Methodology

Current Scholarship

The vast majority of cuneiform writing available to us today is administrative: documents concerned with the running of an organized state, usually in the form of records or receipts. In the early days of Near Eastern archaeology, these documents were considered boring “laundry lists” by looters and archaeologists alike.* Records of sales, wages, and taxes don’t have the same romantic appeal as ancient myths or hymns to gods and kings. These tablets were thus studied only as sources of information about the logistics of the Sumerian state, like date farming or the textile industry.

In the early 20th century, 'laundry list' tablets flooded the market at Baghdad whenever a new archive was looted. They were absorbed into private collections across North America and Europe.

Administrative building

Ur III’s bureaucratic reputation has led to an overwhelming scholarly focus on administrative and economic activity. Faith and worship are often implicitly portrayed as a remnant of an earlier cultural practice that faded into the background of state centralization and management. The offerings of the bala system are viewed through this same lens: a system of state-enforced taxation that used religion as a method of controlling the masses. Citizens were tricked into giving up their property to the state through the excuse of ‘appeasing the gods’, but were really giving complete control of the empire’s resources to those in power. This control, according to scholars, is evident in the detailed records and receipts that kept track of each citizen and their offerings. Thus, studying temple offerings has meant understanding the bureaucratic organization and management practices of the temple depositories and archives.

Notes & References

* Jones, "Sumerian Administrative Documents: An Essay," 1976. 42.

Maggio, "A Mesopotamian Temple Inventory. The Case of the Early Old Babylonian Administrative Texts from Ur," 2019.

Hilgert, Drehem Administrative Documents from the Reign of Šulgi, 1998.

Tsouparopoulou, "A Reconstruction of the Puzrish-Dagan Central Livestock Agency," 2013.

Steinkeller, "The Administrative and Economic Organization of the Ur III State: The Core and the Periphery," 1987.

Dahl, “Neo-Sumerian Temple Treasure Inventories," 2021.

Jones & Snyder, "The Basic Organization at Drehem," 1961.

Chiera, Selected Temple Accounts from Telloh, Yokha and Drehem: Cuneiform Tablets in the Library of Princeton University, 1922.

Szarzyńska, Krystyna. "Offerings for the Goddess Inana in Archaic Uruk," 1993.

However, this view considers only the workings and function of the system of power itself. Scholars see the system of offerings rather cynically, calling them ‘taxes,’ ‘dues,’ ‘subscriptions,’ and ‘imposts’, and often portray citizens as unwilling or blindsided participants.* Offerers are excluded from the picture of a sophisticated bureaucratic state; this complexity applies only to those in charge, while the ruled stayed under ‘primitive’ traditions of sacrifices to the gods. This made me wonder: what were mandatory temple offerings really like for the everyday Sumerian? How were they experienced and understood by those involved?

Mudbrick houses

Notes & References

Same as above: Chiera, 1922; Johns, qtd in Jones, 1976 (45); Steinkeller, 1987; Jones & Snyder, 1961; Tsouparopoulou, 2013.

Yoffee, "Political Economy in Early Mesopotamian States," 1995.

Cunningham, "Sumerian Religion," 2013.

For a discussion of the scholarly framework of 'primitive' religious societies vs. 'developed' secular ones, see Insoll, Archaeology, Ritual, Religion, 2004.

My Focus: history from below

My method starts with the popular approach of ‘history from below’: understanding the lives of commoners who are at first glance invisible in the historical record. History from below has become especially relevant through the recent movement of decolonizing academia and its effort to recover marginalized peoples’ experiences and stories in history. Marc van de Mieroop demonstrates how we might apply history from below to Mesopotamia, where writing was highly political and restricted to the elite. Administrative texts represent everyday people in specific instrumentalizing ways due to their purpose as management records. But they do represent them, and that means the lives of the non-elite should not be simply written off as inaccessible.

Common Sumerian artefacts: the objects that made up daily life

Notes & References

Van de Mieroop, "History from Below," 1999.

Pooley, "Native to the Past: History, Anthropology, and Folklore in Past and Present," 2018.

Goody, "The State, the Bureau and the File," 1986.

Low-level institutional workers worked in various workshops. They might have been making tablets (pictured here), preparing food, or producing crafts.

The people that appear in Tablet Ex642 are not the illiterate laborers that made up the lowest strata of society, but neither are they part of the elite. These offerers seem to be a sort of ‘middle class’. They were institutional workers and temple staff, steadily employed by the state and likely literate to some degree. However, they were still members of the population of the ‘ruled’, living under systems of power and authority upheld by high-ranking bureaucrats and political leaders. My approach demonstrates an important first step to understanding the people in the tablets whose historical record was produced by elites and stored in the royal archives. In the future, a further ‘history from below’ might be applied to records of laborers or wages for agricultural workers.

Notes & References

Maeda, "Bringing (mu-túm) Livestock and the Puzurish-Dagan Organization in the Ur III Dynasty," 1989.

Postgate, Early Mesopotamia: Society and Economy at the Dawn of History, 1992.

Yoshikawa, "The Sumerian Verbal Prefixes Mu-, i- and Topicality," 1979.

Jones & Snyder, "The Basic Organization at Drehem," 1961.

An Anthropological Approach

To uncover the lived experience behind what is recorded in Tablet Ex642, we should think of the tablet not as a simple record but a product of a complex web of cultural values, religious beliefs, social norms, and economic obligations. Some scholars have begun taking a sociocultural approach to Ur III texts, offering directions for future research into aspects such as identity, relationships, and ideology. Research in anthropology demonstrates how documents can be studied as affective entities which exert force and power over communities through shared beliefs and actions. By close reading what seems to be an objective record of people and livestock, we can uncover hints of the social world that produced it. My analysis borrows from the anthropology of religion, institutions, and taxation, as well as the study of materiality and writing. Ultimately I aim to rethink the practice of temple offerings beyond the cynical, surface-level view of disguised taxation: to decenter the goals of the elite and instead examine how this practice was experienced by citizens within.

Notes & References

Sociocultural Approaches to Mesopotamia

Evans & Rossberger, "A World of Things. Investigating Ancient Near Eastern Temple Inventories through Space, Objects and Practices," 2019.

Maggio, "A Mesopotamian Temple Inventory. The Case of the Early Old Babylonian Administrative Texts from Ur," 2019.

Verderame, "Text, Context, and the Social Dimension of Writing: A Case Study from the Early Dynastic Inanna Temple at Nippur," 2019.

Wright, "Crafting Social Identity in Ur III Southern Mesopotamia," 2008.

See also: Cunningham, "Sumerian Religion," 2013; Bottero, Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia, 2001.

Anthropological Theory

Ingold, "Materials Against Materiality," 2007.

Pooley, "Native to the Past: History, Anthropology, and Folklore in Past and Present," 2018.

Smith, "Incorporating Texts into Ethnographic Practice," 2006.

Insoll, Introduction to Archaeology, Ritual, Religion, 2004.

Bell, "Ritual and Society: Questions of Social Function and Structure," 2009.

Applying my method step 1: translation

Image Notes

Image from Mieszkowski, "Hey, mister -- wanna buy a 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablet for $10?", Salon, 2002. https://www.salon.com/2002/05/11/sumerian/.
Illustration of administrative building (cf. 3. historical background)
Illustration of mudbrick houses (cf. 3. historical background)
Illustration of common Sumerian artefacts based off of online museum collections: British Museum; Metropolitan Museum of Art; University of Chicago Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (four-lugged vessel and gazelle-head amulet)
Illustration of a scribal workshop, no reference

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse