derived from the Arabic phrase, “Sarre men ra’a” which translates to “A joy for all who see”. Though the present archaeological site covered by mudbrick ruins is vast, the site of Samarra was only lightly occupied in ancient times, apart from the Chalcolithic Samarran Culture (ca 5500–4800 BC) identified at the rich site of Tell Sawwan, where evidence of irrigation—including flax— establishes the presence of a prosperous settled culture with a highly organized social structure. The culture is primarily known by its finely-made pottery decorated against dark-fired backgrounds with stylized figures of animals and birds and geometric designs. This widely-exported type of pottery, one of the first widespread, relatively uniform pottery styles in the Ancient Near East, was first recognized at Samarra. The Samarran Culture was the precursor to the Mesopotamian culture of the Ubaid period. A city of Sur-marrati, refounded by Sennacherib in 690 BC according to a stele in the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, is insecurely identified with a fortified Assyrian site of Assyrian at al-Huwaysh, on the Tigris opposite to modern Samarra. Ancient toponyms for Samarra noted by the Samarra Archaeological Survey are: Greek: Souma (Ptolemy V.19, Zosimus III, 30), Latin: Sumere, a fort mentioned during the retreat of the army of Julian the Apostate in 364 AD(Ammianus Marcellinus XXV, 6, 8), and Syriac Sumra (Hoffmann, Auszüge, 188; Michael the Syrian, III, 88), described as a village. The possibility of a larger population was offered by the opening of the Qatul al-Kisrawi, the northern extension of the Nahrawan canal which drew water from the Tigris in the region of Samarra, attributed by Yaqut (Mu`jam see under “Qatul”) to the Sassanid king Khosrau I Anushirvan (531–578). To celebrate the completion of this project, a commemorative tower (modern Burj al-Qa’im) was built at the southern inlet south of Samarra, and a palace with a “paradise” or walled hunting park was constructed at the northern inlet (modern Nahr al-Rasasi) near to al-Daur. A supplementary canal, the Qatul Abi al-Jund, excavated by the Abbasid Caliph Harun al-Rashid, was commemorated by a planned city laid out in the form of a regular octagon (modern Husn al-Qadisiyya), called al-Mubarak and abandoned unfinished in 796.
Halafian culture
Halafian (Tell Halaf ) culture, characterized by glazed pottery painted with geometric and animal designs. The site dates to the 6th millennium BCE and was later the location of the Aramaean city-state of Guzana or Gozan. The site is located near the village of R’as al ‘Ayn in the fertile Khabur valley (Nahr al Khabur) through which the Khabur river flows, close to the modern border with Turkey. The name Tell Halaf is a local Arabic placename, tell meaning “hill” in Arabic, and Tell Halaf meaning “made of former city”; what its original inhabitants called their settlement is not known. It was discovered in 1899 by Baron Max von Oppenheim, a German diplomat, while he was surveying the area to build the Baghdad Railway. At the time, Syria was under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. He returned to excavate the site from 1911 to 1913 and then again 1929, now under French stewardship following the creation of modern Syria. Oppenheim took many of the artifacts found to Berlin. In 2006, new Syro-German excavations have started under the common direction of Lutz Martin (Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin), Mirko Novák (University of Tuebingen), Joerg Becker (University of Halle) and Abd al-Masih Bagdo (Directorate of Antiquities Hassake). Von Oppenheim founded the Tell Halaf museum in Berlin to house his discoveries from the site. The museum was wrecked in a massive aerial bombardment in World War II, and many of the irreplaceable artifacts were damaged or destroyed, in what is considered one of the worst losses to have occurred in Near Eastern archaeology. However, eighty cubic meters of basalt fragments were later rescued and stored away in the Pergamon Museum. In 2001, a restoration project commenced in Germany that has made some headway in reconstructing many of the damaged artifacts. Tell Halaf is the type site of Halafian culture, which developed from Neolithic III at this site without any strong break. The Tell Halaf site flourished from about 6000 to 5300 BCE, a period of time that is referred to as the Halafian period. The Halafian culture was succeeded in northern Mesopotamia by the Ubaid culture. The site was then abandoned for a long period. In the 10th century BCE, the rulers of the small Aramaean kingdom Bit Bahiani took their seat in Tell Halaf, which was re-founded as Guzana. King Kapara built the so-called Hilani, a palace in Neo-Hittite style with a rich decoration of statues and relief orthostats. In 894 the Assyrian king Adad-nirari II recorded the site in his archives as a tributary Aramaean city-state. In 808 the city and its surrounding area was reduced to a province of the Assyrian Empire. The governor’s seat was a palace in the eastern part of the citadel mound. Guzana has survived the collapse of the Assyrian Empire and remained inhabited until Roman-Parthian Period. Dryland farming was practiced by the population. This type of farming was based on exploiting natural rainfall without the help of irrigation, in a similar practice to that still practiced today by the Hopi people of Arizona. Emmer wheat, two-rowed barley and flax were grown. They kept cattle, sheep and goats.
