Nibbur

Nibbur¹, also spelled Nippur, called Nibru in Sumerian, and whose remains are called نففر (Nuffar or Niffer)², was the center of an eponymous city state and, in 2250 B.C.E., was tied for the world's third largest city, with an estimated 30 thousand residents.³ It stood along a waterway, probably the former course of the al Furat (Euphrates) River, and was divided by canals. In 2000 BCE it was the tied for sixth largest city in the world⁴ and was part of the Ur Lugalate. In or shortly after 1800 BCE (short chronology) it was part of the Larsa Lugalate⁵, then part of Babilu (Babylon), then ruled by Kassites, and then again part of Babilu. It shared Babilu's fate in becoming part of Assur, then part of the Persian Malkate⁶, then part of Arche Seleukeia, then part of the Arsakou Basileos-Basileonate (Arsacid Empire or Parthia).⁷ The city remained vigorous in the Sassanian period (Eranshahr) and the early Islamic period (until about 800).⁸ Thereafter it diminished to a village along a canal near the ziggurrat. Another village existed in the Nibbur ruins in the 15th century. Small villages or hamlets again appeared in the Nibbur ruins in the Ottoman period and they persist today.

External References

Ziggurrat at Nibbur (Nippur)

Footnotes

1. In Akkadian and Sumerian, the city name was written in Cuneiform. This cannot be rendered in most browsers although unicode for it exists.
2. My Arabic script omits vowels; the strength of this presumption rests on variance in Anglicized transcriptions.
3. Tables of the World's Largest Cities, "2250 B.C." table, in Tertius Chandler, Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth, 2nd ed. (The Edwin Mellen Press, 1987). It was the second largest city in what is now Iraq.
4. Tables of the World's Largest Cities, "2000 B.C." table, ibid.. It was tied for the third largest city in what is now Iraq.
5. Irra-imiti was ruler in 1800 BCE short chronology. It was during his reign that Isin lost possession of Nibbur to Larsa, see Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq, 3rd ed. (Penguin Books, 1992).
6. Maps I have included shown the name in Aramaic script as NBBR (transliterated and without vowels) but I am not sure whether the the name changed. Georges Roux says (ibid., pg. 416) that its fate was unknown in the Seleucid period so it may never have acquired enough attention to get a Greek name. A wiki article, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nippur, accessed 4/18/2010, says that there was a Jewish settlement from before the Arab period until the 20th century and a Christian bishopric in the 12th century C.E. It is probable that these residents spoke a form of Aramaic as did their co-religionists in the area. So the Arabic name, Nufffar, may never have been the name used by residents while it was inhabited. In any case the script to render the Aramaic became locally different than Imperial Aramaic, and probably became cursive--see M. O'Connor, "Epigraphic Semitic Scripts" in Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., The World's Writing Systems. I have not shown these changes on my map.
7. Roux, ibid., pg. 419.
8. http://oi.uchicago.edu/research/projects/nip/pon.html, accessed 5/8/2010.