were merely ‘makeovers’ of what had gone before. Strictly speaking, in order to do
so, we would have to have – for each particular element – a detailed stratigraphic
investigation to determine the sequence of (or absence of) antecedents on that particular
spot. But ideal, laboratory-style conditions do not apply, and we have to make the
best of piecemeal data that shed light on some features but which cannot tell us
much of what we really want to know. In spite of this, there are some clues available
to us in trying to decide how much the first millennium cities owe to their forebears.
For Nippur, there exists a map of the city drawn on a clay tablet, with its principal
features labelled in cuneiform (Zettler 1993 : Plates 6 – 7 ) (see Figure 5. 1 ). The map
has been dated to the Kassite period, and some of the features depicted on it, such
as three of the city gates (the Exalted, Gula and Ur-facing gates), are still attested
in documents of the mid-first millennium BC. This suggests that the city wall,
together with its gates, remained in use from the Kassite period through to at least
the fifth century BC. In fact, excavations in the WC area of Nippur have confirmed
the presence of a seventh-century city wall in close proximity to its Kassite and Ur
III-period predecessors (McG. Gibson, introduction to Zettler 1993 : 8 – 9 ).
Similarly, for Babylon, many of the topographical features known from texts of
the first millennium are already present in the literary-topographical series Tin.tir =
Babylon, a series of (originally) five tablets for which George ( 1992 : 4 – 7 ) has proposed
a dating in the late second millennium BC. Some of the topographical features
mentioned in Tin.tir, such as four of the eight gates of Babylon, can be identified
— Urban form in the first millennium BC—Figure 5. 1 Plan of Nippur, c. 1500 BC, showing the city wall with its seven gates, the Euphrates
and two canals, as well as the enclosure of the Enlil temple on the right. (Hilprecht collection,
Friedrich Schiller Universität, Jena).