Eridu
Eridu (or Eridug/Urudug, from Sumerian Er.i.dug, “House in Faraway Built” as an ancient city seven miles southwest of Ur. Eridu was the southernmost of the conglomeration of cities that grew about temples, almost in sight of one another, in Sumer, southern Mesopotamia. According to Sumerian mythology, Eridu was founded by the Sumerian deity named Enki, later known by the Akkadians as Ea. According to the Sumerian kinglist Eridu was the first city in the world. In Sumerian mythology, it was said to be one of the five cities built before the flood. It appears to be the earliest Sumerian settlement, most likely founded ca. 4000 BC close to the Persian Gulf near the mouth of the Euphrates River; but with accumulation of silt at the shoreline over the millennia, the remains of the city are now some distance from the gulf at Abu Shahrain in Iraq. In early Eridu, Enki’s temple was known as E.ab.zu (”home of the watery deep” due to Enki’s association with water), or the E-engur-a and was located at the edge of a swamp, an apsû. His consort, known by various names including Ninki, Ninhursag, Damgulnanna, Uriash and Damkina had a nearby temple, the E-sagila. According to Gwendolyn Leick, Eridu was formed at the confluence of three separate ecosystems, supporting three distinct lifestyles. The oldest agrarian settlement seems to have been based upon intensive subsistence irrigation agriculture derived from the Samarra culture to the north, characterised by the building of canals, and mud-brick buildings. The fisher-hunter cultures of the Arabian littoral were responsible for the extensive middens along the Arabian shoreline. They seem to have dwelt in reed huts. The third culture that contributed to the building of Eridu was the nomadic pastoralists of herds of sheep and goats living in tents in semi-desert areas. All three cultures seem implicated in the earliest levels of the city. The urban settlement was centered on an impressive temple complex built of mudbrick, within a small depression that allowed water to accumulate.
Kate Fielden reports “The earliest village settlement (c.5000 BC) had grown into a substantial city of mudbrick and reed houses by c.2900 BC, covering 8-10 ha (20-25 acres). By c.2050 BC the city had declined; there is little evidence of occupation after that date. Eighteen superimposed mudbrick temples at the site underlie the unfinished Ziggurat of Amar-Sin (c.2047-2039 BC). The apparent continuity of occupation and religious observance at Eridu provide convincing evidence for the indigenous origin of Sumerian civilization. The site was excavated chiefly between 1946 and 1949 by the Iraq Antiquities Department.” These archaeological investigations were carried out in the 1940s, which showed, according to Oppenheim, “Eventually the entire south lapsed into stagnation, abandoning the political initiative to the rulers of the northern cities,” and the city was abandoned in 600 BC. In the court of Assyria, special physicians trained in the ancient lore of Eridu, far to the south, foretold the course of sickness from signs and portents on the patient’s body, and offered the appropriate incantations and magical resources. the Sumerian king list, Eridu is named as the city of the first kings. The kinglist continues: In Eridu, Alulim became king; he ruled for 28800 years. Alaljar ruled for 36000 years. 2 kings; they ruled for 64800 years. Then Eridu fell and the kingship was taken to Bad-tibira. The king list gave particularly long rules to the kings who came before the “flood”, and shows how the centre of power progressively moved from the south to the north of the country. Adapa U-an, elsewhere called the first man, was a half-god, half-man culture hero, called by the title Abgallu (Ab=water, Gal=Great, Lu=Man) of Eridu. He was considered to have brought civilisation to the city from Dilmun (probably Bahrain), and he served Alulim. In Sumerian mythology, Eridu was the home of the Abzu temple of the god Enki, the Sumerian counterpart of the Akkadian water-god Ea. Like all the Sumerian and Babylonian gods, Enki/Ea began as a local god, who came to share, according to the later cosmology, with Anu and Enlil, the rule of the cosmos. His kingdom was the waters that surrounded the world and lay below it (Sumerian Ab = Water; Zu = far). The stories of Inanna, goddess of Uruk, describe how she had to go to Eridu in order to receive the gifts of civilisation. At first Enki, the god of Eridu attempted to retrieve these sources of his power, but later willingly accepted that Uruk now was the center of the land. This seems to be a mythical reference to the transfer of power northward, mentioned above. Babylonian texts also talk of the creation of Eridu by the god Marduk as the first city, “the holy city, the dwelling of their [the other gods] delight”. It can very well be that Eridu is linked to the Annunaki Some modern researchers, following David Rohl, have conjectured that Eridu, to the south of Ur, was the original Babel and site of the Tower of Babel, rather than the later city of Babylon, for a variety of reasons:
- The ziggurat ruins of Eridu are far larger and older than any others, and seem to best match the Biblical description of the unfinished Tower of Babel.
- One name of Eridu in cuneiform logograms was pronounced “NUN.KI” (”the Mighty Place”) in Sumerian, but much later the same “NUN.KI” was understood to mean the city of Babylon.
- The much later Greek version of the King-list by Berosus (c. 200 BC) reads “Babylon” in place of “Eridu” in the earlier versions, as the name of the oldest city where “the kingship was lowered from Heaven”.
- Rohl et al. further equate Biblical Nimrod, said to have built Erech (Uruk) and Babel, with the name Enmerkar (-KAR meaning “hunter”) of the king-list and other legends, who is said to have built temples both in his capital of Uruk and in Eridu.
