SHEPHERDS AT UMMA IN THE THIRD DYNASTY OF UR: INTERLOCUTORS WITH A WORLD BEYOND THE SCRIBAL FIELD OF ORDERED VISION

BY

ROBERT McC. ADAMS*

Abstract

The Third Dynasty of Ur was a highly bureaucratized, late 3rd millennium B.C.E. empire centering in southern Mesopotamia. Its state superstructure, known almost exclusively from many tens of thousands of looted cuneiform tablets, has long been studied. However, these sources deal only indirectly or not at all with the impacts of imperial rule on the great mass of the subject population. Drawing upon an earlier prosopographic study of animal husbandry for the single province and city of Umma, this article focuses on shepherds, the lowest level of the administration, as a means of penetrating that wall of silence. As interlocutors, need ing to face and be credible in both directions, they become the basis for a more inclusive view of the nature of the Ur III state. Largely indifferent to the condition of its subjects and to the complex realities of the economic tasks imposed on them by heavy taxes and arduous corv?e labor, the administrative elite emerges as not only repressive, but more narrowly extractive rather than broadly managerial in its intent and operations. The overriding focus in pursuit of which it was highly successful (although for less than a century), appears to have been the flow of resources that would enhance its own hegemony and well-being.

La Troisi?me Dynastie d'Ur ?tait un empire hautement bureaucratis? de la seconde moiti? du 3Ae mill?naire avant l'?re chr?tien, centr? sur la M?sopotamie du sud. Sa superstructure ?ta tique,connue presque exclusivement gr?ce ? des dizaines de milliers de tablettes cun?iformes pill?s, a ?t? longuement ?tudi?e. Toutefois, ces sources ne portent pratiquement sur l'impact qu'avait l'autorit? imp?riale sur la population assujettie. Puisant dans une ?tude prosopographique ant?rieure sur l'?levage dans la seule province et ville d'Umma, cet article concerne les berg ers, personnages situ?s au niveau le plus bas de l'administration, dont l'?tude doit permettre de percer ce mur de silence. En tant qu'interlocuteurs cr?dibles tourn?s ? la fois vers le bas comme vers le haut, ils peuvent fournir les bases d'une image plus globale de l'?tat d'Ur III. Il ressort l'image d'une ?lite administrative plus ou moins indiff?rente aux conditions des sujets et aux r?alit?s complexes des taches ?conomiques qui leur sont impos?s par des imp?ts importants et des corv?es p?nibles ; elle ?tait non seulement r?pressive mais anim?e par des intentions et des op?rations plus extractives que managerielles. L'essentiel du fonctionnement ?tatique, poursuivi avec beaucoup de succ?s (bien que pendant moins d'un si?cle), semble avoir ?t? d'assurer un flux de ressources ? m?me d'augmenter sa propre h?g?monie et bien-?tre.

Keywords: Bureaucracy, corv?e labor, administrative elite-subject relations, early empires, interlocutors, prosopography, sheep husbandry

* University of California San Diego, Department of Anthropology La Jolla, CA 92093-0532, [email protected]

? Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2006 JESHO 49,2 - Also available online www.brill.nl

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INTRODUCTION

The Third Dynasty of Ur (conventionally 2112-2004 B.C.) was, by general consensus, a complex and vigorous if relatively short-lived early Mesopotamian empire. Exceptional numbers of cuneiform records, as well as many excavated public buildings, establish that itwas a highly stratified society, with a cohesive, literate elite asserting its administrative authority over a massive, subservient population. Those records disclose a "manifest love for order, regularity and standardization" (Sharlach 2004: 1), yet reflect very little insight into the char acter and effectiveness of themanagement thatwas actually exercised. This dynasty's abundance of surviving documentation may at firstglance seem to displace any need for further inquiry. A more critical examination assumes greater impor tance, however, as the Ur III bureaucracy has gone on to become a virtually iconic exemplar in comparative studies of early states and empires generally (e.g., Trigger 2003, Yoffee 2005). A compendium of records of the personnel involved in the management of animal husbandry in the ancient city of Umma is the admittedly narrow base from which I first set out to address two larger objectives: (1) clarifying the nature and limitations of the Ur III administration's management functions; and (2) to the limited degree presently possible, opening to scrutiny some features of the condition and status of the non-elite population as a whole. Ten years after its publication (Stepien 1996), the one systematic prosopographic study I am aware of remains to be seriously exploited. I hope to show that it is a poten tially serviceable vantage point, deserving replication in other efforts like it, to penetrate below the "management's" prevailing field of view. However, several preliminary, contextualizing steps are needed first. One of these is an overview of the state's exactions from its subjects, even if only in terms of rough aggregates. Providing this is greatly facilitated by a comprehen sive, recently published analysis of the tax system that was implemented under the Third Dynasty (Sharlach 2004). In keeping with the special objectives of this paper, the synopsis given later, drawn largely from this source, is limited insofar as possible to assessing the nature and scale of the system's impacts on the ordinary, lower-status population. For the administrative complexities (and many remaining uncertainties) of the system itself, as well as for the lengthy sequence of scholarly contributions that has led to the present level of under standing, the Sharlach monograph should be consulted directly. Next, a brief outline of the Ur III dynastic sequence is as follows:

