City map of Nippur

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Clay tablet with the city map of Nippur

The city ​​map of Nippur from the middle of the 2nd millennium BC BC is the fragment of an ancient oriental clay tablet with a topographical representation of the city of Nippur (in today's Iraq ), the religious center of Mesopotamia . The map is often referred to as the oldest known city ​​map in the world.

The clay tablet is now 21.5 by 17 centimeters, 4.3 centimeters thick and in good condition. It was found during the University of Pennsylvania's fourth excavation campaign between 1899 and 1900 under the direction of the German-American Assyriologist Hermann Volrath Hilprecht . Today the tablet is part of the Hilprecht collection at the University of Jena .

Historical background

Map of Babylonia at the time of Hammurabi

Nippur was one of the oldest cities in Mesopotamia and was located at the time of the Sumerians on the Euphrates River (which today runs further west). Traces of settlement go back to the fifth millennium BC. The city was the religious center of Sumer , comparable in importance to today's Mecca or Jerusalem . The temple of Enlil , the main god of the Sumerian pantheon, was located in Nippur .

The city reached its first greatest expansion in the so-called Ur-III period - the Sumerian Renaissance - around 2100 BC. In the following four centuries, however, Nippur shrank again, while rivalries broke out between the southern Mesopotamian cities. Eventually, political and religious power shifted in the 18th century BC. Under the rule of Hammurabi to Babylon in the north. The Babylonian god Marduk ousted Enlil and Nippur thus lost its importance as a religious center. Hammurapi's son Šamšu-iluna eventually lost control of the southern cities of Mesopotamia. Riots broke out there and much of the population fled to the north. Nippur also suffered from a lack of water after Šamšu-iluna diverted the course of the Euphrates in order to bring his adversary Rim-Sin II to his knees, the Nippur around 1742 BC. Chr. Held occupied. As a result, the southern cities were almost completely deserted. After 1720 BC BC there was probably little more than a small village left of Nippur.

In the middle of the 2nd millennium BC The Kassites conquered Babylonia and rebuilt numerous old Sumerian cities. The Kassites found Nippur crumbling and covered by sand dunes after centuries of devastation. During the reconstruction of the city in the 14th and 13th centuries BC BC one orientated oneself on the ground plans of the previous buildings. It is therefore believed that the Kassites themselves carried out archaeological digs to identify lost buildings. The clay tablet is dated around that time with the city map.

Archaeological Aspects

Ruins of the ziggurat in Nippur

Find situation

In his book Explorations in Bible Lands , Hermann Volrath Hilprecht writes about the excavations in Nippur he directed. According to this, the fragment with the city map was found in a terracotta vessel immediately after its arrival at the excavation site in March 1900 , which contained a total of around twenty valuable clay tablets from different eras. According to Hilprecht's interpretation, the contents of the vessel represent a kind of small museum of an ancient collector from the New Babylonian Empire of the 6th century BC. Chr.

Shortly after the publication of Explorations in Bible Lands , the former expedition leader of the excavation campaign John P. Peters publicly raised allegations against Hilprecht that he had made misleading information about the origin of individual finds; In his book, Hilprecht tried to give the impression that pieces of earlier excavations were later excavated under his direction. The so-called Peters-Hilprecht controversy gained public attention in 1905 because of Hilprecht's popularity and made some headlines in the daily newspapers of the time. One of the points of contention was the exact location of the plaque with the city map. The University of Pennsylvania set up a commission to clarify the issues at which the expedition architect at the time, Clarence S. Fisher, stated that he had received the plaque a few months before Hilprecht's arrival in October 1899 for cleaning and marking. Accordingly, according to Fisher, it could not come from the said vessel with the collection. The actual circumstances of the find, however, could no longer be clarified even by the questioning of the commission.

