Three temple households anchor most modern scholarly understanding of how the institution worked in practice, each attached to one of Mesopotamia's most important cult centers. The Eanna, house of heaven, was the temple household of the goddess Inanna at Uruk, and its administrative archives, spanning a remarkable stretch of Mesopotamian history, remain among the richest surviving sources for how a major temple economy actually operated day to day. The Ekur, mountain house, belonged to Enlil at Nippur, the religious center whose authority other Mesopotamian cities looked to for validation of kingship, while the Esagila, house whose top is high, was Marduk's temple household at Babylon, closely bound up with the Akitu New Year festival and the political theology of Babylonian kingship.
Each of these households functioned, at its city, as an economic institution substantial enough to rival or actively partner with the royal palace for control of land, labor and surplus, a dynamic scholars see repeated across Mesopotamian history in different forms, from the well documented palace-temple tensions of Old Babylonian Ur to comparable frictions many centuries later around the temple estates of New Kingdom Egypt.