Word: nippur
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Clasped Hands. At the great city of Eridu, once dedicated to the god of waters, archaeologists have found no fewer than 16 temples built in successive generations one on top of another at the same site. The Sumerians created at Eridu, Nippur, Uruk, Ur and Lagash a complex of city-states more sophisticated than anything man had previously known. But however mature they became politically, they remained children of the gods. They portrayed themselves in statues with hands clasped in prayer, their huge, vacant eyes staring heavenward as if they themselves were in a trance. When it came to worship...
...thoroughness, chipping away at the sites of such ancient city-states as Ur, Lagash and Mari. Last week a U.S. expedition, sponsored by the American Schools of Oriental Research and the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, was at work at the site of the holy city of Nippur, the seat of Enlil, god of the elements. There, only 100 miles south of Baghdad, it has uncovered perhaps the finest Sumerian find in 25 years-more than 50 ritual objects, vases, bas-reliefs and statues of the third millennium B.C. (see color...
...Minds. The statues uncovered at Nippur portray a cross section of Sumerian society. A priestess standing majestically with a ritual cup in one hand and a branch in the other hobnobs with an old woman with a matronly double chin. A bearded man and his wife sit holding hands in one of the very few Sumerian double statues ever found. A carefully carved woman is made of a translucent green stone not yet identified. Her face is of gold-a metal that was believed to possess purifying properties and was frequently used for the noblest parts of the sculptures...
...clay tablet, carefully compiling a pharmacopoeia. His calligraphy was better than most doctors': he got more than a dozen formulas on the two sides of a tablet little bigger than a modern picture postcard. Then the sands of the desert covered the great Sumerian city of Nippur (90 miles southeast of Babylon), and the physician's secrets were lost for thousands of years...
...least that is the opinion suggested by a recent discovery. A tablet has been found at Nippur unmistakably antedating the Hebrew epic by ten centuries, and giving in surprisingly similar detail, even to names, the creation and fail of man. Supplemented by other records, a complete Sumerian legend can be constructed, which carries the history of Babylonia up to a flood strangely like that which bore Noah on his famous voyage. Thenceforward, the tale is different, and, as the critics would have said, the Hebrew plagiarism ceases...