Ziggurats, Nippur, and Cuneiform Tablets: Richard Zettler on Mesopotamian Archaeology

Back in 2022, I peppered Richard Zettler with questions about Mesopotamia, Nippur, and its archeological history. Zettler, an archeologist and Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also curates the Near East collection of artifacts at Penn Museum, was kind enough to entertain me.

Though Zettler occasionally (and modestly) defers on some questions, citing his archaeological expertise rather than authority in other subjects, the breadth of his knowledge is impressive. His insights helped me better understand one fascinating corner of humanity’s oldest recorded civilization.

In this wide-ranging chat, Zettler teaches me about ziggurats, the discovery of Sumerian literary texts from the 18th century BCE in two houses at Nippur, Eduba literature and scribe training in ancient Mesopotamia, the number and types of tablets found in early excavations, the relationship between the Sumerian and Akkadian languages, determinatives in Sumerian writing, the connections between Mesopotamian literature and later biblical stories, and other topics.

A transcript of the conversation is below. No audio of the conversation is available.

Transcript

Jeremy Bassetti: Thank you so much for taking the time to meet with me, to talk to me about Nippur and the collection.

Richard Zettler: That seems to be all I do these days. I’m just looking back through a manuscript we submitted for publication almost a decade ago. And that’s been sitting in the publications office at the Oriental Institute.

Jeremy: What is the manuscript?

Richard: It’s a report on the excavations of the Inanna Temple at Nippur.

Jeremy: Okay.

Richard: I mean, they were probably the biggest excavation Chicago ever did at Nippur. It lasted from 1951 until 1963. So it lasted from the time I was born until the time I started high school.

Jeremy: And this was after, I guess, the University of Pennsylvania’s early work there?

Richard: Oh yeah. This was when Chicago and Penn started up the Nippur excavations again in the late 40s, early 50s. But Chicago and Penn are sort of oil and water. They don’t mix terribly well.

Jeremy: Why is that? Is it a methods issue?

Richard: Oh, I don’t know. They’re the two main institutions that deal with the ancient Near East in the U.S.

Jeremy: Friendly competition?

Richard: No, not so friendly. Half of the faculty at Penn is University of Chicago graduates. Including myself.

Jeremy: And so were there a lot of new tablets that were unearthed during that period, during the Chicago period?

Richard: Oh, yeah. They found, especially in the very early seasons, thousands of literary fragments. Even in the Inanna Temple excavations, they came up with several thousand, three or four thousand more tablets of all sorts.

Jeremy: Interesting. I have a general idea of the results from the archaeological works, like all the literary texts that were unearthed and the great contribution it gave to letters since then. But I don’t know what came from what period. Do the Gilgamesh texts come from the Akkadian excavations?

Richard: Yeah, most of these literary texts, the Sumerian literary texts that we have, are from the 18th century BCE. They’re from the late old Babylonian period. And they all come out of two houses.

Jeremy: And do you mean literal houses at Nippur?

Richard: Yep, literal. Penn in 1899, 1900, were excavating on the part of Nippur that’s called Tablet Hill or the Scribal Quarter. And they came down into a set of private houses there. And in the old Babylonian level that really dates to the time of Hammurabi’s son and successor, Samsu-iluna, they came on a few houses that had basically been abandoned.

Because Nippur, in that later old Babylonian period, some people say was abandoned, but it’s more likely depopulated because of the shift in the main flow of the rivers going down the western branch of the Euphrates at that point. So the population largely moves away, though there is a small remnant population there. And these houses were abandoned and they just left the tablets where they were. They took their roofing beams, all that kind of stuff, but the tablets stayed. They were training scribes in those houses.

Jeremy: One of Sam Kramer’s books - History Begins at Sumer - mentions a schoolhouse, or kind of a school, in the region.

Richard: There is a series of texts called the Eduba literature, and Eduba just means tablet house. And there’s a series of literary texts that Sam Kramer published on the Eduba text.

Jeremy: Okay.

Richard: This is a kind of idealized version of what goes on in the schools. And there have been a lot of efforts now to really understand how they actually train scribes. And we can do that with the sort of tablets that were left in this house because you can walk from very early writing exercises where scribes are learning to make vertical wedges and horizontal wedges, that sort of thing, all the way through the training in writing literary texts.

Jeremy: Okay. That’s interesting. And these two houses, are these the places that I’ve seen referred to as the Archive or the Library?

