Tablet Analysis & Reconstruction
Tablet Analysis & Reconstruction
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Religion within
the Institution
Religion within
the Institution
1 lamb for Enlil
brought in by Ikshu- ...
1 lamb for Ninlil
brought in by Nahbir, the baker.
1 lamb for the god Shamash,
1 lamb for Ninharsag,
brought in by KA+SHU-sha-IM, the sword carrier.
1 lamb for Ninni,
brought in by Lu-bal-shagga, the foreman.
1 lamb for Nana,
brought in by Kimalu, the foreman.
1 lamb for Ninhul,
brought in by Ibni-Anu, the foreman.
1 lamb for Lugal-banda,
brought in by Nur-Ishtar.
Scholarship frames these texts cynically as practical documents within an economic redistribution system. They record taxes for the benefit of the state, collected under the guise of worship. The idea that religion was used by the Ur III state as a tool to elicit cooperation and exploitation from the masses is consistent with early ideas in the anthropology of religion, which suggested that religion was a method enabling large-scale community organization and resource management.*
But the documents themselves tell a different story. These records are rooted in a world shared between humans and the divine; citizens are recorded alongside deities, all of them active participants in a complex organizational system. The scribe’s dutiful notation of each offerer and their divine recipient demonstrates an undeniable commitment to religious belief and practice. An anthropological reading of these texts demands that we take these writers at their word;** we should follow their lead in taking religious belief as a vital starting point for the process of economic organization.
Notes & References
* Bell, "“Ritual and Society: Questions of Social Function and Structure," 2009.
** This is a general principle in the discipline of anthropology that we should not impose our own meanings onto cultural practices but strive to understand how they are experienced from within. For a more specific discussion of how written documents reveal the shared views and values of an institutional organization, see Smith, “Incorporating Texts into Ethnographic Practice," 2006.
Religion as 'Superstructure'
Religion as 'Superstructure'
Scholars consider the bala system as an economic organization which merely incorporates the cult as one aspect of life. Temples are one of many pathways of redistribution, one sector in a society built around an organizational system of resource management. However, recent work on ancient religion suggests a different approach. Timothy Insoll argues for a view of religion as “the superstructure into which all other aspects of life can be placed,” an overarching framework rather than one ‘category’ of life (12). This is a useful framing for Mesopotamia, where the world was simply understood to be ruled by divine powers. Human civilization, the natural environment, social forces - all of this was created and maintained by the gods.* So rather than the bala system containing a religious sector, we should think of the system as working within a religious mode of being, a ‘superstructure’ permeating all aspects of life in Ur III.
Mesopotamian iconography often depicted deities in this seated position.
Notes & References
* For broad overviews of Sumerian religion, see Cunningham, "Sumerian Religion," 2013, and Bottero, Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia, 2001. For an example of how this worldview manifested in Sumerian literature, see the ‘Hymn to Enlil’ in Jacobsen, The Harps That Once...: Sumerian Poetry in Translation, 1987.
Van de Mieroop’s A History of the Ancient Near East ca. 3000-323 BC, 2007 focuses quite heavily on religion in other periods of Mesopotamian history, while the section on Ur III is skewed toward the economic.
Insoll, Introduction to Archaeology, Ritual, Religion, 2004.
Raja & Rüpke, "Appropriating Religion: Methodological Issues in Testing the ‘Lived Ancient Religion’ Approach," 2015.
Coleman, "Ritual, Rationality and Intersections Between Economy and Religion," 2015.
Gudeman & Hann, "Introduction: Ritual, Economy, and the Institutions of the Base," 2015.
Entanglement of Religion and Economy
Entanglement of Religion and Economy
Rather than an administrative system encompassing religion within the economy, I believe the bala offerings at Puzrish-Dagan represent a complex entanglement of religious and economic life. This can be seen in the records: some livestock are labelled as offerings and routed to temples, while others are sent to institutional offices as regular disbursements and provisions. This may have been understood through notions of parallelism, a common idea in Sumerian thought that the setup and happenings of the human world mirrored that of the gods. The pantheon was structured in the same way as human institutions, and the actions of the gods kept society running. Cunningham explores parallelism in his discussion of Sumerian religious views, suggesting that the early temple's basic redistributive role mirrored the deities' distribution of good health and fortune to the people. In the same way, the bala system may have been fundamentally dependent on the divine. Offerings to the gods were taken care of first, as seen in the record; perhaps the secondary distribution of livestock to cities and institutions was an earthly mirror of this act.
Notes & References
Cunningham, "Sumerian Religion," 2013.
Bottero, Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia, 2001.
Szarzyńska, “Offerings for the Goddess Inana in Archaic Uruk," 1993.
Officials as Intermediaries
Officials as Intermediaries
In addition to creating the records and managing the logistics of redistribution, scribal officials were in charge of matching offerers to divine recipients. After all of the livestock was pooled at Puzrish-Dagan, some amount of the total was allocated for the temples to provide the gods with (interpretations differ on how much). Which animals were gifts for deities seems to have been decided later, within the bureau, because the gods are named only in records of deliveries sent out and absent from records of payments brought in. Furthermore, the list of deities was set in a fixed order, always beginning with Enlil and Ninlil and ending with Lugalbanda.* I believe it was the receiving official’s job to assign offerers to deities in the process of allocating livestock throughout the empire. These officials would take on a unique intermediary role as a facilitator of ongoing relationships between humans and deities, demonstrating a power we might expect from an ancient priest. The role of officials as both economic resource managers and religious intermediaries reveals the bala not as a mere system of tax collection and redistribution, but as a complex of relationships between citizens, institutions, and deities.
