Heritage
Why Sippar.
A city sat at the bend of the Euphrates for twenty-four centuries. Its temple was where commerce, law, and verification lived under one roof. We named this project after it.
The city
Sippar was the cult city of justice.
Sippar - modern Tell Abu Habbah, about 69 km north of Babylon - was continuously occupied from the Early Dynastic period (~2900 BCE) through the Achaemenid Persian conquest (539 BCE). Roughly 2,400 years of civic life across seven empires. The city's reason for being was the temple of Shamash - the sun god of justice - whose role in the Mesopotamian worldview was to see everything that happened in the world every day. Universal observation was the precondition of universal adjudication. His daughter Kittum was the personification of truth itself.
Hammurabi's law code stele was probably erected at Sippar. The relief at the top of the stone depicts Shamash handing the laws to the king. The legal authority of the most famous code in the ancient world derived from the god of this city - not from royal decree, but from divine witnessing.
The archive
An intact library between justice and witness.
In 1986, the Iraqi archaeologist Dr. Walid al-Jadir excavated something archaeologists had not previously seen: an intact temple library at Sippar. About four hundred clay tablets stored in a pigeonhole system - ten niches by four rows - inside a chamber positioned physically between the courtyards of Šamaš (justice) and his consort Aya (witness).
The placement was the semantic claim. The library held the canonical literature of Mesopotamia - Enūma eliš, Atra-ḫasīs, Lugale, the Šamaš Hymn - preserved in situ because the texts that recorded what a civilization knew about itself belonged between the gods of justice and witness. The al-Jadir library is now considered the type-specimen of the ancient Mesopotamian archive.
The artifacts
The first world map was made here.
Two objects from Sippar sit in the British Museum and bear on what this project is doing. The Tablet of Shamash (BM 91000), commissioned around 880 BCE, shows the god enthroned with the rod and ring symbols of authority, while a king is led toward him to receive divine legitimation. The Babylonian Map of the World (BM 92687), also from Sippar and probably from the 9th to 7th century BCE, is the oldest known map of the world. Earth as a disc surrounded by the Bitter River, Babylon at the center, seven outer regions extending beyond.
A cosmology of connection. Made at Sippar. Held at Sippar.
What we kept
Three patterns, carried forward.
We did not pick the name for aesthetic reasons. Three things about ancient Sippar mapped to the architecture we were building.
Shamash saw everything. Sippar verifies everything.
ICP threshold signatures and on-chain receipts mean every Sippar payment is verifiable by anyone, against the chain itself, without trusting Sippar. The same truth is visible to all parties simultaneously - the divine-observation premise, applied to cryptography.
Sippar bridged civilizations with clay. It bridges chains with cryptography.
The city's 2,400-year continuous occupation across seven empires made it the connective tissue of Mesopotamian civilization. Goods, laws, and tablets moved through it as polities rose and fell around it. The cross-chain relay - pay on any supported chain, access services on any other - is the same shape of connective infrastructure.
The first world map was made here. The first cross-chain payment map is too.
Sippar's Imago Mundi placed the known world on a single disc with a coordination layer at its center. Sippar's chains - Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, BNB, Solana, Stellar, Algorand, TON - share the topology: a central coordination layer in ICP threshold signers, outer settlement zones reachable through it.
What is happening now
AI is reading the city we named after.
This was not in the plan when we picked the name. But between 2023 and 2025, several research groups built systems that have started to make the Sippar archive readable at scale for the first time.
In May 2023, a Tel Aviv University team published the first neural-machine-translation system from Akkadian - the language of the Sippar tablets - to English (PNAS Nexus). The system scored above the comprehensibility threshold on royal decrees, administrative records, and divinations, which is exactly what most of the Sippar archive contains. The same year, the AICC corpus released about 130,000 AI-translated cuneiform tablets. In March 2025, Cornell Tech and Tel Aviv University published ProtoSnap, a diffusion model that solves cuneiform's central character-recognition problem by snapping prototype templates onto scribe-pressed wedge strokes.
In July 2025, a team at Munich's eBL Fragmentarium used AI fragment-matching to reassemble a 250-line hymn in praise of Babylon. Thirty fragments across twenty separate tablets, kept at Sippar, copied by Babylonian schoolchildren across the 7th through 1st centuries BCE. The hymn had been unreadable in modern times. The reassembly, per the team's lead author, would formerly have taken decades.
There are an estimated half a million surviving cuneiform tablets worldwide. Only a small fraction had ever been translated by humans before 2023. The proportion of the Sippar archive that becomes legible over the next decade is going to be substantially larger than what humanity has read of it in the previous three thousand years.
The point
An anchor, not a claim.
We named this project after Sippar because the city did this work first. Verification between observers. Connective infrastructure across rising and falling polities. A cosmology of connection where the coordination layer sits at the center and the settlement zones reach through it. We do not claim continuity. We claim respect for a working pattern.
What the Sumerians wrote about higher intelligence transmitting civilization to humans - the Apkallu, the Anunnaki, the ME, the Tablet of Destinies - is a different conversation, and one we are not having on this page. Whether that higher intelligence was external beings, deified ancestors, or encoded collective wisdom is not what this page answers. What it answers is what Sippar the city was, what its archive held, and what AI is starting to surface from it now.
For the texts the al-Jadir library held, the Cambridge Iraq journal series of Sippar Library publications (I through VII) is the canonical scholarly entry point. For the broader corpus, the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative and the eBL Fragmentarium at Munich are the open-access portals.