Richard: Yeah, well, that whole business of the library and everything is just made up. That’s Hermann Hilprecht.

Jeremy: So that’s just a figure of speech to say there’s a room with a lot of tablets in it?

Richard: Well, they were finding tablets all over the place. He wanted to create some sort of library, but most of the tablets, there were something like 17,000 tablets came out of these two houses.

Jeremy: Wow. And how big are they?

Richard: Well, they’re various sizes. Steve Tinney wrote an article on how they learn to write, and he published that in Expedition Magazine.

Jeremy: Okay.

Richard: And another person by the name of Andrew George did an article on what the Eduba literature says and then what we know to be factual based on the reconstruction of the scribal curriculum that we do from these texts.

Jeremy: It’s all very interesting. I was thumbing through a book called — I think it was an Akkadian dictionary by Jeremy Black, if that rings a bell.

Richard: Yeah. Jeremy Black and Tony Green, I think, did that.

Jeremy: Yeah. And he mentioned some of the methods that the scholars used to reconstruct what they believed to be the pronunciation of this based on Akkadian and what they assume from Hebrew and some of the other Semitic languages. So it’s all really interesting how everything was pieced together. It kind of blows my mind.

Richard: What we know of Sumerian, we know filtered through Akkadian.

Jeremy: So it’s a different language, essentially? Akkadian is a Semitic language? Sumerian, who knows?

Richard: Akkadian is just another version of the Semitic languages we know like Arabic and Hebrew and everything else.

Jeremy: But they use the same alphabet, essentially, the same script?

Richard: Well, they use the same signs. They use the same cuneiform signs. And where they had logographic value in Sumerian, they take on syllabic value in Akkadian.

Jeremy: Okay.

Richard: I know just enough about all that to be dangerous. I’m more of an archaeologist than a text specialist. But I have worked on texts, three or four administrative and economic texts.

Jeremy: Most of the texts that were, the tablets that were unearthed, a vast majority were administrative and economic in nature?

Richard: Absolutely, yeah. The overwhelming majority of texts that we have, especially from the Ur III period, are administrative, economic in character. I mean, that’s how the writing system developed. It developed in the context of an increasingly complex administrative economy. So our earliest texts are almost entirely administrative, economic in character.

Jeremy: That’s interesting. It gives a new meaning to this idea of coining words, with the financial aspect of it.

Richard: Well, even Egyptian hieroglyphic writing had an important administrative component to it when it developed. And then it kind of spreads into other areas.

Jeremy: And so these tablets and these texts, if I’m reading it correctly, and you mentioned the Egyptian hieroglyphics, that’s what reminded me of this, but in terms of the history of writing, these are the earliest extant examples of writing?

Richard: Right. And they’re developing at about the same time, around the later, mid to late fourth millennium.

Jeremy: What can you tell me about Nippur as a religious center? I’ve seen this city referred to as the Mecca of the Sumerians, like the important religious zone.

Richard: I don’t know that I have any original insights into that. To try and explain it, Nippur is the site of the Temple of Enlil at Ekur. And he is the preeminent deity of the early Mesopotamian pantheon. The original head of the pantheon was the god Anu.

Jeremy: Anu means “sky” or “heaven,” right?

Richard: Yeah. And the name is written just with a sign that looks like a star.

Jeremy: Okay. Yeah, I’ve seen that.

Richard: And his temple, his main temple in southern Mesopotamia is at Uruk.

Jeremy: Okay.

Richard: His daughter, Inanna, is at Uruk as well. But Enlil is at Nippur. And why Nippur becomes important, nobody’s quite sure.

Geographically, it is in the very center of the southern Mesopotamian flood plain. And some people have theorized that it is on the borderline between a predominantly Sumerian southern Mesopotamia, that is the southern part of the current floodplain, and an Akkadian-speaking northern portion of the floodplain. So Nippur is located near Diwaniya, or actually a small town called Afej.

Whereas other city-states have kings that are ruling, there are no kings who are from Nippur who are known to have ruled over the southern flood plain. So, Thorkild Jacobsen always theorized that because of its strategic location of Enlil, that Nippur basically was neutralized very early on. It became a religious center.

Jeremy: Okay. That’s interesting.

Richard: And, as Marduk becomes more important, the action shifts to Babylon.

Jeremy: And that’s closer to Baghdad?

Richard: It’s near an Iraqi town called Hilla. About an hour south of Baghdad. And it is the most massive mound you could ever imagine.

