the Center of the World of Sumer and Akkad 40 Centuries Ago!
| Dubsar, the Cuneiform Scribe | His Old Donkey Anshe |
Welcome to our sun-dried mudbrick house. We have several rooms clustered around a courtyard. Steps lead up to the roof on our one-story structure. Palm tree logs span the top of the rooms and are packed with mud. Frequent repairs are needed from the erratic rain storms. The weather is hot, so most activity takes place on the roof or in the courtyard. Before you leave, please view and sign our guestbook, The Nippur Town Tablet. Buttons are at the bottom of the page. What do you think of people who lived 4,000 years ago?
My old donkey Anshe and I live on the east side of the metropolis of Nippur, considered the center of the world forty centuries before your time. Sumerians, Akkadians and Amorites shared a great reverence for this ancient religious center, home to the Sumerian high god Enlil. From his shrine Ekur and his stepped temple-tower or ziggurat, Enlil bestowed kingship on the legitimate ruler of Sumer and Akkad.
In the cities of Sumer, written documentation for political, administrative, and legal purposes was monopolized by a small elite group of professional scribes, the dubsar's (represented in cuneiform at the top of page). Mastering the cuneiform (that is, wedge-shaped) writing system was quite a task and still is for modern scholars. Below are the expressions for citizen of Nippur and the assembly of Nippur (notice the different handwriting style in the two expressions).
The scribe pressed his stylus onto wet, clay tablets as he made use of a large number of characters to express the syllables, word signs and determinatives (word classifiers) of the Sumerian and Akkadian languages. This system was much more complex than that used in the United States and west European countries with a small group of Roman characters representing individual letters rather than full syllables or words.
Thanks for keeping our traditions alive. Have you ever wondered why your microwave counts down from 1:00 to :59 instead of from 1:00 to :99? Why are there 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in an hour? Why not 100? You are keeping alive a 5000-year-old Sumerian tradition. In 3000 B.C. the Sumerians were using a base 60 arithmetic. You use a base 10 or decimal system (the word decimal is from Latin decem and Greek deka, both meaning "10"). Computers use base 2 (binary) and base 16 (hexadecimal) systems of counting. Your division of time in terms of 60 and division of a circle in terms of 360 (60 x 6) does honor to the genius of the ancient Sumerians. Thanks!!
My old donkey Anshe has been nagging me about giving him more world-wide attention since he does a lot of work around here. He asked for his own pages to show our world-wide visitors the importance of the non-human inhabitants of Nippur and other Sumerian cities. The humans would not make much progress without the help of their non-human friends, such as donkeys, sheep, goats, oxen, horses, camels, and fish. Anshe is a little slow with a two-button mouse, but he has finished several pages. He is very proud of his first page about life for ancient donkeys. From his own cuneiform tablet collection that he has been gathering, he presents a special, very old tablet that he traveled over 100 kilometers (each way) to get. Take a look at this tablet that he uses to remind me to feed the hungry (donkeys!).
Anshe urges me to say something on behalf of the honor due to the ancient Sumerians. The blossoming of the brilliant high culture of the ancient Sumerians was not a sudden event. Their achievements resulted from much hard thinking and heavy labor. The available archaeological data reveals the gradual development of Sumerian culture over many centuries. There is no sign of a sudden intrusion of alien technology or intelligence. The Sumerians deserve credit for what they accomplished by careful management of resources, by clever manipulation of the environment, and by imaginative goals to attain what may have seemed unattainable. This is not to say that the Sumerians were an arrogant people. The ancient Sumerians, along with Kishites, Akkadians, and Amorites, recognized and honored the divine realm that controlled their environment, just as humans all over the planet still do in the twenty-first century A.D. Faithlessness in the face of a supposedly acosmic, meaningless environment was not a mark of high culture among the ancient Sumerians. The kalam ("land") was a cosmos, that is, a meaningful world system that made some sense, even if life seemed inscrutable and mysterious at times. Substantial temple establishments were constructed and maintained in all the major Sumerian cities. "Secular humanism" was not regarded as a legitimate religion in Sumerian courts. Anshe just wanted to make sure that modern humans would be fair to the ancient humans whom he faithfully served.
Anshe and I invite you to explore these rooms in our humble abode:
- To help visualize the location and layout of Nippur, visit our Map Room.
- To see Nippur through the eyes of explorer and excavator John Punnett Peters, first modern archaeologist at Nippur, visit our Earth-Moving Room.
- To learn more about ancient Nippur, discover the resources in the Reading Room or wander over to the Cultural Annex for the cultural context of the Sumerians and Akkadians who inhabited Nippur and the neighboring great cities.
- To get an overview of Nippur go to the Broad Vista Room.
- To gather information on professional life and specialization at Nippur, check out the Professional Room.
- To learn about the non-human inhabitants of Nippur and its neighbors, visit Anshe's Room.
- To sneak up for a close look at "the establishment," step into the Establishment Room.
- To find the most official point of view from the great and wonderful king himself, enter the Royal Display Room.
- After you have wandered through Dubsar's domain, why not try your hand at a quiz? JavaScript required. Check out Dubsar's Nippur Quiz. Two levels now available.
- To meet the modern incarnation of Dubsar, visit Erasmus Compositor who can instruct you on twentieth-century A.D. business communications. You can also visit our mirror site at the Nippur Quay.
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