Dilmun
Dilmun (sometimes transliterated Telmun) is an ancient civilization usually associated with archaeological sites on the islands of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf and the nearby coast, including Qatif. Because of its location along the sea trade routes linking Mesopotamia with the Indus Valley Civilization, Dilmun developed in the Bronze Age, from ca. 3000 BC, into one of the greatest entrepôts of trade of the ancient world. The first contact of the area with Southern Mesopotamia is attested during the Ubaid period (circa 5,300 BC-4,100 BC), with the finds of numerous sites showing the importation of the fine Ubaid were pottery. Prior to this period, shellfish middens attest to the presence of semi-permanent settlements of hunter-gatherer-fisherfolk of the Arabian bifacial industry tradition. There is both literary and archaeological evidence for the later trade between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley (probably correctly identified with the land called Meluhha in Akkadian). Impressions of clay seals from the Indus Valley city of Harappa were evidently used to seal bundles of merchandise, as clay seal impressions with cord or sack marks on the reverse side testify. A number of these Indus Valley seals have turned up at Ur and other Mesopotamian sites. “Persian Gulf” types of circular stamped rather than rolled seals, known from Dilmun, that appear at Lothal in Gujarat, India, and Failaka, as well as in Mesopotamia, are convincing corroboration of the long-distance sea trade. What the commerce consisted of is less sure: timber and precious woods, ivory, lapis lazuli, gold, and luxury goods such as carnelian and glazed stone beads, pearls from the Persian Gulf, shell and bone inlays, were among the goods sent to Mesopotamia in exchange for silver, tin, woolen textiles, olive oil and grains. Copper ingots, certainly, bitumen, which occurred naturally in Mesopotamia, may have been exchanged for cotton textiles and domestic fowl, major products of the Indus region that are not native to Mesopotamia— all these have been instanced. The importance of this trade is shown by the fact that the weights and measres used at Dilmun were in fact identical to those used by the Indus, and were not those used in Southern Mesopotamia. Mesopotamian trade documents, lists of goods, and official inscriptions mentioning Meluhha supplement Harappan seals and archaeological finds. Literary references to Meluhhan trade date from the Akkadian, the Third Dynasty of Ur, and Isin – Larsa Periods (ca. 2350 – 1800 BC), but the trade probably started in the Early Dynastic Period (ca. 2600 BC). Some Meluhhan vessels may have sailed directly to Mesopotamian ports, but by the Isin – Larsa Period, Dilmun monopolized the trade. By the subsequent Old Babylonian period, trade between the two cultures evidently had ceased entirely. The Bahrain National Museum assesses that its “Golden Age” lasted ca. 2200 – 1600 BC. Its decline dates from the time the Indus Valley civilization suddenly and mysteriously collapsed, in the middle of the 2nd millennium BC. This would of course have stripped Dilmun of its importance as a trading center between Mesopotamia and India. The decay of the great sea trade with the east may have affected the power shift northwards observed in Mesopotamia itself. Evidence about Neolithic human cultures in Dilmun comes from flint tools and weapons. From later periods, cuneiform tablets, cylinder seals, pottery and even correspondence between rulers throw light on Dilmun. Written records mentioning the archipelago exist in Sumerian, Akkadian, Persian, Greek, and Latin sources. There is mention of Dilmun as a vassal of Assyria in the 8th century BC and by about 600 BC, it had been fully incorporated into the Neo-Babylonian Empire. Dilmun then fell into deep eclipse marked by the decline of the copper trade, so long controlled by Dilmun, and the switch to a less important role in the new trade of frankincense and spices. The discovery of an impressive palace at the Ras al Qalah site in Bahrain is promising to increase knowledge of this late period. Otherwise, there is virtually no information until the passage of Nearchus, the admiral in charge of Alexander the Great’s fleet on the return from the Indus Valley. Nearchus kept to the Iranian coast of the Gulf, however, and cannot have stopped at Dilmun. Nearchus established a colony on the island of Falaika off the coast of Kuwait in the late 4th century BC, and explored the Gulf perhaps least as far south as Dilmun/Bahrain. From the time of Nearchus until the coming of Islam in the 7th century AD Dilmun/Bahrain was known by its Greek name of Tylos. The political history for this period is little known, but Tylos was at one point part of the Seleucid Empire, and of Characene and perhaps part of the Parthian Empire. Shapur II annexed it, together with eastern Arabia, into the Persian Sasanian empire in the 4th century. Dilmun, sometimes described as “the place where the sun rises” and “the Land of the Living”, is the scene of some versions of the Sumerian creation myth, and the place where the deified Sumerian hero of the flood, Ziusudra (Utnapishtim), was taken by the gods to live forever. Dilmun is also described in the epic story of Enki and Ninhursag as the site at which the Creation occurred. Ninlil, the Sumerian goddess of air and south wind had her home in Dilmun. It is also featured in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and is one of the sites that some theorists have proposed as the true location of the Garden of Eden. However, in the early epic “Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta”, the main events, which center on Enmerkar’s construction of the ziggurats in Uruk and Eridu, are described as taking place in a world “before Dilmun had yet been settled”. A Nigerian researcher and UN arts and culture ambassador, Catherine Acholonu-Olumba, has recently claimed that her deciphering of some of the text on the Ikom monoliths in southeast Nigeria proves that Dilmun was in fact Calabar. She has yet to publish any evidence
Kish