Jeremy: Yeah, I’ve seen pictures of this, and it seems like the floodplain that you mentioned just seems like the Great Plains.

Richard: It’s incredibly flat.

Jeremy: And then you see these tells…

Richard: That’s right. They are the only topographic relief on the southern floodplain.

Jeremy: And so it’s pretty easy to identify these old sites?

Richard: They stand out fairly easily on satellite imagery and even on low-level aerial photographs.

Jeremy: I have this idea of a ziggurat kind of stepped up. Is the entire city built on some sort of platform, or is that tell that we’re seeing, is that the ziggurat temple complex itself?

Richard: The tell is an artificial formation that comes with a lot of people living in a single place over thousands of years. They’re building with mud brick, which is a good utilitarian building material, but it has a limited lifespan. And when your house begins to decay, what do you do? You knock it down to the solid footing, and you fill it in, and you build on top of it. And that’s just the way it works.

So gradually over time, the street level’s building up because you have no trash removal. So what do people do with their trash? They throw it in the street, or they throw it in abandoned buildings, or they throw it in empty lots. Of course, there are scavenging animals, pigs and dogs and that sort of thing, that eat the organic debris. But they’re just drowning in their own garbage.

So if you’ve lived in one place over thousands of years, and you think of Nippur, Nippur was occupied, let’s say, in the 6th, maybe 7th millennium BCE. We can’t quite get back that far. And it continued to be occupied until the 9th century CE. It was still occupied under the Abbasids. And there was even a bishop there at one point.

Jeremy: Last time I was in Rome, when you walk around the Pantheon, you can see how deep the original building goes and how much just over the course of 1,500 or 2,000 years, how much sediment has been built up around that.

Richard: That’s right. I once went on a tour of the Roman cemetery that’s under St. Peter’s. We had to squeeze by a Swiss guard to get to the office, but we managed to do it. And it’s really very interesting. So St. Peter’s is just sitting on…. I mean, I’m sure it’s all over Rome.

I always tell my students, it’s not just these ancient sites that are stratified. Philadelphia is stratified. It hasn’t been occupied for thousands of years, but let’s say four or five hundred years. And I say, if you ever see a hole in the center of the street — don’t actually do this — jump down in and you’ll see earlier street levels. And you may actually see the original wooden water channel.

But the big mounds, Nippur, Ur, all of these places, they’re big cities. They’ve been occupied for thousands of years.

Jeremy: So I tried to find a map of Nippur online to see where some of these spaces were, and I couldn’t find anything.

Richard: You should be able to find a topographic map of Nippur. If not, I can send you one.

Jeremy: I’ll email you for that. I saw very basic ones that were not clear. I also saw a tablet that was unearthed with a map of the city, which I found really interesting.

Richard: That’s right, there is a tablet. It probably dates to the 15th century BCE. And what we have hypothesized is that it is a map of Nippur showing a projected redevelopment of the site after this period of depopulation.

And it’s really great because it’s got the Euphrates on one side and it’s labeled — it says it’s the Euphrates. Then it’s got a canal coming off of it and going through the center of Nippur and it’s called “the canal in the center of the city.” It labels Ekur and labels all of the walls with the length of the wall between the different gates.

In my time at Nippur, which was the mid-70s, we were able to confirm the location of the city wall as shown on that map. And we were able to show that there are two walls shown on the map. One is the earlier wall, and one is a projected rebuild of that wall in the 15th century BCE. That was supposed to be in Penn, but unfortunately Bill Precht gave it to Jena.

Jeremy: When I see the map of Nippur, I see the city halved by the canal. And on the eastern part of the plan, that’s where Ekur was and the ziggurat. Is that right?

Richard: That’s right.

Jeremy: And is Ekur on top of the ziggurat or is that next to it?

Richard: Well, Ekur is just the ziggurat complex, as far as we know. The ziggurat complex consisted of a front courtyard and a back courtyard with walls around it. And the ziggurat sits in the back courtyard. They started out building temples on platforms. And then eventually these platforms would get bigger and bigger, and then the ziggurat begins in the third millennium BCE.

Jeremy: Right. I read that they would build temples on top of the foundations of older temples and eventually it would take on this kind of stepped tower design.

Richard: Well, I think this stepped tower is a deliberate thing that the Sumerian king Shulghi develops.

Jeremy: Okay.

Richard: They certainly were building temples on platforms.

