Nippur

Nippur was never a political capital, and that was its position: it was the religious centre of Sumer, home of Enlil, the god whose sanction legitimised kings, so rulers of competing cities all endowed its temples. Its scribal schools produced tens of thousands of clay tablets, and it is from Nippur that a great part of Sumerian literature survives, including versions of the flood story and the hymns and laments that fill the corpus. The mound holds the ziggurat of Enlil, temple precincts, and the excavated scribal quarter; a nineteenth-century American expedition worked here and later teams continued. What a visitor sees is a large mound with a brick ziggurat core standing above the plain and trenches cut across the site.

What you actually see

• The Enlil ziggurat - the brick core standing above the mound.
• Temple precincts - excavated foundations around the sacred area.
• The scribal quarter - the area that produced the tablet archives.
• Deep trenches - cuts left by more than a century of excavation.

When to go

November to March; summer on the open plain is severe. Mornings are best. Spring can bring mud on the approach tracks after rain.

Honest expectations

The site is mudbrick and trenches; it rewards preparation more than a casual look. There is no interpretation on site. Permission and a local driver are needed. Tablets from Nippur are held in Philadelphia, Istanbul and Baghdad, not here.

Nearby

Kish lies northwest; Diwaniyah is west.