The priestess-entum was a special case: a sort of human stand-in for Ningal, wife of the god Nanna, she lived in the building that also housed the goddess's temple. But this was clearly not the general rule. We began by examining the area around Nanna's sanctuary, i.e. sites EH and EM, to determine what proportion of the temple's servants resided there and what the status of the soil was in this area.
The EH quarter was first excavated by Taylor in 1854, the tablets he discovered having been transported to the British Museum. In the decades that followed, uncontrolled excavations evidently took place at the same site, with the exhumed tablets scattered among numerous collections. It was during his fourth campaign, in 1925-1926, that Woolley resumed excavation of this area. Unfortunately, the area was so poorly preserved that he was unable to identify a coherent plan, with the exception of a temple dedicated to Nimintabba. Private devotion to this goddess in the Paleo-Babylonian period is fairly well documented, but only at Ur, as most of the evidence was found in this area. This is therefore a very interesting example of a specific cult taking root in a limited area. Nimintabba was a guardian goddess of the temple of Nanna; a temple was dedicated to her in the vicinity of the main sanctuary. We can see how closely the lives of the gods were modelled on those of men: the temple porters, holders of prebends, also lived in houses in the vicinity of the sanctuary. This EH quarter continued further west, in an area that Woolley called EM; he made a trial here at the end of his fourth campaign, close to the spot already successfully probed by Hall in 1919, and the encouraging results he obtained decided him to continue. This was done in 1926-1927, during the5th campaign, during which Woolley cleared an area of some 2,800m2, uncovering three traffic routes and some fifteen houses. The archives discovered show that several generations of families belonging to the Ekišnugal clergy lived in this district. For example, atNo. 7 Quiet Street, Ur-Nanna, bursar(šandabakkum) of the Nanna temple, then Ku-Ningal, priest-abriqqum, and his sons lived successively. Their neighbors included the administrator(šatammum) Ela, and a farmer from the goddess Ningal's domain, Sin-ereš. In the house "no 5 Quiet Street" lived the kišibgallum Šamaš-naṣir. In principle, the land was owned by the families who lived in these homes. Only one example shows the temple of Nanna selling a plot of land in this neighborhood: it was undoubtedly an abandoned house. It should be added that this neighborhood was not exclusively inhabited by the clergy of the neighboring temple, and conversely that some members of the sanctuary staff might live elsewhere in the city, as we saw with Sin-nada.