Jeremy: I see.

Richard: And again, I think that’s a kind of organic development where you have a temple and you know you have to rebuild it so you knock it down and you fill it in and put something new on top of it. Over time, I don’t think it has anything to do with raising the temple above the city or above flood plain. I think it’s just an organic development. I can’t prove that, but that’s my theory.

Jeremy: Right. I mentioned to you I’m doing research on the history of ideas about mountains and how people think about them. The subject I’m looking at now has to do with what I’m calling manufactured mountains, like the pyramids, the step pyramids in Mesoamerica, the Egyptian pyramids, and now I’m looking at the ziggurats.

I’m seeing this pattern, this association with worship and the mythology of mountains, and we see that in some of the Sumerian texts, Ninhursag, the Lady of the Mountains, and in some of the creation myths, the time before the heavens and the earth were separated was described as a mountain.

I see Dilmun prefaced… this is another interesting thing in some of the Sumerian creation myths I see Dilmun referred and the prefix in the transliteration of the Sumerian is kur, so kur Dilmun, but kur takes on several different meanings. It also means land and underworld, foreign place, which is sometimes associated to the Zagros mountains. I think it also means mountain. But the word mountain is not always included in the translations of those references to Dilmun.

Richard: The way things work in Sumerian is they have what are called determinatives. These are a series of signs that you put in front of the actual word so you know what you’re talking about. You know you’re dealing with a tree, or a foreign place, or a person, a male or a female. And those are simply there. They’re not actually read insofar as we know.

If you’re dealing with a god, they put the sign, the dingir sign, which is the star-shaped sign that also can be read on or anu.

Jeremy: Okay. So, kur could be the determinative for the city of Dilmun? Is that what you’re saying?

Richard: Yeah, for any kind of foreign place.

Jeremy: Okay.

Richard: I don’t know why they use it in front of Dilmun, except Dilmun is a bit foreign to them. Well, it’s not so foreign to them. They know it’s there, and they’re going there early on.

Jeremy: I know some of the early interpretations of this specific story that we’re referring to here, and I think it was Kramer who mentioned that it was like the early paradise myth, and I know this has been challenged in recent scholarship. But I wonder: if we’re thinking about these as literary texts, then why can’t it be a figurative description of a paradise or a holy mountain, which is an idea that we see in Semitic cultures and around the world, really.

Richard: I suppose it could be. I would defer to people who know the texts and the literature better than I do. I mean, I know plenty of this stuff, but I’m not an expert in it.

Jeremy: Yeah, I get what you’re saying.

Richard: I mean, I could only tell you what I know from secondary literature. Somebody like Walther Sallaberger writes the secondary literature. He’s a nice guy. He doesn’t have much of a sense of humor.

When I once told him, I said, “Walther, I think you could teach a monkey to read an Ur III administrative text.” And he said, “Oh, I don’t think a monkey could read those texts.”

(Laughs)

Jeremy: I guess based on your proximity to the historians and the scholarship who do deal with this, there seems to be a consensus amongst historians that these Sumerian ideas, if not some of the words themselves, were carried through the world thanks to Akkadian and then its proximity to Hebrew and the other Semitic languages. Is that safe?

Richard: In Akkadian, there are a lot of Sumerian things that get incorporated, just as there are a lot of Akkadian things that get incorporated into Sumerian.

Early on in Mesopotamia, we have this conception of the region as dominated by these two ethno-linguistic groups. We basically say anybody who is speaking Sumerian is probably an ethnic Sumerian, or speaking Akkadian is ethnic Akkadian. Well, I don’t know whether that’s true or not. But it’s a mixed population. There’s plenty of cross-cultural interaction there.

Even in the far south where we know they’re writing in Sumerian, we don’t know if they’re speaking Sumerian. We haven’t found anybody who could speak Sumerian. But we know they’re writing in Sumerian. But there are plenty of Semitic words in the Sumerian.

In the Abu Salabikh texts, which are sort of mid-third millennium BCE texts, there are lots of Akkadian words. And the famous Queen of Ur, Puabi, that’s a Semitic name.

Jeremy: So cross-pollinating languages…

Richard: I mean, it’s not that big a place, southern Mesopotamia.

Jeremy: And it’s a desert.

Richard: Six hours from Baghdad to Basra.

Jeremy: Do you find that there are some scholars or historians or groups that are a bit hesitant to the idea that perhaps some of the Old Testament ideas, or some of these Abrahamic tradition ideas, have origins in cultures that predate their own?

