The cuneiform script matured into an effective writing system capable of recording economic transactions and conveying stories.
Ur-Nammu was succeeded by Shulgi, whose fifty year long reign undoubtedly made an impression on the region. No less than eighteen hymns were dedicated to him, extolling his prowess in war, his athletic ability, and his attractiveness to women, especially to Inanna. One of the hymns even tells how the king ran from Ur to Nippur through a hailstorm in order to participate in two religious festivals on sequential days.
The people rejoiced at the athleticism of their king according to one account of that momentous event, perhaps written by none other than Shulgi himself, for he also claimed to have learned to read and write, do mathematical calculations, and speak Elamite, Akkadian, and Sumerian. An active and intelligent king, Shulgi implemented significant administrative reforms during the years of his reign. These appear to have resulted in the proliferation of “paperwork”—large numbers of economic tablets date to his reign. Although they make for tedious reading, they provide unique insight into what life was like for the common man and woman living in Sumer during the Ur III period.
Dissecting an Economic Tablet
Women are indicated in these texts by the symbol and men as whereas the symbol for workers in general was . A similar convention was used for bulls , cows and cattle . Both cattle and men served as beasts of burden; the former for men and the latter for the gods.
Shulgi carrying a basket.
Sometimes the symbol of a cord was added to a head to indicate a slave . Or a symbol of a yoke was displayed next to the individual to indicate their slave status.1Nissen 1993, 83-88 However, the majority of people mentioned in these texts were neither slaves nor foreigners but native Sumerians.
To illustrate how these tablets work, and what life was like for the working poor, let’s take a closer look at a tablet that tracks the labor of 36 woman tasked with milling grain for a period of approximately one year under the oversite of a foreman named Ur-Shara.
36 female laborers, each of whom received 3 ban per month, from the completed day 23 of the month “Barley brought to the quay” of the year “Harshi and Kimash were destroyed” until the completed day 7 of the month “Bricks cast in moulds” of the year following “Harshi and Kimash” were destroyed.2Nissen 1993, 83-84
The year is given according to its year name—the year Harshi and Kimash were destroyed—which was the 45th year of Shulgi’s reign. The months are named after the different types of tasks performed in each of them. June was a hot month ideal for baking bricks in the sun and was therefore named “bricks cast in moulds” and so on and so forth.
The tablet was essentially a record of debits and credits for a one year period. The unit of account was a ban—a measure of barley (1 ban = 10 sila = approximately 2 gallons). On the debit side of the tablet is the amount of grain allocated to Ur-Shara. A certain portion of this grain was paid to the workers and the rest milled into flour. On the credit side is the amount of flour the workers produced.3Nissen 1993, 83-84 Although the primary task of the women under Ur-Shara was milling flour—which constitutes 70% of their labour days—the tablet records other types of work the women engaged in, such as digging trenches, loading flour onto barges, transporting baled straw to the temple, and various jobs related to the manufacture of textiles. They received on average around 16 gallons (60 litres) of barley per month as payment.4Nissen 1993, 82 If one of the women died, it was duly noted in the tablet. The amount of lost labor and rations she would have consumed are still accounted for. Nissen notes that there is no conception of a fixed Sabbath in the Ur III administrative texts. The women might have 1 in 6 free days whereas for men the ratio was more commonly set at 1 in 10.
From the fact that male and female laborers were treated differently in respect to free days, we may deduce that there was no such thing as a rigid weekly schedule with something comparable to a work-free Sunday. Breaks in work occurred rather on an irregular basis, depending on the work performed and the constitution of the works. A comparison between the nominally booked work-free periods—whether or not they were really honored by the foremen of work gangs—and modern vacation norms makes apparent that such periods hardly exceeded the minimum time required for the regeneration of the laborers’ strength.5Nissen 1993, 88
The tablets offer a glimpse into the strictly regimented life of the common laborer, which could not have been happy or easy for most of them. Their livelihoods depended on the fulfillment of quotas in return for rations. Canal digging, for example, was set at 4 cubic yards of earth, per worker, per day. Different type of grain were milled at a rate of 2 1/2 to 5 gallons per day.6Nissen 1993, 83-84, 88 Records of land sales taper off sharply during the Ur III period as a result of the takeover of not just the temple estates by the kings of Ur but quite possibly “all other categories of arable land as well.”7Gelb 1989, 26 Centralized control of the means of production (land, oxen, plow, etc.) disrupted natural economic relationships between people and replaced them with an impersonal state bureaucracy that operated according to quotas and rations. Those who managed to get a foothold in the administrative state were well looked after but everyone else received just enough to survive.
Commenting on the plight of the common man during the Ur III period, the Russian dissident scholar, Igor Shafaravich, pointed to the many references in Sumerian economic tablets to deaths of workers and attempted escapes. From this data he argued that the lot of a labourer did not differ greatly from that of a slave during this period. Shafaravich concluded that the state which deifies its king has essentially abolished religion for the lower classes and replaced it with the state. When family, religion, and industry revolve around the state, the result is a loss of individuality or, what Shafaravich refers to as an “anonymous society,” patterned after the bee hive or ant hill.8Shafaravich 1980, 152-160
All this is inspired by one principle—the destruction of individuality or, at least, its suppression to the point where it would cease to be a social force. Dostoyevsky’s comparisons to the ant hill and the bee hive turn out to be particularly apt in the light of ethological [non-human] classifications of society: we have constructed a model of the anonymous society.9Shafaravish 1980, 269
There are undoubtedly strains of this beehive mentality in ancient Mesopotamia, whose origin myths teach us that we were created to labour for the gods, and for the king!
Collon, Dominique.
First Impressions : Cylinder Seals in the Ancient Near East.
Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Berman, J.
Created Equal : How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought.
Oxford ; New York, N.Y: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Gelb, Ignace J, P. Steinkeller, R. M. Whiting Jr..
Earliest Land Tenure Systems in the Near East: Ancient Kudurrus. OIP 104 vols.
Chicago: The Oriental Institute, 1989. Link
Hallo, W.
The World’s Oldest Literature : Studies in Sumerian Belles-lettres. .
Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2010.
Nissen, H. J.
Archaic Bookkeeping : Early Writing and Techniques of Economic Administration in the Ancient Near East.
Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Nissen, H. J. R.
The Early History of the Ancient Near East, 9000-2000 B.C..
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Link
Shafarevich, I. R.
The Socialist Phenomenon, Foreword by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, translated by William Tjalsma.
New York: Harper & Row., 1980. Link