Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
Sealed receipt of fodder for sacrificial sheep, 2026 BCE
Description:
Animals were sacrificed daily to Šara, the city god of Umma. Although this tablet does not say so explicitly, this must also have been the fate of the sheep recorded here, given the recipient’s known connection to the temple household.
Record of withdrawals from a sealed warehouse, 2053 BCE
Description:
Two quantities of grain, or a similarly fluid commodity, are apparently transferred from a sealed warehouse to the temples of Enlil and Ninil in this rather damaged document.
Royal inscription of Sîn-kāšid on a votive cone: FSU 24
Description:
This clay cone bears a well-known votive inscription for Sîn-kāšid, king of Uruk, commemorating the (re)building of the goddess Inana’s temple E-ana at Uruk. The text, a variant of FSU 25, is published as RIME 4.4.1.3.
Almost nothing except the date survives of this small administrative record, but the morphology of the tablet and the style of hand-writing suggest that it was probably an early administrative record like FSU 6 and FSU 11.
This undated, unsigned note records over 100, 000 litres of grain entering a store room. The erased numerals on the reverse suggest it was written in the process of drawing up a more formal record of account. Identical quantities of grain...
Date:
2058 BCE, Ur III, undated but probably Šulgi year 37
Most of the obverse of this tablet is too damaged to read, but the reverse suggests that it is a list of items handed out to personnel, at least some of whom were scribes. The fact that the distributed items were weighed suggests that...
At Umma the management of state-owned land was contracted to teams of twenty or so agricultural laborers headed by an overseer. Running accounts were kept which recorded work owed and work performed year by year (Englund 1991). This...
This tablet allocates different numbers of animals for sacrifice to (the statues of) several major deities, male and female, in the god Iškur’s temple, as well as to the goddess Allatum.
Royal inscription of Sîn-kāšid on a votive tablet: FSU 25
Description:
This tablet bears a well-known votive inscription for Sîn-kāšid, king of Uruk, commemorating the (re)building of the goddess Inanna’s temple Eanna at Uruk. The text, a variant of FSU 24, is published as RIME 4.4.1.4.
Like FSU 23, this tablet records an agricultural labor team’s maintenance work on fields in which crops are growing. It calculates the theoretical labor expended on the basis of standardized work rates, distinguishing between regular...
Sealed summary of regular offerings over fourteen months, 2035 - 2034 BCE
Description:
The statues of the gods were offered regular meals of grain and meat (which were then redistributed to temple personnel). This tablet summarizes the grain disbursed to Šara, the city-god of Umma, and Šulgi, the deified former king since...
This tablet contains a brief record of livestock that were dead on arrival at their destination (or that died shortly thereafter). Living animals from the same herd would have been accounted for on a separate tablet.
A note about reed bundles. Reeds were a staple crop of Umma, on the edge of the southern Iraqi marshes. They were used as building materials and to weave a variety of mats, baskets, and other everyday objects.
This rather difficult, damaged tablet seems to record the disbursement of garments to prisoners from named individuals. Most extant lists of clothing gifts record the weight of each length of cloth. This record, however, does not.
List of beer rations for high officials and priests, circa 2051 BCE
Description:
This is a very unusual record, documenting the distribution of ‘high quality beer’ for a variety of priests and priestesses in Umma, who were perhaps attached to the temple of the city-god Šara.
This tablet, from the state livestock collection center at Puzriš-Dagan, documents the birth of lambs and kids to animals that were under the center’s administration, and hands them to a named individual for rearing.
This tablet summarizes the delivery of various sheep and goats recorded by at least two different scribes (the beginning and end of the document are missing), but most of the livestock noted by Ğiri-Šara-idab have since died.
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