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Updated: May 9, 2025
A factor that contributed largely to the growth of the sacred precinct in the large centers was the circumstance that the political importance of such centers as Nippur, Lagash, Ur, Babylon, and Nineveh led the rulers to group around the worship of the chief deity, the cult of the minor ones who constituted the family or the court of the chief god.
The oldest known to us at present is the frequently mentioned temple of E-Kur at Nippur, sacred to En-lil or the older Bel. Its history can be carried back to a period beyond 4000 B.C.; how far beyond cannot be determined until the early chronology is better known than at present.
At a very early period Babylon itself was not a capital and Nineveh had not come into existence. The important cities, such as Nippur and Shirpurla, were situated farther to the south.
While the Cassites do not come to the front till the eighteenth century, at which time the center of their kingdom is Nippur, there is every reason to believe that they were settled in the Euphrates Valley long before that period.
It is now known that the temple of Bel at Nippur antedates the reign of Naram-Sin, and in the further publications of the University, we may look for material which will enable us to pass beyond the period of Sargon. Sunday School Times, 1895, no. 41.
Ur-Bau, we have seen, about 2700 B.C., erected a zikkurat in the temple area. Some centuries later we find Bur-Sin repairing the zikkurat and adding a shrine near the main structure. As the political fortunes of Nippur varied, so E-Kur had its ups and downs.
The fact that in the later Sumerian account their creation is related between that of mankind and the building of Nippur and Erech cannot be cited in support of this suggestion, in view of the absence of those cities from our text and of the process of editing to which the later version has been subjected, with a consequent disarrangement of its episodes.
The priests of Nippur, of Sippar, of Eridu, of Erech, Cuthah, Ur, and other places began long before the period of Hammurabi to compile, on the basis of past experience and as a guide for future needs, omen lists, incantation formulas, and sacrificial rituals.
It is interesting to note that Gudea mentions a hall of judgment in the temple to Nin-girsu at Lagash. The number of such buildings attached to the temple precinct varied, of course, according to the needs and growth of each place. In Nippur, the numbers appear to have been very large.
Among the recently published documents from Nippur we have at last recovered one at least of those primitive originals from which the Babylonian accounts were derived, while others prove the existence of variant stories of the world's origin and early history which have not survived in the later cuneiform texts.
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