Nippur's temple archive turned out to hold more Sumerian literature than any other single findspot, including some of the oldest flood stories in the world.
A god's house and a mountain of tablets
Nippur's central temple, the Ekur, dedicated to the god Enlil, anchored a religious complex that, when excavated by University of Pennsylvania expeditions beginning in the late nineteenth century, yielded one of the largest collections of cuneiform tablets ever recovered from a single site, providing the basis for a substantial share of everything scholars now know about Sumerian literature, law and administration.
Flood stories older than familiar ones
Among the literary tablets recovered at Nippur are early versions of Sumerian flood narratives, texts that predate and likely influenced later Mesopotamian and biblical flood accounts, giving Nippur's archive outsized importance for understanding the literary prehistory of stories that eventually appear in vastly more widely known later texts.
As this entry's companion article covers
Nippur's unusual historical position as Sumer's primary religious centre, one whose blessing was required to legitimise a king's rule even though the city itself apparently never held direct political or military dominance over other city-states, is addressed directly in this entry's companion article rather than repeated here.