Sippar

The City of the Sun

Sippar is the fourth of the five pre-flood cities in the Sumerian King List. In Sumerian it is written Zimbir.

"Then Larag fell and the kingship was taken to Zimbir. In Zimbir, En-men-dur-ana became king; he ruled for 21000 years."

One king, one number, and then kingship moves to Shuruppak. Like Larak, the list says nothing more. But Sippar is different from Larak in a way that matters: it is a real, excavated city that remained important for thousands of years.

By the Numbers

• Kings: 1
• Years: 21,000
• In sar (units of 3,600): 5 sar and 5 ner (a ner is 600)
• Share of the 241,200-year pre-flood total: about 8.7%
• Average reign: 21,000 years

Sippar’s 21,000 years and Shuruppak’s 18,600 together make 39,600, which is exactly 11 sar.

The Seventh King

Count the rulers in order: Alulim, Alaljar, En-men-lu-ana, En-men-gal-ana, Dumuzid, En-sipad-zid-ana, and then En-men-dur-ana. He is the seventh king before the flood.

Later Mesopotamian tradition remembered him, under the Akkadian form Enmeduranki, as a king of Sippar. In an Akkadian ritual text edited by W. G. Lambert, the sun god Shamash and the storm god Adad bring him into the assembly of the gods and give him the arts of divination. He then teaches those arts to the men of Sippar, Nippur and Babylon, and the text presents him as the origin of the line of diviners.

That tradition comes from tablets of the first millennium BC, not from the King List, which gives only his name and his reign.

A Debated Comparison

Some scholars have compared Enmeduranki with the biblical Enoch. Both are seventh in a pre-flood sequence, and both later became associated with extraordinary heavenly knowledge. The comparison is debated, and the sources do not prove a direct borrowing. It is offered here as a comparison, not as a conclusion.

The Temple of the Sun God

Sippar was the city of the sun god, known in Sumerian as Utu and in Akkadian as Shamash. The Sumerian Temple Hymns address it directly, calling Zimbir the “dais upon which Utu sits daily.”

The site has been excavated. Between 1880 and 1882, Hormuzd Rassam dug at Sippar for the British Museum. A tablet of the Babylonian king Nabu-apla-iddina identified the site as the temple of Shamash in the city of Sippar. The excavations recovered tens of thousands of inscribed tablets and cylinders. One of them records the last Babylonian king, Nabonidus, digging down to the temple’s old foundation, laid by Naram-Sin.

The Sun God Tablet

The best-known single find is the Sun God Tablet, now in the British Museum. Its carved relief, dated to about 860–850 BC, shows King Nabu-apla-iddina being led by a priest and the goddess Aa into the presence of the sun god, who sits in his shrine with a solar disc on an altar before him. The six-column inscription records the king’s re-endowment of the sun temple at Sippar.

The tablet was found in a clay coffer that also held protective clay impressions of the relief. A much later king, Nabopolassar, added text of his own to it, which shows that the temple and its records were still being studied and valued centuries after the tablet was made.

So the fourth city of the King List is also one of the best documented cities in the ancient world. It was a working temple city centuries after the list was written.

The Buried Tablets

Sippar appears once more in a late flood tradition. The Babylonian priest Berossus wrote a history in Greek in the third century BC. In his version, the god tells the flood hero, whom he calls Xisuthros, to bury all the writings and hide them in Sippar, “the city of the sun.” After the flood, the survivors are told to dig them up.

This is Berossus’s own late Babylonian tradition, and his work survives only in quotations by later writers. It is not evidence that every ancient account placed the tablets at Sippar. It does show that, by his time, Sippar was remembered as a place where knowledge from before the flood was thought to be kept.

What Sippar Asks

The King List gives Sippar one king and one number. Other sources give it a temple, a sun god, a seventh king remembered for divination, and a legend of buried books.

The city where, in Berossus’s account, the pre-flood writings were hidden has yielded tens of thousands of tablets. What else is still in the ground at Sippar?

"Then Zimbir fell and the kingship was taken to Shuruppak."