Kish [kish] (Tall al-Uhaymir) was an ancient city of Sumer, now in central Iraq. The Sumerian king list states it was the first city to have kings after the Deluge. A French archeological team under Henri de Genouillac excavated there between 1912 and 1914, and later an Anglo-American team under Stephen Langdon from 1923 to 1933. More than 5,000 years ago the first empire in the world was founded by the King of Kish. While the name of that king is lost to history along with most of the history of his empire, the imposing title remains. Ever since that time every emperor to conquer the area known as Sumeria, now in Iraq, from the Sargon, who overthrew Kish and established the Akkadian Empire, to Saddam Hussein has taken the title of King of Kish. For over 5,000 years that title has been synonymous with power. It has meant authority. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh despite all his power is a vassal of the King of Kish. While he makes an attempt to display that he could be independent, by defying Kish’s authority, his display is brief and in the end he comes back and pledges his fealty. Indeed, some scholars believe that both the ancient Sumerian and the Biblical flood stories arise from one of the greatest floods in history, the flood that destroyed Kish near the height of its power…while Kish recovered somewhat and had kings again this destruction enabled other empires to form. From what little we know of the Empire of Kish it appears to have operated a fairly centralized bureaucracy to run a system of tithe and tax that primarily dealt in agricultural goods and animals. The structure of Kishite bureaucracy and government can in some way be reconstructed from Akkadian practices, as the Akkadian kings copied much from the leaders of Kish who in turn preserved a great deal from the earlier days of the Empire. We can tell this because of the physical structures that have been excavated. Excavation of large buildings that appear to have been central storage facilities with attached office rooms for bureaucrats have told us much about both Kishite architecture and about the purposes that architecture may have served before it was buried in the great flood that practically leveled the city and ended its glory days.
Lagash
Lagash or Sirpurla was one of the oldest cities of Sumer and later Babylonia. It is represented by a rather low, long line of ruin mounds, now known as Tell al-Hiba in Iraq, northwest of the junction of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers and east of Uruk. It is positioned on the dry bed of an ancient canal, some 3 miles (5 km) east of the Shatt-el-Haj, and a little less than 10 miles (16 km) north of the modern town of Shatra in the district administered from Nasiriyah. Lagash ruins were discovered in 1877 by Ernest de Sarzec, at that time French consul at Basra, who was allowed, by the Montefich chief, Nasir Pasha, the first Wali-Pasha or governor-general of Basra, to excavate at his pleasure in the territories subject to that official. At the outset on his own, and later as a representative of the French government, under a Turkish firman, de Sarzec continued excavations at this site, with various intermissions, until his death in 1901, when the work was continued under the supervision of Gaston Cros. The principal excavations were made in two larger mounds, one of them proving to be the site of the temple E-Ninnu – shrine of the patron god of Lagash, Nin-girsu or Ninib. Later French archeological expeditions were led by Henri de Genouillac (1929-31) and Andre Parrot (1931-33). The site – This temple had been razed and a fortress built upon its ruins, in the Greek or Seleucid period, some of the bricks found bearing the inscription in Aramaic and Greek of a certain Hadad-nadin-akhe, king of a small Babylonian kingdom. It was beneath this fortress that numerous statues of Gudea were found, constituting the prize of the Babylonian collections at the Louvre. These had been decapitated and otherwise mutilated, and thrown into the foundations of the new fortress. From this stratum also came various fragments of bas reliefs of high artistic excellence. The excavations in the other larger mound resulted in the discovery of the remains of buildings containing objects of all sorts in bronze and stone, dating from the earliest Sumerian period onward, and enabling the art history of Babylonia to be traced to a date some hundreds of years before the time of Gudea. Apparently this mound had been occupied largely by store houses, where were stored not only grain, figs, etc., but also vessels, weapons, sculptures and every possible object connected with the use and administration of palace and temple. In a small outlying mound, de Sarzec discovered the archives of the temple — about 30,000 inscribed clay tablets containing the business records, and revealing with extraordinary minuteness, the administration of an ancient Babylonian temple, the character of its property, the method of farming its lands, herding its flocks, and its commercial and industrial dealings and enterprises; for an ancient Babylonian temple was a great industrial, commercial, agricultural and stock-raising establishment. Unfortunately, before these archives could be removed, the galleries containing them were rifled by looters, and large numbers of the tablets were sold to antiquity dealers, by whom they have been scattered all over Europe and America. From the inscriptions found at Telloh, it appears that Lagash was a city of great importance in the Sumerian period, some time probably in the 4th millennium BC. It was at that time ruled by independent kings, Ur-Nina (24th century BC) and his successors, who were engaged in contests with the Elamites on the east and the kings of “Kengi” and Kish on the north. With the Semitic conquest, it lost its independence, its rulers or patesis becoming vassals of Sargon of Akkad and his successors; but it remained Sumerian, continuing to be a city of much importance and above all, a centre of artistic development. Indeed, it was in this period and under the immediately succeeding supremacy of the kings of Ur, Ur-Gur and Dungi, that it reached its highest artistic development. After the collapse of Sargon’s Empire under pressure from the Guti tribes, Lagash again thrived under the patesis Ur-baba (Ur-bau) and Gudea, and had extensive commercial communications with distant realms. According to his own records, Gudea brought cedars from the Amanus and Lebanon mountains in Syria, diorite from eastern Arabia, copper and gold from central and southern Arabia and from Sinai, while his armies were engaged in battles in Elam on the east. His was especially the era of artistic development. Gudea, following Sargon, was one of the first rulers to claim divinity for himself; and we have even a fairly good idea of what Gudea looked like, since he had his numerous statues or idols depicting himself with unprecedented, lifelike realism, placed in temples throughout Sumer. Gudea took advantage of artistic development because he evidently wanted posterity thousands of years later to know exactly what he looked like, and in that he has succeeded — a feat that was available to him as royalty, but not to the common people who could not afford to have statues engraved of themselves. Some of the earlier works of Ur-Nina, En-anna-tum, Entemena and others, before the Semitic conquest, are also extremely interesting, especially the famous stele of the vultures and a great silver vase ornamented with what may be called the coat of arms of Lagash: a lion-headed eagle with wings outspread, grasping a lion in each talon. After the time of Gudea, Lagash seems to have lost its importance; at least we know nothing more about it until the construction of the Seleucid fortress mentioned, when it seems to have become part of the Greek kingdom of Characene. The objects found at Telloh are the most valuable art treasures up to this time discovered in Babylonia. At the time of Gudea, the capital of Lagash was really Girsu (Telloh). The kingdom covered an area of approximately 1,600 km². It contained 17 bigger towns, eight district capitals, and numerous villages (about 40 known by name).