Richard: Whoever wrote the Bible or the books of the Bible, they were very interested in connecting their culture with this ancient culture. So they’ve got the Garden of Eden at the place where the four rivers come together, two of them being the Tigris and Euphrates. Some people have claimed to have identified one of the western rivers coming out of Arabia. Early on they’re situating the Garden of Eden in that area.

They’ve got Abraham coming from Ur, Ur of the Chaldees. The Chaldeans were a tribal group that shows up in southern Mesopotamia in the first millennium BCE, which is probably when the biblical texts are composed. So I don’t know if anybody really knows that.

And then, of course, the flood story is right out of Gilgamesh. They stole that. Everybody has a flood story. It reminded me of an episode of Big Bang Theory where Sheldon’s mother and Leonard’s father are talking in a cab, and he said he’s an anthropologist who studies the flood. He said many cultures have flood stories, and she said, “Well, mine is the unerring word of God” or something like that.

All the people who began these studies tried to connect what we know of Mesopotamia with biblical traditions. Certainly Speizer did that, Barry Eichler, other people did that, everybody did that. At the beginning, of course, that’s all we knew. When Penn started excavating there in the 1890s, those were your sources. Of course, you have the Greek and Roman sources, but the Bible was nearby.

Jeremy: Would you say that, I know some early archaeologists back in the early Enlightenment found some cuneiform tablets. I just don’t know the extent, but would you say that the excavations that the University of Penn and people like Haynes, is that what basically created a boon for Assyriology? Do most of the sources that we have today come from these excavations?

Richard: Yeah, they do. They began finding tablets very early on, even the French and the English excavating in the mid-19th century. And even before then, cuneiform texts had gradually filtered into Western Europe from early travelers and other things like that.

But with the British and French excavators in the Assyrian sites, they were finding tons of tablets in the Library of Ashurbanipal. And I think it was George Smith who was reading some of the texts from Layard’s excavation, and then he discovered the flood story in these texts. So that created a grand sensation that the Bible is true. And these Assyrian kings are known from more historic books of the Bible.

Jeremy: Right. But the excavations at Penn really ushered in a new era in understanding Mesopotamian literature?

Richard: It did for the U.S. There were plenty of tablets and other finds that had filtered in. The British and French began excavating the big Assyrian cities in the 1840s and 1850s. And they tried to work in the south as well, but they’re not finding the same things.

In the north, they’re finding these big Assyrian palaces with reliefs on the walls. You can’t possibly miss something like that. When in the south, they’re getting a bunch of mud brick. It takes some training to be able to find that stuff. Layard worked at Nippur once, and he said, “No, on the whole, I don’t think this site is worth excavating.”

Jeremy: Wow.

Richard: Then Penn comes in the late 19th century, beginning 1880s, and John Peters puts a proposal on the table saying the British and French had done yeoman’s work in uncovering the past of this land. It’s time for the Americans to get on the action and grab some stuff ourselves, which is certainly what they wanted to do.

Jeremy: Right. And they found mud brick.

Richard: Yeah, or sometimes they didn’t find mud brick. And they didn’t know how to dig. They tunneled, these are big mounds, and so they just created tunnels into them.

Jeremy: Yeah, I think you referenced in one of your YouTube lectures that someone mentioned they were not doing archeology back then but mining…

Richard: Yeah, that is in fact right. And you can’t even tell where you are when you’re in a tunnel. At one point when I was working at Nippur, I was up here, and then the floor collapsed, and I went down into one of those tunnels because the tunnel was going right under it. In the early 60s, Chicago found an old Penn tunnel. You find them all over the place. Found an old Penn tunnel with dead workers in it. The tunnel had collapsed. They still had their tools in their hands.

Jeremy: Man. So is this why some of the teams are called incompetent by later archaeologists?

Richard: Probably, but I don’t think they were incompetent. I mean, okay, they didn’t dig mud brick as well as you might hope they would. A lot of walls didn’t get found, got cut away. But it’s real easy to do that.

Even if you were a super archaeologist, we all made mistakes in digging. I was at one point when working in Syria, dealing with a wall that had a blocked doorway. And this is the good thing about mud brick. If you don’t like where the door is, you just block it up, plaster it over, and put a new one in there. And I couldn’t quite tell what was what. So I cut the wall away and left the blocking in it.