Some Professions with Both Male and Female Members in the Presargonic E2-MI2 Corpus
ORIENT Volume 51, 2016 Some Professions with Both Male and Female Members in the Presargonic E2-MI2 Corpus Fumi KARAHASHI The Society for Near Eastern Studies in Japan (NIPPON ORIENTO GAKKAI) Some Professions with Both Male and Female Members in the Presargonic E2-MI2 Corpus Fumi Karahashi* This paper will examine three professions (šu-i2, tug2-du8, and i3-du8) in the Presargonic E2- MI2 Corpus that included both male and female members, with the aim of assessing their socio-economic status and roughly delineating their internal organization. A pattern seems to be discernible, namely that each group was comprised of men who held subsistence land and thus were listed in Type I ration lists, and men and women who held no land but received barley rations every month, and thus were listed in Type II or IV lists. Assuming that the ration lists and land allotment texts reflect the socio-economic status of a receiver, these documents should in turn refect the workforce hierarchy. Keywords: women, Presargonic, Lagaš, queen’s household, E2-MI2 I. Introduction The so-called Presargonic E2-MI2 Corpus (ED IIIb), which originated in Girsu in the city-state of Lagaš, contains some 1,800 texts (Foxvog 2011, 59). Many were excavated clandestinely and reached museums in various parts of the world (Paris, Berlin, London, St Petersburg, Copenhagen, US, and so forth) via antiquities dealers in Baghdad (Prentice 2010, 2–5). The majority of the documents are dated to the last three rulers of Presargonic Lagaš, spanning more than twenty years (Visicato 2011, 301; Sallaberger and Schrakamp 2015, 70–74).1 The institution that produced these documents was called E2-MI2 during the reigns of Enentarzi and Lugalanda as well as the frst year of Urukagina, and then its designation was changed to E2- d Ba-u2.
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