Nippur
The city of Nippur [nipoor'] (Sumerian Nibru, Akkadian Nibbur) was one of the most ancient 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. Indeed, in Sumerian cuneiform, the signs read ‘Nibru’ and ‘Enlil’ are the same. 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. 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.”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. 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. 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. Somewhere, apparently, in the 4th millennium BC, we begin to find inscriptions written on clay, in an almost linear script, in the Sumerian tongue. 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. 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-zagesi 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. So on their votive offerings some of these rulers designate themselves as ensis, or governors. Early 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. 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-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. 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 greatlyfacilitated 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. 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. Rim-Sin, biblical Arioci), the Elamite king of Larsa, styles himself “shepherd of the land of Nippur.” 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. Under the succeeding Cossaean 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. 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. 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 BC 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. As at Telloh, 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 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. For an account of one of the most interesting fragments of a literary or religious character, found at Nippur.
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 vavious 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 BC, 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. 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 BC. 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. 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 was a suburb of Nippur. Some of its cuneiform archives are at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto. There are Neo-Sumerian economic texts in the Drehem archives, and enough cuneiform tablets to permit a tentative description of its administration.
Ur
Ur was an ancient city in southern Mesopotamia, located near the original mouth of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers on the Persian Gulf and close to Eridu. Because of marine regression, the remains are now well inland in present-day Iraq, south of the Euphrates on its right bank at 30°57.75′N 46°6.18′E, and named Tell el-Mukayyar near the city of Nasiriyah south of Baghdad. The site is marked by the ruins of the ziggurat (right), still largely intact, and by the settlement mound. The ziggurat is a temple of Nanna, the moon deity in Sumerian mythology, and has two stages constructed from brick: in the lower stage the bricks are joined together with bitumen, in the upper stage they are joined with mortar. Ur was inhabited in the earliest stage of village settlement in southern Mesopotamia, the Ubaid period. However it later appears to have been abandoned for a time. Scholars believe that, as the climate changed from relatively moist to drought in the early 3rd millennium BC, the small farming villages of the Ubaid culture consolidated into larger settlements, arising from the need for large-scale, centralized irrigation works to survive the dry spell. Ur became one such center, and by around 2600 BC, in the Sumerian Early Dynastic Period III, the city was again thriving. Ur by this time was considered sacred to Nanna. The location of Ur was favorable for trade by sea and also by land routes into Arabia. Many elaborate tombs including that of Queen Puabi were constructed. Eventually the kings of Ur became the effective rulers of Sumer, in the first dynasty of Ur established by the king Mesannepada (or Mesanepada, Mes-Anni-Padda).The first dynasty was ended by an attack of Sargon of Akkad around 2340 BC. Not much is known about the following second dynasty, when the city was in eclipse. The third dynasty was established when the king Ur-Nammu (or Urnammu) came to power, ruling between ca. 2112 BC and 2094 BC. During his rule, temples, including the ziggurat, were built, and agriculture was improved through irrigation. His code of laws (a fragment was identified in Istanbul in 1952) is one of the oldest such documents known, preceding the code of Hammurabi. He and his successor Shulgi were both deified during their reigns, and after his death, he continued as a hero-figure: one of the surviving works of Sumerian literature describes the death of Ur-Nammu and his journey to the underworld.The third dynasty fell around 1950 BC to the Elamites; the Lament for Ur commemorates this event. Later, Babylon captured the city.In the 6th century BC there was new construction in Ur under the rule of Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon. The last Babylonian king, Nabonidus, improved the ziggurat. However the city started to decline from around 550 BC and was no longer inhabited after about 500 BC, perhaps owing to drought, changing river patterns, and the silting of the outlet to the Persian Gulf.