Dating

The clay tablet was dated using palaeographic methods, i.e. the analysis of the characters, syntax and language. For example, the spelling of numbers, units of length or the designation of geographical objects can provide information on the possible age. Accordingly, a temporal classification of around 1400 BC applies. BC as the most likely - that is, between the end of the Hammurabi dynasty and the beginning of the Kassite epoch . The city map is therefore often referred to in the literature as the “Kassite city map of Nippur”, although a clear assignment to the Kassites is not guaranteed. However, later excavations in the 1970s support the thesis of assignment to the Kassite era.

description

In the center of the map is the Sumerian name of the city of Nippur En-Lil-Ki "The Place of Enlil ". The map shows the city walls with the city gates, rivers, some temples, parks and, outside the city, the moats. The elements are each labeled with partly Akkadian , partly Sumerian names. The individual sections of the city walls are provided with dimensions throughout. Apparently the map does not show the complete city structure, but only a few selected objects. The main focus is on the city walls and their gates.

Canals and city walls are shown as parallel pairs of lines. The lines are straight and angled - the use of naturally curved shapes, on the other hand, is seldom on clay tablets because of the difficult drawing technique. (However, some other maps also use wave patterns for rivers, see section Comparable Artifacts .) The cartographer used abstract line signatures for the city gates and entrances to the temple . In the case of the canals and city gates, the labels run in the signature band or in the direction of the city gates, otherwise they are horizontally aligned. Dimensions are set directly on the lines of the city walls, although the beginning and end of the dimensioning are sometimes somewhat unclear.

A special feature can be seen in the lower left corner of the map, where two parallel lines lead away from the city wall and are crossed out twice. Apparently the draftsman made a mistake here.

Location of the map

Overlay of the ancient city map on a modern topographic map (after Samuel N. Kramer)

Based on the lettering on the map and the name of the Ekur temple, it was early to assume that the map must actually be a real representation of the city of Nippur. However, their precise orientation and the question of the scale were initially unclear. Clarence S. Fisher presented in his book Excavations at Nippur , published in 1905, a first interpretation of the direction of the plan, in which he was mainly based on the two neighboring temples Ekur and Ekiur shown on the map. Since evidence of a forecourt was found southeast of the Ekur Temple, Fisher assumed that this must be the Ekiur Temple and oriented the map accordingly, so that the north direction on the map is rotated by about −45 degrees. Regarding the scale, Fisher assumed that the map would only show part of the city (around the ziggurat).

In 1955, the American Assyriologist Samuel Noah Kramer had the opportunity to study the clay tablet with the city map in the Jena Collection more closely, and for the first time published an edited copy of the tablet with translations of the cuneiform texts . On the basis of these new findings, Kramer rejected Fisher's thesis and suggested a north direction of about +45 degrees. Accordingly, contrary to Fisher's original theory, the map would show not just part of the city, but the entire city.

The interpretation of Kramer was largely confirmed by later excavations and research. In the 1970s, remnants of the city wall were found in the area of ​​the southern tip. The canal, labeled “Canal in the middle of the city” on the map, coincides with the course of the Schatt-en-Nil between the two elevations of the urban area. Evidence for the original course of the Euphrates west of the city was also found. The names of individual city gates could be associated with cities that lie in this direction; for example the Uruk Gate, which leads south to the city of Uruk .

According to the dimensions on the map, a scale of about 1: 9200 can be calculated. This scale figure also fits the georeferencing of the map proposed by Kramer and Gibson .

Labels

The following transcriptions of the inscriptions are taken from Kramer (German translations partly from Oelsner's recent findings on the city map of Nippur ). The numbers are listed on the accompanying card (identical for Kramer).

