Shuruppak

Template:Infobox settlement
**Shuruppak** (Template:Lang-sux Template:Transl, "the healing place"), modern **Tell Fara**, was an ancient Sumerian city situated about 55 kilometres (35 mi) south of Nippur on the banks of the Euphrates in Iraq's Al-Qādisiyyah Governorate. Shuruppak was dedicated to Ninlil, also called Sud, the goddess of grain and the air.

 Local flooding
At the end of the Uruk period there was an archaeologically attested river flood in Shuruppak. Polychrome pottery from a destruction level below the flood deposit has been dated to the Jemdet Nasr period that immediately preceded the Early Dynastic I period.

Sumerian writings
The kings of Shuruppak are mentioned in later epigraphic sources. In the Sumerian King List a king Ubara-Tutu is listed as the ruler of Shuruppak and the last king "before the flood". In the Epic of Gilgamesh a Utanapishtim (also Uta-na'ishtim), son of Ubara-Tutu, is noted to be king of Shuruppak. The names Ziusudra and Atrahasis are also associated with him. These figures have not been supported by archaeological finds and may well be mythical.

Grain storage city
 File:Sumerian account of silver for the govenor (background removed).png
Shuruppak was a grain storage and distribution city having more silos than any other Sumerian city. The city expanded to its greatest extent at the end of the Early Dynastic III period (2600 BC to 2350 BC) when it covered about 100 hectares. At this stage it was destroyed by a fire which baked the clay tablets and mudbrick walls, which then survived for millennia. Shuruppak was abandoned shortly after 2000 BCE.

Excavation
The earliest excavated levels at Shuruppak date to the Jemdet Nasr period about 3000 BCE. Several objects made of arsenical copper were found in Shuruppak/Fara dating from the mid-fourth to early third millennium BCE (approximately Jamdat Nasr period). Similar objects were also found at Tepe Gawra (levels XII-VIII). Erich Schmidt found one Isin-Larsa cylinder seal and several pottery plaques which may date to early in the second millennium BCE. Surface finds are predominantly Early Dynastic.
After a brief survey by Hermann Volrath Hilprecht in 1900, it was first excavated in 1902 by Robert Koldewey and Friedrich Delitzsch of the German Oriental Society for eight months. Among other finds, hundreds of  Early Dynastic tablets were collected, which ended up in the Berlin Museum and the Istanbul Museum. In March and April 1931, a joint team of the American Schools of Oriental Research and the University of Pennsylvania excavated Shuruppak for a further six week season, with  Erich Schmidt as director and with epigraphist Samuel Noah Kramer. The excavation recovered 87 tablets and fragments—mostly from pre-Sargonic times—biconvex, and unbaked. In 1973, a three-day surface survey of the site was conducted by Harriet P. Martin. Consisting mainly of pottery shard collection, the survey confirmed that Shuruppak dates at least as early as the Jemdet Nasr period, expanded greatly in the Early Dynastic period, and was also an element of the Akkadian Empire and the Third Dynasty of Ur.

References
1. ↑ Schmidt (1931).
2. ↑ Martin (1988), pp. 20–23.
3. ↑ Leick, Gwendolyn (2002). *Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City*. London: Penguin. ISBN 0-14-026574-0.
4. ↑ Daniel T. Potts, *Mesopotamian Civilization: The Material Foundations.* Cornell University Press, 1997 ISBN 0801433398 p167
5. ↑ Martin, Harriet P. (1988). *FARA: A reconstruction of the Ancient Mesopotamian City of Shuruppak*. Birmingham, UK: Chris Martin & Assoc.. p. 44, p. 117 and seal no. 579. ISBN 0-907695-02-7.
6. ↑ Adams, Robert McC. (1981). *Heartland of Cities*. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fig. 33 compared with Fig. 21. ISBN 0-226-00544-5.
7. ↑ Heinrich, Ernst; Andrae, Walter, eds (1931). *Fara, Ergebnisse der Ausgrabungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft in Fara und Abu Hatab*. Berlin: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.
8. ↑ Schmidt, Erich (1931). "Excavations at Fara, 1931". *University of Pennsylvania's Museum Journal* **2**: 193–217.
9. ↑ Kramer, Samuel N. (1932). "New Tablets from Fara". *Journal of the American Oriental Society* **52** (2): 110–132. doi:10.2307/593166.
10. ↑ Martin, Harriet P. (1983). "Settlement Patterns at Shuruppak". *Iraq* **45** (1): 24–31. doi:10.2307/4200173.

Bibliography* Pomponio, Francesco; Visicato, Giuseppe; Westenholz, Aage; Martin, Harriet P. (2001). *The Fara Tablets in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology*. CDL Press. ISBN 1-883053-66-8.
* Matthews, R. J. (1991). "Fragments of Officialdom from Fara". *Iraq* **53**: 1–15. doi:10.2307/4200331.