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Cities: Nippur
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In the desert, a hundred miles south of Baghdad, lies the tell (mound) of Nippur. At sixty feet high and almost a mile across, the site preserves an unparalleled archaeological record spanning more than six thousand years. For thousands of years Nippur was the religious center of Mesopotamia, where Enlil, the supreme Sumerian god was worshipped. The city was the focus of pilgrimages and royal building programs. In 1888 the University of Pennsylvania sponsored the first American expedition ever to work in Mesopotamia and chose to excavate at Nippur. Their main achievements included finding the temple of Enlil and recovering more than thirty thousand cuneiform tablets. More than eighty percent of all known Sumerian literary compositions have been found at Nippur, including a Flood Story and tales of Gilgamesh. In 1948 a joint excavation team from the Universities of Chicago and Pennsylvania began work at Nippur. The archaeologists discovered the remains of a temple dedicated to the queen of heaven, Inanna. They revealed numerous rebuildings of the temple, one upon the other, dating from 3200 B.C. to A.D. 100 with thousands of artifacts.
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