Biblical Ur
Ur is considered by many to be the city of Ur Kasdim mentioned in the Book of Genesis as the birthplace of Abraham. Ur is mentioned four times in the Tanakh or Old Testament, with the distinction “of the Kasdim/Kasdin” — traditionally rendered in English as “Ur of the Chaldees”, referring to the Chaldeans, who were already settled there by around 900 BC. Ur is said to be the birthplace of the patriarch Abram (Abraham). In Genesis, the name is found in 11:28, 11:31 and 15:7. In Nehemiah 9:7, a single passage mentioning Ur is a paraphrase of Genesis. The Book of Jubilees states that Ur was founded in 1687 Anno Mundi (year of the world) by ‘Ur son of Kesed, presumably the offspring of Arphaxad, adding that in this same year, wars began on Earth. “And ‘Ur, the son of Kesed, built the city of ‘Ara of the Chaldees, and called its name after his own name and the name of his father. (ie, Ur Kesdim)” (Jubilees 11:3) In the mid-17th century, the site was visited by Pietro della Valle, who recorded the presence of ancient bricks stamped with strange symbols, cemented together with bitumen, as well as inscribed pieces of black marble that appeared to be seals. The first excavation was made by British consul J.E. Taylor, who partly uncovered the ziggurat. Clay cylinders found in the four corners of the top stage of the ziggurat bore an inscription of Nabonidus (Nabuna`id), the last king of Babylon (539 BC), closing with a prayer for his son Belshar-uzur (Bel-?arra-Uzur), the Belshazzar of the Book of Daniel. Evidence was found of prior restorations of the ziggurat by Ishme-Dagan of Isin and Gimil-Sin of Ur, and by Kuri-galzu, a Kassite king of Babylon in the 14th century BC. Nebuchadnezzar also claims to have rebuilt the temple. Taylor further excavated an interesting Babylonian building, not far from the temple, part of an ancient Babylonian necropolis. All about the city he found abundant remains of burials of later periods. Apparently, in the later times, owing to its sanctity, Ur became a favourite place of sepulture, so that even after it had ceased to be inhabited it still continued to be used as a necropolis. After Taylor’s time the site was visited by numerous travellers, almost all of whom have found ancient Babylonian remains, inscribed stones and the like, lying upon the surface. The site was considered rich in remains, and relatively easy to explore. Excavations from 1922 to 1934 were funded by the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania and led by the archaeologist Sir Charles Leonard Woolley. A total of about 1,850 burials were uncovered, including 16 that were described as “royal tombs” containing many valuable artifacts, including the Standard of Ur. Most of the royal tombs were dated to about 2600 BC. The finds included the unlooted tomb of Queen Puabi [2] – her name is known from a cylinder seal found in the tomb. Many other people had been buried with her, in a form of human sacrifice. Near the ziggurat were uncovered the temple E-nun-mah and buildings E-dub-lal-mah (built for a king), E-gi-par (residence of the high priestess) and E-hur-sag (a temple building). Outside the temple area, many houses used in everyday life were found. Excavations were also made below the royal tombs layer: a 3.5m thick layer of alluvial clay covered the remains of earlier habitation, including pottery from the Ubaid period, the first stage of settlement in southern Mesopotamia. Woolley later wrote many articles and books about the discoveries. Most of the treasures excavated at Ur are in the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Archaeological names of periods of habitation include: Ubaid period; Sumerian Early Dynastic period III Ur-III, c. 2100 BC–2000 BC
Uruk
Uruk (Sumerian Unug, Biblical Erech, Greek Orchoë and Arabic Warka), was an ancient city of Sumer and later Babylonia, situated east of the present bed of the Euphrates, on the line of the ancient Nil canal, in a region of marshes, about 140 miles SSE from Baghdad. The modern name of Iraq is possibly derived from the name Uruk. It was one of the oldest and most important cities of Sumer. Its walls were said to have been built by order of Gilgamesh, or rather, his predecessor Enmerkar, who also constructed, it was said, the famous temple called Eanna, dedicated to the worship of Inanna (Ishtar). Its voluminous surviving temple archive of the Neo-Babylonian period, documents the social function of the temple as a redistribution center. In times of famine, a family might dedicate children to the temple as oblates. Uruk played a very important part in the political history of the country from an early time, exercising hegemony in Babylonia at a period before the time of Sargon. Later it was prominent in the national struggles of the Babylonians against the Elamites up to 2004 BC, in which it suffered severely; recollections of some of these conflicts are embodied in the Gilgamesh epic, in the literary and courtly form that has come down to us.
Oppenheim states, “In Uruk, in southern Mesopotamia, Sumerian civilization seems to have reached its creative peak. This is pointed out repeatedly in the references to this city in religious and, especially, in literary texts, including those of mythological content; the historical tradition as preserved in the Sumerian king-list confirms it. From Uruk the center of political gravity seems to have moved to Ur.”
According to the Sumerian king list, Uruk was founded by Enmerkar, who brought the official kingship with him from the city of Eanna. His father Mesh-ki-ag-gasher had “entered the sea and disappeared”. Other historical kings of Uruk include Lugalzagesi of Umma (now Djokha) (who conquered Uruk), and Utuhegal. Uruk was first excavated by a German team led by Julius Jordan before World War I. This expedition returned in 1928 and made further excavations until 1939, then returned in 1954 under the direction of H. Lenzen and made systematic excavations over the following years. These excavations revealed some early Sumerian documents and a larger cache of legal and scholarly tablets of the Seleucid period, that have been published by Adam Falkenstein and other German epigraphists.
