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# The Babylonian poem "The Poor Man of Nippur", composed around 701 BC and devoted to the duty of hospitality and to vengeance for an undeserved insult
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/vavilonskaia-poema-bedniak-iz-nippura-napisannaia-okolo-701-g-do-n-e-i-posviashchennaia-dolgu-gostepriimstva-i-mesti-za-nezasluzhennuiu-obidu/
- Published: 2026-08-03T10:36:10.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:25:29.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Archaeology, Archive, The East, Books

The Babylonian poem "The Poor Man of Nippur", composed around 701 BC and devoted to the duty of hospitality and to vengeance for an undeserved insult. A poor man from the city of Nippur gives up his last possession and brings a goat as a gift to the governor, who humiliates him and drives him away, having given him watered-down beer and gristle. The insulted man vows to repay the offence three times over, and three times he beats his offender cruelly: disguised as a messenger, as a physician, and by luring him out into the field.

The poem was most probably part of the curriculum of a scribal school in Nippur, but the story itself is thought to be older and Sumerian in origin, as the mention of Sumerian gods indicates. An almost complete text of the poem was found at Sultantepe, in present-day Turkey, in 1952, but fragments had been discovered earlier among the tablets of the famous library of Ashurbanipal.

The Sultantepe copy ends with the name of the apprentice scribe who copied the text and with a curse on anyone who removes the tablet from the library, which echoes the themes of the poem itself. The translation given here is taken from the 1981 book "I Will Reveal to You a Hidden Word. The Literature of Babylonia and Assyria" and was made by the eminent Assyriologist Igor Mikhailovich Dyakonov. The poem is variously called Babylonian, Akkadian and Neo-Assyrian.

The text draws on the Mesopotamian understanding of hospitality, which required a guest to be received with dignity, regardless of his station. The ancient author asks what a man deserves, why the well-born deserve a more generous welcome than the poor, and how such an injustice may be repaid. It is no accident that the name of the main character, Gimil-Ninurta, is linked with the god of retribution.