No, Noah did not store tablets in Sippar

Zimbir was an important city in Sumeria, which parasemitic Akkadians later elided to our familiar Sippar. The Sippar sun-temple archive has "renown"... today. Because it is a library; we like lie berries here. Saddam's archaeologists dug this one up in 1986. Unfortunately it got looted thanks to George Bush II and the locals who used him as an excuse. But some of it might be coming back, or got photographed before the lootage.

The late news comes from Enrique Jiménez and Anmar Abdulillah Fadhil. This is a hymn to Marduk, oft-copied, but fragmented - or so the article argues. It seems that AI was used to gather the fragments, as to associate them all to the same hymn.

It's been neglected. Not only was the text scattered in fragments, they also date to the 7th century and even later. This is the Neo Babylonian era, or perhaps Terminal Babylonian - mostly the Persian or even Greek/Parthian era called "Hellenistic". I don't know if the hymn was ever sung at the courts of, say, Hammurabi.

Since the archives at Sippar were for the sun god, that Marduk is here praised suggests Babylon's influence. Indeed from vv. 25 on, the hymn shifts subject: a god is praising Marduk; I expect at Sippar's sun temple that would be the sun, Shamash. And vv. 100f praises Babylon, then the Babylonians. And-and, some of the reconstruction pulls from Babylonian texts as well. By Nabu-Kadrusr's time, the Babylonians were draping the glory of Eridu upon themselves. They also nodded to the ancient stele, which the authors associate with that of Hammurabi.

So I agree: a work of late Babylonian propaganda, disseminated throughout all the lower-Mesopotamian scribal schools.

But what the actual hell is this nonsense: One of the key goals of the LMU-Baghdad collaboration is to decipher hundreds of cuneiform tablets from the renowned Sippar Library and ensure their preservation. According to legend, Noah concealed these tablets there before the flood. I do not find any reference to some legend of Noah in Jiménez-Fadhil. Also stupid is this which is claiming the tablets are Middle Bronze Age which they are not.

BACKDATE 11/12