Notes & References
* Edzard et al., Reallexikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischen Archäologie, Volume 7: 120.
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.
Hilgert, Introduction to Drehem Administrative Documents from the Reign of Šulgi, 1998.
Insoll, Archaeology, Ritual, Religion, 2004.
Raja & Rüpke, “Appropriating Religion: Methodological Issues in Testing the ‘Lived Ancient Religion’ Approach," 2015.
Individual Experience in the System
Individual Experience in the System
With the focus on Mesopotamia's impressive bureaucratic organization, it's easy to forget that these records are a window into the everyday people of 4 thousand years ago - such as Nahbir the baker, who might have made fancy pastries for the gods. (Surviving Sumerian recipes feature lots of date and pistachio.)
These texts may have been produced by the elite and for the institution, but they are evidence of a much wider community. What were regular offerings like for the individuals recorded in the tablets? Scholars portray them as exploited citizens, mandated to give up their property in the name of economic development and bureaucratic efficiency. Their rulers recorded nothing about them but their names and professions. But these were people with their own beliefs, motivations, and relationships. Even if we take exploitation as a starting point for the Ur III elites, its meaning would have transformed on different levels of the system, taking on new significance for the people on the ground.*
Recent work in anthropology has drawn a distinction between the religious life of the individual and the structured, organized cult of the community. We also know that people in Mesopotamia had very intimate relationships with deities beyond their communal loyalty to the city god; each citizen had a personal god who they interacted with directly and regularly. How did this translate to the offerings at Puzrish-Dagan, where worship was structured into a streamlined economic institution? How were relationships between offerers and the divine constructed, and on what level? Cunningham, citing a common view in the study of religious giving, argues that Mesopotamians entered into relationships of 'hierarchical reciprocity' through offerings to the divine. How did these relationships change in the bureaucratic complexity of Ur III?
A communally-maintained social order was an important value in Mesopotamia. The concept of the functioning, stable city was rooted in ideas of cooperation, responsibility, and 'doing one's part.'** Perhaps the bala was conceived of in the same way: not an exploitative taking of the elite from the people, but a common duty which ensured the safety of the social order.
Notes & References
* Raja & Rüpke, "Appropriating Religion: Methodological Issues in Testing the ‘Lived Ancient Religion’ Approach," 2015.
Cunningham, "Sumerian Religion," 2013.
* Premawardhana, "Transformational Tithing: Sacrifice and Reciprocity in a Neo-Pentecostal Church," 2012.
* Kauppinen, “God's Delivery State: Taxes, Tithes, and a Rightful Return in Urban Ghana,"
Postgate, Early Mesopotamia: Society and Economy at the Dawn of History, 1992.
Coleman, "Ritual, Rationality and Intersections Between Economy and Religion", 2022.
** This is a theme that can be seen throughout other periods of southern Mesopotamian history, which I argue can be applied to Ur III due to the continuity of cultural beliefs and values throughout the region's various historical periods. See Frankfort, “Town Planning in Ancient Mesopotamia," 1950 for discussions of omen texts and building traditions which illustrate the social value of 'doing one's part.'
Bottero, Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia, 2001.
Dates, Power, & Propaganda
Dates, Power, & Propaganda
All livestock sent in or out of Puzrish-Dagan was recorded in daily expense records; at the end of a month or year, giant periodical reports were drawn up using these daily records as a guide. The carefully noted date here tells us this is a record of all the deliveries made on the 6th day of Kisig-Ninazu, the fourth month of the Sumerian year. The year is given through a special formula that was chosen by the crown and standardized throughout the empire as a way to propagandize the structure of time itself.* This formula, commemorating the year Shulgi had destroyed rival cities, is curious because it’s a shortened version of what is usually found: "The year Sulgi, mighty man, king of Ur, king of the four quarters, destroyed Kimas, Hurti, and their lands in a single day."** Here the formula is reduced to its essence: enemy lands being destroyed. The scribe doesn’t find it necessary to even mention the king - perhaps reflecting the awareness of Shulgi’s citizens that nothing happened in Sumer without his influence.
Because of this year, we can also attribute this tablet to an author! Maeda shows that an official named Nasha was in charge of all livestock deliveries at Puzrish-Dagan throughout the end of Shulgi’s reign. Since the bureau was so organized and each person had a very specific role, it’s safe to assume this tablet is his handiwork.
Notes & References
* Molina, "Archives and Bookkeeping in Southern Mesopotamia during the Ur III Period," 2016.
Chiera, Selected Temple Accounts from Telloh, Yokha and Drehem: Cuneiform Tablets in the Library of Princeton University, 1922.
** Frayne, Ur III Period (2112-2004 BC), 1997.
More examples of date formulas: see Dahl, “Neo-Sumerian Temple Treasure Inventories," 2021.
See Goody, "The State, the Bureau and the File," 1986 for a discussion of the control of time and measurements by the Mesopotamian state, although he does not include date formulas in his analysis.
Image Notes
Illustration of a seated god loosely synthesized from cylinder seal depictions of the divine
Illustration of a baker with pastries inspired by surviving Sumerian recipes
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