Abu Salabikh

The low tells at Abu Salabikh, near the site of ancient Nippur in Central Babylonia (now southern Iraq) mark the site of a small Sumerian city of the mid third millennium BCE, [Ian Shaw, in Shaw and Robert Jameson, eds., "A Dictionary of Archaeology" (Blackwell) 2002, "s.v." "Abu Salabikh".] with cultural connections to the cities of Kish, Mari and Ebla. [P. R. S. Moorey, "Abu Salabikh, Kish, Mari and Ebla: Mid-Third Millennium Archaeological Interconnections", "American Journal of Archaeology" 85.4 (October 1981:447–448). ] Its contemporary name is uncertain: perhaps this was Eresh. [Roger Matthews, "The Archaeology of Mesopotamia: Theories and Approaches" (Routledge) 2003:163; see also Mark E. Cohen's speculation in note below] Abu Salabikh was excavated by an American expedition from the Oriental Institute of Chicago in 1963 and 1965, and was a British concern after 1975, under the direction of Nicholas Postgate for the British School of Archaeology in Iraq (1975–89), after which excavations were suspended with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990; "plans to resume fieldwork have now been abandoned in the light of current political conditions" Postgate reports. [ [http://www.arch.cam.ac.uk/~jnp10/ Prof. Nicholas Postgate] : Postgate turned his attention to the multiperiod site at Kilise Tepe, in the province of Mersin in southern Turkey.]

The city, built on a rectilinear plan in Early Uruk times, revealed a small but important repertory of cuneiform texts on some 500 tablets, of which the originals were stored in the Iraq Museum, Baghdad, and were largely lost when the museum was looted in the early stages of the Second Iraq War; fortunately they had been carefully published. [R. D. Biggs, with a chapter by D. P. Hansen. "Inscriptions from Tell Abu Salabikh", (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press), 1974 ISBN 0-226-62202-9. Transcribes all of the cuneiform tablets excavated at Tell Abu Salabikh in 1963 and 1965.] Texts, comparable in date and content with texts from Shuruppak (modern Fara, Iraq) included school texts, literary texts, ["We are now able to behold the earliest creative period of Sumerian "belles lettres", remarked Mark E. Cohen in 1976 (Cohen, "The Name Nintinugga with a Note on the Possible Identification of Tell Abu Salābīkh" "Journal of Cuneiform Studies", 28.2 [April 1976:82–92] ). Cohen identifies the contemporaneous name of the city, from the "zà-mì hymns", as "Gišgikidu", "Gišgi, the good place". ] word lists, and some administrative archives, as well as the "Instructions of Shuruppak", a well-known Sumerian "wisdom' text of which the Abu Salabikh tablet is the oldest copy.

Postgate's interdisciplinary approach was integrated under the broad aim of describing the daily life of a small Sumerican city, down to the lives of the simplest illiterate inhabitants. [Postgate summarized the discoveries at Abu Salabikh in the relevant article in J. Curtis, ed., "Fifty Years of Mesopotamian Discovery"(London) 1982:48–61.]

The Euphrates was the city's highway and lifeline; when it shifted its old bed, [Identified to the west of the Main Mound by coring techniques.] in the early second millennium BCE, the city dwindled away. Only eroded traces remain on the site's surface of habitation after the Early Dynastic Period of Sumer. ["Occupation ceased at the end of Early Dynastic IIIa, or shortly thereafter, and the site was never reoccupied:", concludes D. Hanson in "Oriental Institute Papers" 99, p. 55).]

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