The ancient city map with color highlighting and translations of the inscriptions
  1. Enlilki - "The place of Enlil ", the ancient name for the city of Nippur
  2. Ekur - "mountain house", the temple pyramid ( ziggurat ), temple of Enlil
  3. Ekiur - Temple of Ninlil , the Gehmalin of Enlil. So far, no traces have been found for the existence of this temple. It is therefore assumed that this is either a faulty representation (or the cartographer's assumption regarding earlier developments) or a projected draft of the Kassite for the reconstruction of the city.
  4. Anniginna - "one-fifth enclosure" (reading and meaning uncertain). This area in the lowlands was probably uninhabited for a long time. Comparative studies with other Mesopotamian cities show that this pattern, that the city walls also enclose larger, low-lying open spaces in addition to the densely populated residential areas, is repeated. The purpose of these open spaces, however, is uncertain.
  5. Kirishauru - "Garden inside the city"
  6. Eshmah - Temple Eshmach (or "Sublime Sanctuary")
  7. Buranun - Sumerian name of the Euphrates river
  8. Nunbirdu - Nunbirdu Canal. The naming is of particular interest as the Nunbirdu Canal is also explicitly named in the creation myth of Enlil and Ninlil as the place where Ninlil first met her husband Enlil.
  9. Ijauru - "Canal inside the city". According to Kramer's orientation, the course of the canal corresponds to today's Schatt-en-Nil.
  10. Kagal Musukkatim - Gate of the "unclean women"
  11. Kagal Mah - Sublime Gate
  12. Kagal Gula - Great Gate. Gibson remarks about the Gula Gate that if one takes the deity Gula instead of the literal translation Gula "great" , the direction of the Gula gate takes on a wider meaning than the gate that leads to the city of Isin , the cult center of the city goddess Gula, leads. A Gula temple was also excavated in Nippur.
  13. Kagal Nanna - Nanna Gate. Nanna is the Sumerian moon god, son of Enlil and Ninlil.
  14. Kagal Uruk - Uruk Gate. The city of Uruk lies in the direction of the gate .
  15. Kagal Igibiurishe - "Gate that leads to Ur". The city of Ur lies in the direction of the gate .
  16. Kagal Nergal - Nergal Gate. Nergal is the god of the underworld , son of Enlil and Ninlil. The gate leads towards the city of Kutha , the main cult place of Nergal.
  17. Hiritum - moat
  18. like 17.

Dimensions

Example for a dimension "25"

No unit is given for the circumferential dimensions of the city walls entered on the map. However, it is assumed that this is Sumerian even , which consists of 12 cubit (about 50 centimeters). 1 corresponds to about 6 meters. The measurements were written in the map in the sexagesimal system . In addition to whole-number values, ½ even (by three angle hooks ? added on the right-hand side ) is sometimes also given.

If you add up the figures given for the western course of the city wall, you get: 68 + 42 + 46 + 16 = 172 even, i.e. about 1032 meters.

If you put the dimensions in relation to the corresponding route sections within the map, one can speak of a true-to-scale illustration. The question of how well the dimensions correspond to reality can only be answered to a limited extent, as a large part of the urban structure has not yet been secured by archaeological excavations. It can only be said that the map corresponds surprisingly well with the findings of the ruin.

Comparable artifacts

So far, the quality and completeness of the city map of Nippur is without a comparable example in the archeology of the Near East . In addition to this find there are only a few much smaller fragments from Sumerian and Babylonian times with map-like representations. Compared to the enormous amount of administrative or legal cuneiform texts , the share of cartographic images is extremely small.

Further finds with city maps:

  • Fragment of a city map of Tuba, a suburb of Babylon; around 605-562 BC Chr. (?); 7.9 × 10.7 centimeters. The plan shows the Euphrates (as a ribbon filled with a wave signature), the name Tuba and the Šamaš Gate. (British Museum, MB 35385)
  • Fragment of a plan of the temple of Enlil in Nippur or Babylon; late Babylonian (1st millennium BC); 7.5 × 4.5 centimeters. (British Museum, MB 73319)

There are also a number of smaller-scale maps showing fields and irrigation systems. For example, a map of the Nippur area around 1500 BC (University of Pennsylvania CBS 13885). Even larger-scale plans are known which show the layout of temples. A famous statue of Gudea on display in the Louvre holds an architectural drawing for a temple complex on her lap along with a pen and a rule.

