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Updated: May 9, 2025
As long as the various districts of Babylonia were not formally united under one head, various local cults might rise to equally large proportions, while the gods worshipped as the special patrons of the great centers, as Lagash, Ur, Uruk, Nippur, and the like, would retain their prominence, even though the political status of the cities sacred to them suffered a decline.
The two large brick columns at the entrance to the Nippur court are paralleled in the case of the Solomonic temple by the two large columns, known as Yakhin and Boaz, that stood at the gateway. These names are as yet unexplained.
In the north was Nippur, now Niffer, whose great temple of Mul-lil or El-lil, the Lord of the Ghost-world, was a centre of Babylonian religion for unnumbered centuries.
Thus we have no guarantee that the other cities referred to by name in the text, Nippur, Erech, and Eridu, are mentioned in any significant connexion with each other. Of the actual cause of Creation the text appears to give two versions also, one in its present form impersonal, and the other carried out by a god.
It is also on a knob which contains remains of an iron stick, to which, evidently, the knob was fastened. Written A-e. Hilprecht, Old Babylonian Inscriptions, i. 1, p. 58. In reality, glass colored with cobalt. On this production of false lapis lazuli, see Peters' Nippur, ii. 134. For examples, see Hilprecht, ib., pl. 18, no. 34; pl. 23, nos. 56, 57; pl. 25, nos. 66, 69; pl. 26, no. 70.
From one came the nation, from the other the god. It is in this way that they fuse. To the composite, if it be one, history added a heightening touch. The Khammurabi legislation came from Bel, who, originally, was a local sun-god of Nippur. There he was regarded as the possessor of the Chaldean Urim and Thummin, the tablets of destiny with which he cast the fates of men.
That the columns at Nippur were erected in accordance with recognized custom follows from De Sarzec's discovery of two enormous round columns within the sacred quarter of Lagash. In the light of Peters' excavations, the significance of the columns at Lagash becomes clear.
Their symbolic character, apart from other evidence, may be concluded from the circumstance that, as Schick has shown, the columns stood free, and did not serve as a support for any part of the gateway. There is no need, therefore, for any hesitation in comparing these two columns, whose presence in the Solomonic structure is certainly due to foreign influence, to those found at Nippur.
In the upper strata of the ruins of Nippur, hundreds of clay bowls were found, inscribed with Jewish inscriptions, in the Aramaic dialect that was spoken by the Babylonian Jews. Similar bowls were found elsewhere in the mounds of the Euphrates Valley. These bowls indicate the presence of Jews in various parts of the country.
The diggings at Nippur furnished indications that certain inscriptions found on that site and written in a very archaic form of script were to be assigned to a period earlier than that of Sargon. One class of evidence was obtained from a careful study of the different levels at which the inscriptions and the remains of buildings were found.
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