Shuruppak

**Shuruppak** (Sumerian: 𒋢𒆳𒊒𒆠 '**Šuruppag*KI*, "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.

## Shuruppak

### Names

Sumerian: 𒋢𒆳𒊒𒆠, "The Healing Place",The City of Grain, The Golden City

## Location

### Climate

Humid, fertile, semi-arid, with hot summers and sporadic rain.

### Terrain

Wetland ecosystem, sand and silt, flat and marshy

## Social

### Population

20,000**
Shuruppak became a grain storage and distribution city and had more silos than any other Sumerian city. The earliest excavated levels at Shuruppak date to the Jemdet Nasr period about 3000 BC; it was abandoned shortly after 2000 BC. Erich Schmidt found one Isin-Larsa cylinder seal and several pottery plaques which may date to early in the second millennium BC. Surface finds are predominantly Early Dynastic.

Excavations there in the first half of the 20th century uncovered three levels of habitation extending in time from the late prehistoric period to the 3rd dynasty of Ur (*c.* 2112–2004 BC). The most distinctive finds were ruins of well-built houses, along with cuneiform tablets with administrative records and lists of words, indicating a highly developed society already in being toward the end of the 4th millennium BC.

Shuruppak was celebrated in Sumerian legend as the scene of the Deluge, which destroyed all humanity except one survivor, Ziusudra. He had been commanded by a protecting god to build an ark, in which he rode out the disaster, afterward re-creating man and living things upon the earth, and was himself endowed with eternal life. Ziusudra corresponds with Utnapishtim in the Gilgamesh epic and with the biblical Noah.

The report of the 1930s excavation mentions a layer of flood deposits at the end of the Jemdet Nasr period at Shuruppak. More recently, it has been suggested that the nature of this deposit is more like that deposited by river avulsions, a process that was very common in the Tigris–Euphrates river system.

Several objects made of arsenical copper were found in Shuruppak/Fara dating from the mid-fourth to early third millennium BC (approximately Jamdat Nasr period), which is quite early for Mesopotamia. Similar objects were also found at Tepe Gawra (levels XII-VIII).

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.

Two possible kings of Shuruppak are mentioned in epigraphic data from later sources found elsewhere. In some versions of 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 man named 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.