Larsa
Larsa modern Tall Sankarah, was one of the ancient capital cities of Babylonia, located about 20 miles (32 km) southeast of Uruk (Erech; Arabic Tall al-Warka’), in southern Iraq. Larsa was probably founded in prehistoric times, but the most prosperous period of the city coincided with an independent dynasty inaugurated by a king named Naplanum (c. 2025-c. 2005 BC); he was a contemporary of Ishbi-Erra, who founded a dynasty at the rival city of Isin. Naplanum was succeeded by a line of 13 kings, many of whom exercised great authority in Babylonia and represented the new hegemony of Semitic Akkadian elements that superseded the Sumerians. Isin and Larsa seem to have existed in a state of armed neutrality for more than a century during the time when each city was consolidating its rule. Isin was initially recognized as dominant at Ur, but business records on clay tablets found in the latter city show that by the time of the fifth and sixth kings of Larsa, Gungunum (c. 1932-c. 1906 BC) and Abisare (1905-1895), Larsa was already on the road to dominance. The 12th king of the dynasty, Silli-Adad (c. 1835), reigned for only a year and was then deposed by a powerful Elamite, Kutur-Mabuk, who installed his son Warad-Sin (1834-23) as king. This act apparently caused little disruption in the economic life of Larsa, and this was in fact a most prosperous period, as many thousands of business documents attest. Agriculture and stockbreeding flourished; much attention was given to irrigation; and long-distance trade connected the Euphrates with the Indus valley through commerce in hides, wool, vegetable oil, and ivory. Under Warad-Sin’s son Rim-Sin (1822-1763), the arts, especially the old Sumerian scribal schools, received great encouragement. The days of Larsa were numbered, however, for Hammurabi of Babylon, who had long been determined to destroy his most dangerous enemy, defeated Rim-Sin in 1763 BC and substituted his own authority for that of Larsa over southern Mesopotamia. The brief excavations conducted in Larsa in 1933 by André Parrot revealed a ziggurat, a temple to the sun god, and a palace of Nur-Adad (c. 1865-c. 1850 BC), as well as many tombs and other remains of the Neo-Babylonian and Seleucid periods.
Kish
Kish (Sumerian KIŠKI, modern Tall al-Uhaymir) was an ancient city of Sumer, situated some 12 km east of Babylon, now ca. 80 km south of Baghdad, in the Babil Governorate, Iraq. The Sumerian king list states it was the first city to have kings after the Deluge. The city’s patron deity was Zababa. The once-majestic city of Kish is today only ruins. It lies between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, about 8 miles (13 kilometers) east of the site of Babylon in what is now Iraq. Inscriptions in the ruins state that it was “the first city founded after the Flood.” As the traditional first capital of the Sumerians, Kish was an early center of civilization (see Babylonia and Assyria). In ancient times, the area was fertile. The Sumerians settled along a bend of the Euphrates River. They built a fortified city, more than 5 miles (8 kilometers) long and almost 2 miles (3 kilometers) wide. Until as late as the time of King Sargon I (about 2300 BC), Kish dominated the Near East. Then it declined because the Euphrates changed its course. Finally it was abandoned, and desert sand covered its ruins. Archaeologists excavated the ruins between 1923 and 1933. Digging to virgin soil, 60 feet (18 meters) below the top of the mound, the expedition found remains of several cultures, from Neolithic times to the Christian Era. A band of alluvial soil about 40 feet (12 meters) below the surface indicated that Kish had been flooded in about 3200 BC. Many take this to be evidence of the great Biblical flood. Astounding also was the discovery, below the flood stratum, of a four-wheeled chariot, the earliest known wheeled vehicle. Other discoveries showing the highly developed Sumerian civilization were thick-walled temple towers, canals, and a library with some of the earliest known writing.
Eshnunna
Eshnunna is the transliteration of the ancient name of a Sumerian city and city-state in lower Mesopotamia. Although situated in the Diyala Valley north-east of Sumer proper, the city nonetheless belonged securely within the Sumerian cultural milieu. The remains of the ancient city are now preserved in the mound of Tell Asmar, near Baqubah, excavated by an American team led by Henri Frankfort in the 1930s. The tutelary deity of the city was Tishpak (Tispak). Occupied from the Early Dynastic Period, Eshnunna was eventually drawn within the sphere of Third Dynasty of Ur, before achieving a short-lived political prominence – after Ur’s decline and fall – within the first two centuries of the second millennium BCE. At this time, Eshnunna again represented the focus of an independent polity of significant size and influence. Because of its control over lucrative trade routes, Eshnunna did function somewhat as a gateway between Mesopotamian and Iranian culture. The trade routes gave it access to many exotic, sought after goods such as horses, copper, tin, and other precious stones and metals. Eshnunna was ultimately conquered by Hammurabi, ruler of Babylon, and absorbed within the Old Babylonian Empire (sometimes called the First Babylonian Dynasty). Thereafter, the city appears but rarely within cuneiform textual sources, reflecting a probable decline and eventual disappearance. There is evidence that in c. 1755, just four years after its supposed capture, the entire town was ravaged by a terrible flood.
