Sura סורא
The academy founded by Rav, where Rav Ashi began the editing of the Babylonian Talmud.
Sura was founded in 3979 by Rav — Abba Aricha, a disciple of Rabbi Yehuda haNasi who returned from the Land of Israel to Babylonia. He chose a town where Torah was barely studied and made it a centre: tradition speaks of twelve thousand at his lectures, and of the kalla months of Adar and Elul, when field work stopped and thousands came from across the country.
A century and a half later Rav Ashi spent sixty years here putting the accumulated material in order, going through the entire corpus twice — the beginning of the Babylonian Talmud's redaction, completed under Ravina around 4260.
In the geonic age Sura was the first academy of the diaspora; in 4688 Rav Saadya Gaon was brought from Egypt to head it, bringing translation, philosophy, grammar and a prayer book into Jewish learning.