Shuruppak

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Coordinates: 31°46′42 N°45′30 Shuruppak was an ancient Sumerian city, also called Curuppag ("the healing place").

It is located at modern Tell Fa'rah, situated south of Nippur on the banks of the Euphrates in what is now Al-Qādisiyyah, in south-central Iraq [1]. It was first excavated in 1902 by the "Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft".^[1]

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

Shuruppak became a grain storage and distribution city and had more silos than any other Sumerian city. Shuruppak began near the beginning of the Jemdet Nasr period and was abandoned before the Old Babylonian period.^[2]

In the WB-62 version of the Sumerian king list two ante-diluvial kings of Shuruppak are mentioned. Ziusudra reigned for 10 (shar) years in Shuruppak.^[3]. Ziusudra was preceded in this king list by his father SU.KUR.LAM who was also king of Shuruppak and ruled 8 (shar) years.^[4]

At the beginning of the Early Dynastic I period there was an archaeologically attested river flood in Shuruppak that has been radio-carbon dated about 2900 BCE. ^[5] Polychrome pottery from below the flood deposit has be dated to the Jemdet Nasr period that immediately preceded the Early Dynastic I period.^[6] This river flood left deposits in Shuruppak, Uruk, and Kish.

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[edit] References

^ Erik Schmidt, Excavations at Fara, 1931, University of Pennsylvania's Museum Journal, 2 (1931), pp 193-217.
^ Robert McC. Adams, Heartland of Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), Fig. 33 compared with Fig. 21.
^ S. Langdon, "The Chaldean Kings Before the Flood," Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1923), pp 251-259; Harriet P. Martin, FARA: A reconstruction of the Ancient Mesopotamian City of Shuruppak, Birmingham, UK: Chris Martin & Assoc., (1988).
^ Langdon, p. 258, note 5.
^ Harriet Crawford, Sumer and the Sumerians, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), p. 19.
^ Schmidt (1931)