To the southwest of the Nanna sanctuary was a building described by several inscriptions as Gipar-ku, or "pure Gipar". It was linked to a religious function performed by a person with the Sumerian title of "en": in Ur, this was a woman, referred to here by her Akkadian title ofentum. An inscription of one of these priestesses, named Enanedu, contains this definition of her role: "The being who has the great role of building in a pure place the Gipar to ensure its priesthood (nam-en), that's me!"
The building in question is located in the temenos, to the south-west of the ziggurat; it essentially dates from the time of Ur III, with major work having been carried out in the Paleo-Babylonian period. Gipar-ku was almost square, measuring 79 m x 76.50 m, and oriented at the corners. The interior was cut by a transverse corridor, hence Woolley's distinction between two ensembles: the southeastern block (C) was the temple of Ningal, the northwestern block (A + B) formed the residence of theentum. At the boundary between these two complexes are storerooms (B1 to B8) and a kitchen (C32-34), which served both the goddess and the priestess.
Eachentum-priestess was the daughter of the king who ruled Ur at the time she was chosen by divination, and then installed in her position: the two events were often commemorated by the name of a year. They all bore Sumerian names related to their office, such as en-me-gal-an-na " entum (fit) for the great rites of An", en-šà-ki-ág-dnanna" entum beloved of Nanna" or en-an-e-du7 " entum suitable for An". Unfortunately, the entum 's cultic activities are poorly documented; we know more about their management of the estate they had to manage. When they died, they were placed in a burial vault beneath the building, and each entum was expected to provide funeral offerings for those who had gone before. The prosopography of entum priestesses drawn up by Johannes Renger in 1967 can now be improved on a number of points. We have been able to correct an old error by Gadd: Enšakiag-Nanna was dead when Enanedu took over theentum office, and the notion of "retired", in this case as in all others in Mesopotamia, is to be forgotten [1]. So there was only one living entum at any one time.
