song services is the titular litany as the penultimate song
and a final song as an intercession. A considerable number of such
perfected services exist in the Berlin collection. These were obtained
apparently from Sippar.(12) The writer has made special efforts to
reconstruct the Sumerian canonical series as they existed in the age of
Isin and the first Babylonian dynasty. On the basis of tablets not
excavated at Nippur but belonging partly to the University Museum and
partly to the Berlin collection the writer restored the greater part of an
Enlil liturgy in part 2, pp. 155-167.(13) In the present and final part of
this volume another Enlil liturgy has been largely reconstructed on pages
290-306.(14) From these two partially reconstructed song services the
reader will obtain an approximate idea of the elaborate liturgical worship
of the late Sumerian period. These were adopted by the Babylonians and
Assyrians as canonical and were employed in interlinear editions by these
Semitic peoples. Naturally the liturgical remains of the Babylonian and
Assyrian breviaries are much more numerous and on the basis of these the
writer was able in previous volumes to identify and reconstruct a large
number of the Sumerian canonical musical services. But a large measure of
success has not yet attended his efforts to reconstruct the original
unilingual liturgies commonly written on one huge tablet of ten columns.
Obviously the priestly schools of the great religious center at Nippur
possessed these perfected prayer books but their great size was fatal to
their preservation. It must be admitted that the Nippur collection has
contributed almost nothing from the great canonical Sumerian liturgies
which surely existed there.

Much better is the state of preservation of the precanonical liturgies, or
long song services constructed by simply joining a series of _kisubs_ or
songs of prostration. These _kisub_ liturgies are the basis of the more
intricate canonical liturgies and in this aspect the Nippur collection
surpasses in value all others. Canonical and perfected breviaries may be
termed liturgical compositions and the precanonical breviaries may be
described as liturgical compilations, if we employ "composition" and
"compilation" in their exact Latin sense. Since Sumerian song services of
the earlier type, that is liturgical compilations, are more extensively
represented in the Nippur temple library than in any other, this is an
appropri