Sippar
The sun god's city where, according to Berossus, the flood hero buried writings about all things before the waters came.
- Location
- Southwest of Baghdad, on the Euphrates
- Modern name
- Abu Habbah
- Modern country
- Iraq
- Temple
- Ebabbar, temple of Shamash
- Excavated by
- Hormuzd Rassam (1880s); Iraqi teams found an intact temple library (1986)
- In tradition
- Where Berossus' flood hero buried the writings
What is Sippar known for?
Sippar, modern Abu Habbah southwest of Baghdad, was the city of the sun god Shamash, whose temple was called the Ebabbar. Hormuzd Rassam dug there in the 1880s and found tens of thousands of tablets and the Shamash tablet of King Nabu-apla-iddina, now in the British Museum. In 1986 Iraqi archaeologists found a temple library with tablets still on their shelves.
The Sumerian King List names Sippar as one of the five cities ruled by kings before the Flood. In Berossus' Greek account, the god tells Xisuthrus to bury writings about the beginning, middle and end of all things in Sippar, and to recover them after the Flood.
That story turns a real city with real libraries into the setting for one of antiquity's most intriguing ideas: a buried archive meant to survive a catastrophe. No such pre-Flood deposit has been found; the story is known only through later Greek summaries of Berossus.
Berossus says the flood hero buried records of all things at Sippar before the waters came.
Mentioned on these pages
- Rabbit holeBerossus
- Rabbit holeZiusudra (Xisuthrus)
- ChapterOne History 11: The sentence ends
- ChapterOne History 8: The reset
- PassageXisuthrus buries the writings before the Flood (Berossus, Babyloniaca, via Alexander Polyhistor)
- PersonEnmeduranki
Sources
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, 'Sippar'Reference
- Livius, 'The Great Flood: Berossus'Primary text
- Wikipedia, 'Sippar'Reference
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