Kingdoms of Mesopotamia

The city states of Sumer formed one of the first great civilisations in human history (see feature link). This Near Eastern civilisation emerged a little way ahead of that of Africa's ancient Egypt, and up to a millennium before that of the Indus Valley culture. It developed out of the end of the Pottery Neolithic across the Fertile Crescent, a period which had seen Neolithic Farmer practices spread far and wide across the Near East and beyond.

As irrigation improved so the more southerly reaches of the Euphrates could at last be occupied by humans and their animals. Southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and the western edge of Iran) was subjected to permanent settlement, initially in the form of pastoralists but soon as farmers too. Cultures around the edges of this progression included the Hassuna and Samarra which began this settlement process, and perhaps elements of the Hissar culture in the Iranian highlands were also involved.

By the late fourth millennium BC, Sumer was divided into approximately a dozen city states which were independent of one another and which used local canals and boundary stones to mark their borders. Many early historical events in the region are found only in the Sumerian king list, which notates the rulers of the city states (and see feature link), but archaeology has also uncovered a wealth of detail.

Nippur (located in the modern town of Afak, close to the city of Diwaniyah, and still known as Nuffar or Niffer) was one of the oldest of all Sumerian cities. Its earliest occupation is sometimes dated to 5262 BC during the early Pottery Neolithic. Human habitation of southern Mesopotamia was only just about starting to become possible at this time, given advances in farming and irrigation techniques.

The city was (and its ruins still are) situated on both sides of the Shatt-en-Nil canal in the middle of the Babylonian plain. This canal was one of the Euphrates' earliest courses, lying between the river's modern course and the Tigris, almost a hundred and sixty kilometres to the south-east of Baghdad.

In the AD 1880s this was marshland, with the site being accessible only by boat, while Nippur's ruins cover 2.6 square kilometres of raised land. The first modern archaeological examination was carried out by Austen Layard in 1851. He was defeated by the climate after just two weeks of trench-opening.

Originally, Nippur (or Nibu in Sumerian) was a village of reed huts in those same marshes, but its settlement area gradually rose upwards as a result of continuous habitation and building work. Reed was replaced with mud brick, and a holy centre seems to have existed there almost from the very beginning. The city was regarded as sacred by many of the most powerful early kings who began to appear in the 'Early Dynastic I' period at the start of the third millennium BC.

Enmebaragesi was one of the early kings of Kish who achieved a level of domination over areas of Sumer, in the late twenty-seventh century BC. One of his outstanding achievements was the construction at Nippur of the temple of Enlil, the leading deity of the Sumerian pantheon, ruler of the cosmos and only subject to the god An. In fact, in Sumerian cuneiform, the local name of the city, Nibu, and the god Enlil are one and the same. Ninlil, Ninurta, and Ninnibru also had large temples, plus there were another twenty-two even in Kassite times.

Nippur gradually became the spiritual and cultural centre of Sumer. It was never the location of a major kingship, although it was claimed once or twice on a smaller scale. It had its own ensis though (an ensi was an early form of city ruler. The title eventually became a common descriptor for a city governor, especially when subordinated to a king in another city).

Even when protected by its third millennium city wall, it remained Sumer's central spiritual centre into the Amorite period in southern Mesopotamia when first Isin and then Babylon dominated. Largely it fulfilled the role of Sumer's centre of learning - a regional Oxford or Harvard - with scribes being trained there, and intellectual snobbery being part of its everyday discourse.

Rulers who succeeded in imposing their control over a swathe of the southern alluvium, necessarily including Nippur itself, celebrated and symbolised their sovereignty by making offerings, presumably in person, to Enlil in his temple of Ekur, since he was the overarching patron deity of the whole region. It seems improbable that any ruler could have made such offerings to Enlil when another was effectively in control of Nippur, so it can be accepted that rulers who offered inscribed bowls at Nippur were for at least a while acknowledged as 'king' at (but not of) Nippur.

Puzrish Dagan, today's Drehem, was a small city which was largely counted as a suburb of Nippur. Very little of note took place there. Instead it seems to have provided what today would be known as services. During the 'Ur III' period it supplied much of the livestock needed by the temples in Nippur (presumably both for priestly food and godly offerings).

Near East Kingdoms

Ancient Mesopotamia

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