Author Description

From the preface: "These two volumes bear the title, Nippur. Before the explorations of the University of Pennsylvania Expedition, that name was known only to a few scholars, and they knew little more than the name of the city and that at an early period it had played an important part in the religious development of Babylonia and, through Babylonia, of the world. We now know that in the times of the glory of Nineveh and Babylon the name of " Nippur " was as familiar to the citizens of those cities as the names of Nineveh and Babylon are to us, and that Nippur exercised on their religious life and religious development an influence as potent as that of Jerusalem on our own. The Temple of Bel at Nippur was to the religion of Babylonia and Assyria very much what the Temple of Jerusalem was to our religion. It was this city, which exercised so great an influence on the religious life of the people that so long dominated the civilized world, and so materially affected and determined the religious and scientific development of both Orient and Occident, and particularly the great Temple of Bel in that city, the oldest temple in the world, which the University of Pennsylvania Expedition explored. I have called this temple " the oldest temple in the world." We found that Nippur was a great and flourishing city, and its temple, the Temple of Bel, the religious centre of the dominant people of the world at a period as much prior to the time of Abraham as the time of Abraham is prior to our day. We discovered written records no less than 6000 years old, and proved that writing and civilization were then by no means in their infancy. Further than that, our explorations have shown that Nippur possessed a history extending backward of the earliest written documents found by us, at least 2000 years."