Shuruppak

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Coordinates: 31°46′38.51″N, 45°30′35.14″E Shuruppak (also Shuruppag "the healing place", modern Tell Fara, Iraq) was an ancient Sumerian city situated south of Nippur on the banks of the Euphrates in what is now Al-Qādisiyyah, in south-central Iraq [1].

Shuruppak was dedicated to Ninlil, also called Sud, the goddess of grain and the air.

1 History
2 Archaeology
3 See also
4 References

[edit] History

Shuruppak became a grain storage and distribution city and had more silos than any other Sumerian city. The earliest excavated levels at Shuruppak date to the Jemdet Nasr period about 3,000 BC; it was abandoned shortly after 2,000 BC. Schmidt found one Isin-Larsa cylinder seal and several pottery plaques which may date to early in the second millennium BC. ^[1] Surface finds are predominantly Early Dynastic. ^[2]

At the end of the Uruk period there was an archaeologically attested river flood in Shuruppak. Polychrome pottery from a destruction level below the flood deposit has been dated to the Jemdet Nasr period that immediately preceded the Early Dynastic I period.^[3] ^[4]

[edit] Archaeology

It was first excavated in 1902 by the "Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft". ^[5] In 1931 the University of Pennsylavania excavated Shuruppak for a further six week season with Erich Schmidt as director. ^[6]

[edit] See also

History of Sumer

[edit] References

^ Harriet P. Martin, FARA: A reconstruction of the Ancient Mesopotamian City of Shuruppak, Birmingham, UK: Chris Martin & Assoc., (1988)p. 44, p. 117 and seal no. 579.
^ Robert McC. Adams, Heartland of Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), Fig. 33 compared with Fig. 21.
^ Schmidt (1931)
^ Martin (1988)pp. 20-23
^ Ernst Heinrich and Walter Andrae, ed. "Fara, Ergebnisse der Ausgrabungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft in Fara und Abu Hatab" (Berlin:Staatlich Museen zu Berlin, 1931),
^ Erich Schmidt, Excavations at Fara, 1931, University of Pennsylvania's Museum Journal, 2 (1931), pp 193-217.