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 possession of the town for the French. Protestantism made numerous proselytes at Niort, and Gaspard de Coligny made himself master of the town, which successfully resisted the Catholic forces after the Battle of Jarnac, but surrendered without striking a blow after that of Moncontour. Henry IV. rescued it from the League. It suffered severely by the revocation of the edict of Nantes.

NIPIGON [, or ], a lake and river of Thunder Bay district, Ontario, Canada. The lake is 30 m. N. of the bay of the same name on Lake Superior, at an altitude of 852 ft. above the sea. It is 70 m. long and 50 m. wide; contains over 1000 islands, is very deep, and has a much-indented shore-line measuring upwards of 580 m. The river, which drains the lake, descends several hundred feet in the 40 m. of its course and is the largest stream flowing into Lake Superior. It is widely known for the excellence of its trout fishing.

NIPISSING, a lake of the district of the same name in Ontario, Canada, situated nearly midway between Lake Huron and the Ottawa river, at an altitude of 64·4 ft. above the sea. It is of irregular shape, with bold shores, and contains many islands; from the north it receives the waters of Sturgeon river. It is 50 m. in length and 20 in breadth; discharges its waters by French river into Lake Huron, and is separated by a low watershed from the Mattawa river, a tributary of the Ottawa. It has been proposed as the summit level of the projected Ottawa and Georgian Bay canal, an important project rendered difficult by the numerous rapids both on French river and on the Ottawa. With the Ottawa, Mattawa and French, it formed the old voyageur route from Montreal to the Great Lakes.

NIPPUR, one of the most ancient of all the Babylonian cities of which we have any knowledge, the special seat of the worship of the Sumerian god, En-lil, lord of the storm demons. It was situated on both sides of the Shatt-en-Nil canal, one of the earliest courses of the Euphrates, between the present bed of that river and the Tigris, almost 100 m. S.E. of Bagdad, in 32° 7′ N. 45° 10′ E. It is represented by the great complex of ruin mounds known to the Arabs as Nuffar, written by the earlier explorers Niffer, divided into two main parts by the dry bed of the old Shatt-en-Nil (Arakhat). The highest point of these ruins, a conical hill rising about 100 ft. above the level of the surrounding plain, N.E. of the canal bed, is called by the Arabs Bint el-Amir or “prince’s daughter.” Here very brief and unsatisfactory excavations were conducted by Sir A. H. Layard in 1851, which served, however, by means of the inscribed bricks discovered, to identify the site. The university of Pennsylvania began systematic excavations in 1889 under the directorship of Dr John P. Peters. With some intermissions these excavations were continued until 1900 under the original director and his successors, Dr John Henry Haynes and Dr H. V. Hilprecht. The result of their work is a fairly continuous history of Nippur, and especially of its great temple, E-kur, from the earliest period.

Originally a village of reed huts in the marshes, similar to many of those which can be seen in that region to-day, Nippur underwent the usual vicissitudes of such villages—floods and conflagrations. For some reason habitation persisted at the same spot, and gradually the site rose above the marshes, partly as a result of the mere accumulation of debris, consequent on continuous habitation, partly through the efforts of the inhabitants. As these began to develop in civilization, they substituted, at least so far as their shrine was concerned, buildings of mud-brick for reed huts. The earliest age of civilization, which we may designate as the clay age, is marked by rude, hand-made pottery and thumb-marked bricks, flat on one side, concave on the other, gradually developing through several fairly marked stages. The exact form of the sanctuary at that period cannot be determined, but it seems to have been in some way connected with the burning of the dead, and extensive remains of such cremation are found in all the earlier, pre-Sargonic strata. There is evidence of the succession on this site of different peoples, varying somewhat in their degrees of civilization. One stratum is marked by painted pottery of good make, similar to that found in a corresponding stratum in Susa, and resembling the early pottery of the Aegean region more closely than any later pottery found in Babylonia. This people gave way in time to another, markedly inferior in the manufacture of pottery, but superior, apparently, as builders. In one of these earlier strata, of very great antiquity, there was discovered, in connexion with the shrine, a conduit built of bricks, in the form of an arch. Somewhere, apparently, in the 4th millennium, we begin to find inscriptions written on clay, in an almost linear script, in the Sumerian tongue. The shrine at this time stood on a raised platform and apparently contained, as a characteristic feature, an artificial mountain or, peak, a so-called ziggurat, the precise shape and size of which we are, however, unable to determine. So far as we can judge from the inscriptions, Nippur did not enjoy at this time, or at any later period for that matter, political hegemony, but was distinctively a sacred city, important from the possession of the famous shrine of En-lil. Inscriptions of Lugal-zaggisi and Lugal-kigub-nidudu, kings of Erech and Ur respectively, and of other early pre-Semitic rulers, on door-sockets and stone vases, show the veneration in which the ancient shrine was then held and the importance attached to its possession, as giving a certain stamp of legitimacy. So on their votive offerings some of these rulers designate themselves as patesis, or over-priests, of En-lil. Early in the 3rd millennium the city was conquered and occupied by the Semitic rulers of Akkad, or Agade, and numerous votive objects of Alu-usharsid (Urumush or Rimush), Sargon and Naram-Sin testify to the veneration in which they also held this sanctuary. En-lil was in fact adopted as the Bel or great lord of the Semitic pantheon. The last monarch of this dynasty, Naram-Sin, rebuilt both the temple and the city walls, and in the accumulation of débris now marking the ancient site his remains are found about half way from the top to the bottom. To this Akkadian occupation succeeded an occupation by the first Semitic dynasty of Ur, and the constructions of Ur-Gur or Ur-Engur, the great builder of Babylonian temples, are superimposed immediately upon the constructions of Naram-Sin. Ur-Gur gave to the temple its final characteristic form. Partly razing the constructions of his predecessors, he erected a terrace of unbaked bricks, some 40 ft. high, covering a space of about 8 acres, near the north-western edge of which, towards the western corner, he built a ziggurat, or stage-tower, of three stages of unburned brick, faced with kiln-burned bricks laid in bitumen. On the summit of this artificial mountain stood, apparently, as at Ur and Eridu, a small chamber, the special shrine or abode of the god. Access to the stages of the ziggurat, from the court beneath, was had by an inclined plane on the south-east side. To the north-east of the ziggurat stood, apparently, the House of Bel, and in the courts below the ziggurat stood various other buildings, shrines, treasure chambers and the like. The whole structure was roughly orientated, with the corners towards the cardinal points of the compass. Ur-Gur also rebuilt the walls of the city in general on the line of Naram-Sin’s walls.

The restoration of the general features of the temple of this and the immediately succeeding periods has been greatly facilitated by the discovery of a sketch map on a fragment of a clay tablet. This sketch map represents a quarter of the city to the eastward of the Shatt-en-Nil canal, which was enclosed within its own walls, a city within a city, forming an irregular square, with sides roughly 2700 ft. long, separated from the other quarters of the city, as from the surrounding country to the north and east, by canals on all sides, with broad quays along the walls. A smaller canal divided this quarter of the city itself into two parts, in the south-eastern part of which, in the middle of its S.E. side, stood the temple, while in the N.W. part, along the Shatt-en-Nil, two great storehouses are indicated. The temple proper, according to this plan, consisted of an outer and inner court (each covering approximately 8 acres), surrounded by double walls, with ziggurat on the north-western edge of the latter.

The temple continued to be built upon or rebuilt by kings of various succeeding dynasties, as shown by bricks and votive objects bearing the inscriptions of the kings of various dynasties of Ur and Isin. It seems to have suffered severely in some