Umma
Umma (modern Tell Jokha) was an ancient city in Sumer, best known for its long frontier conflict with Lagash. The city reached its zenith ca. 2350BC, under the rule of Lugal-Zage-Si, who also controlled Ur and Uruk. The Umma calendar of Shulgi (ca. 21st century BC) is the immediate predecessor of the later Babylonian calendar, and indirectly of the post-exilic Hebrew calendar. During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, after Coalition bombing began, looters descended upon the site which is now pockmarked with hundreds of ditches and pits. The archaeological site is now being destroyed and its artifacts stolen. The prospects for future official excavation and research are being destroyed in the process, preventing official researchers from learning more about the history and culture of this place
Isin
Isin was a city of lower Mesopotamia, which flourished during the 20th century BC. No kings of Isin are known from the Sumerian period, and the “Dynasty of Isin” refers to Amorite states in lower Mesopotamia that attained independence with the decline of the Third dynasty of Ur. The dynasty of Isin ends at ca. 1730 BC short chronology. When the Third Dynasty of Ur slowly collapsed in at the end of the third millennium BCE, a power vacuum was left that the larger city-states scrambled to fill. The last king of the Ur Dynasty, Ibbi-Sin, had not the resources nor the organized government needed to expel the aggressive forces that were invading from Elam. One of his governmental officials, Ishbi-Erra, relocated from Ur to Isin, another city in the south of Mesopotamia, and established himself as a ruler there. Although he is not considered part of the Third Dynasty of Ur, Ishbi-Erra did make some attempts at continuing the dynasty, most likely to justify his rule. Ishbi-Erra had ill luck expanding his kingdom, however, for other city-states in Mesopotamia rose to power also. Eshnunna and Ashur were developing as powerful centers. However, he did have some military luck in defeating the Elamites who had invaded Ur to the point of retreat. This gave the Isin dynasty control over the culturally significant cities of Ur, Uruk, and the spiritual center of Nippur. For over 100 years, Isin flourished. Remains of large buildings projects, such as temples, have been excavated. Many royal edicts and law-codes from that period have been discovered. The centralized political structure of Ur III was basically continued, with Isin’s rulers appointing governors and other local officials to carry out their will in the provinces. Lucrative trade routes to the Arab-Persian gulf remained a crucial source of income for Isin. The exact events surrounding Isin’s rapid disintigration as a kingdom are largely unknown, but some evidence can be pieced together. Documents indicate that access to water sources presented a huge problem for Isin. Isin also endured an internal coup of a sort when a royally appointed governor of the Lagash province, Gungunum, seized the town of Ur. Ur had been the main center of the Gulf trade; thus this move economically crippled Isin. Additionally, Gungunum’s two successors Abisare and Sumu-el (c. 1905 and 1894) both sought to cut Isin off from its canals by rerouting them into Larsa. Somewhere in between, Nippur was also lost. Isin would never recover. Around 1860, an outsider named Enlil-bani seized the throne of Isin, ending the hereditary dynasty established by Ishbi-Erra over 150 years prior. Although politically and economically weak, Isin maintained its independence from Larsa for at least another forty years, finally succumbing to Larsa’s ruler Rim-Sin. Much of the major archaeological work at Isin was accomplished in the 1980s, by a team of German archaeologists. However, as was the case at many sites in Iraq, research was interrupted by the Gulf War (1990-1) and the Iraq War (2003 to present). Saddam Hussein treasured artifacts and sites of his national heritage, and acted to protect them as best he could. However, since his fall as a result of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the protection of Isin and many other sites has evaporated. Looters are destroying the site at an alarming rate, undoing the work done over the last several decades and preventing future research into the culture and history of Isin. Artifacts, including cuneiform tablets and cylinder seals, numbering in the tens or hundreds of thousands, have already been looted and sold to Western collectors and dealers. According to Simon Jenkins, “the remains of the 2000BC cities of Isin and Shurnpak appear to have vanished: pictures show them replaced by a desert of badger holes created by an army of some 300 looters” Ishbi-Erra continued many of the cultic practices that had flourished in the preceding Ur III period. He continued acting out the sacred marriage ritual each year. During this ritual, the king played the part of the mortal Dumuzi, and he had sex with a priestess who represented the goddess of love and war, Inanna (also known as Ishtar). This was thought to strengthen the king’s relationship to the gods, which would hopefully then bring stability and prosperity on the entire country. The Isin kings continued also the practice of appointing their daughters official priestesses of the moon god of Ur. The literature of the period also continued in the line of the Ur III traditions when the Isin dynasty was first begun. For example, the royal hymn, a genre started in the preceding millennium, was continued. Many royal hymns written for the Isin rulers mirrored the themes, structure, and language of the Ur ones. Sometimes the hymns were written in the first person of a king’s voice; other times, they were pleas of ordinary citizens meant for the ears of a king (sometimes an already dead one).It was during this period that the Sumerian king list attained its final form, though it used many much earlier sources. The very compilation of the List seems to lead up to the Isin Dynasty itself, which would give it much legitimacy in the minds of the people because the dynasty would then be linked to earlier (albeit sometimes legendary) kings.