See also

literature

  • Samuel Noah Kramer: History Begins at Sumer: Thirty-Nine Firsts in Recorded History . 3. Edition. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 1981, ISBN 978-0-8122-1276-1 , pp. 375-379 .
  • Joachim Oelsner: More recent findings on the “City Map of Nippur” . In: Riches and Rarities. Monuments, collections, files and manuscripts . Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Jena 1990, p. 54-61 .
  • Helmut Minow: City map of Nippur - an interesting document of ancient field measurement . In: Verband Deutscher Vermessungsingenieure e. V. (Ed.): The surveying engineer . 1970, p. 184-187 .
  • F. Vass: The Map of Nippur . In: Australian Institute of Cartographers (Ed.): Cartography . tape 9 , no. 3 , 1976, p. 168-174 .

Web links

  • Oldest city map in the world - Website of the University of Jena for the city map of Nippur
  • Samuel N. Kramer: The Sumerians . (PDF) with a handmade copy of the ancient city map of Nippur (after page 64), edited by Inez Bernhardt

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Joachim Oelsner, Peter Stein: Oldest city map in the world. Retrieved February 2, 2014 .
  2. ↑ Jane McIntosh, Ancient Mesopotamia: New Perspectives , 89
  3. ^ McGuire Gibson: Patterns of Occupation at Nippur. 1992, accessed December 28, 2013 .
  4. ↑ a b c d e f g McGuire Gibson: Nippur, Volume 3: Kassite Buildings in Area WC-1. In: Oriental Institute Publications . No. 111 , 1993, ISBN 0-918986-91-5 , pp. 4–7 ( online [accessed January 2, 2014]).
  5. ↑ Several articles on the Peters-Hilprecht controversy , in the New York Times, 1905
  6. ^ HV Hilprecht, JP Peters: The so-called Peters-Hilprecht controversy . 1908, p. 77 f., 96 ff., 194 ff., 215 ff., 335 ( online [accessed January 2, 2014]).
  7. ^ Karen Rhea Nemet-Nejat: Late Babylonian Field Plans in the British Museum . Biblical Institute Press, 1982, History of Babylonian Cartography, pp. 5 ff . ( Google Books ).
  8. ↑ a b c d Joachim Oelsner: Newer findings on the “city map of Nippur” . In: Riches and Rarities. Monuments, collections, files and manuscripts . 1990, p. 54-61 .
  9. ^ Map by Clarence S. Fisher with the now discarded theory on the location of the city map
  10. ^ Samuel Noah Kramer: History Begins at Sumer: Thirty-Nine Firsts in Recorded History . 3. Edition. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 1981, ISBN 978-0-8122-1276-1 , pp. 375-379 .
  11. ↑ Elizabeth C. Stone: The Spacial Organization of Mesopotamian Cities . In: Instituto Interuniversitario del Próximo Oriente Antiguo de la Universitat de Barcelona (ed.): Aula Orientalis . tape 9 , 1991, pp. 235–242 ( aulaorientalis.org [PDF]).
  12. ^ A b Alan R. Millard: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean . In: The History of Cartography . tape 1 , 1987, 6. Cartography in the Ancient Near East ( online [accessed December 27, 2013]).

Artifacts

  1. ↑ Frau Professor Hilprecht Collection of Babylonian Antiquities, HS 197 "The city map of Nippur" .
  2. ↑ BM 35385 "Map of Babylon" . Clay cuneiform tablet; plan of part of Babylon, with metrological commentary; this shows the Tuba area in North-West Babylon, beside a branch of the Euphrates, with two gates; 14 ll. The British Museum
  3. ↑ BM 73319 “tablet” . Clay tablet; fragment; temple plan; Late Babylonian. The British Museum
  4. ^ University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology, CBS 13885 , Plan of the fields from Nippur
  5. ↑ Statue acéphale de Gudea, prince de Lagash . Louvre Museum