Ur-Nammu 2112-2095 B.C. (no relevant records) Shulgi 2094-2047 B.C.

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Amar-Sin 2046-2038 B.C. Shu-Sin 2037-2029 B.C. Ibbi-Sin 2028-2004 B.C. (later reign unrepresented)

My principal concern centers on Umma, a city-state earlier in the thirdmil lennium B.C. (and probably in the late fourth millennium as well). In the first instance, this is because Umma was the urban entity from which the prosopog raphy was drawn. But no less importantly, it is also because of the exceptional richness of cuneiform records dating to the Third Dynasty of Ur recovered from the city's ruins that pertain not only to the city itself but to its hinterlands. Under that dynasty's imperial control the city perhaps partly retained elements of its earlier organizational form as a free-standing city-state. Now, however, both the city and its temples, as well as many outlying dependencies, fell under the unitary control of an ensi or 'governor,' who was himself under the absolute but lightly exercised authority of a dynastic succession of kings whose political capital lay in Ur, 80 km. south. Never legitimately excavated, the ruins of Umma lie along the outermost, northeastern perimeter of the most extensive archaeological survey of the adjoining region (Adams and Nissen 1972: site 197 in the appended Catalog). Heavily blanketed with dunes at the time of that work, what was readily visi ble was an elevated area covering well in excess of 2 square kilometers. Its population during the Third Dynasty of Ur almost certainly was not less 20,000 inhabitants (Steinkeller n.d., p. 9). . . In this forthcoming article on "City and Countryside .," primarily focused on Umma and its province, Steinkeller documents in rewarding detail the remarkably extensive geographic information that he has found in Umma's cuneiform documents. A credible urban hierarchy within a total provincial area of approximately 2,000 square kilometers is outlined, extending downward from Umma as the largest city through a ranked series of smaller cities and towns to sites as small as hamlets. The latter, numbering between 86 and 120, are often identified only by references to their threshing floors and/or silos (but sometimes also small chapels). All are reasonably assumed to be small rural settlements or still smaller estates, the "administrative focus" of the ensi-governor's provincial domain, and as such apparently served as collecting and shipping-points for har vests to be transported by barge to the capital. The full account of this tanta lizing depth of information cannot be recapitulated here, but the small handful of larger sites that Steinkeller has been able provisionally to locate are given in the accompanying map (Fig. 1). Unfortunately, Umma and its surrounding region lay on the outermost, north eastern perimeter of the Warka Survey (Adams and Nissen 1972) that was

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This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Thu, 21 Jan 2016 18:04:17 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SHEPHERDS AT UMMA IN THE THIRD DYNASTY OF UR 137 based at distant Uruk, and at the time could receive only brief and inadequate attention. There has never been a later opportunity to return for fuller coverage. The region presents a further challenge to archaeological surface reconnais sance, in the form of a dense blanketing of much of it by overlying dunes already mentioned, while not far to the northeast of Umma itself lies a zone of modern irrigation agriculture that impedes both visibility and access. In the decades since that brief look, facilitated at the time only by aerial photographic coverage, satellite imagery has emerged as a far more powerful tool of investi gation. When the dangerously chaotic conditions presently prevailing in Iraq are finally overcome, Umma's environs are likely to become known in truly remark able precision and detail. For the present, however, any precise lines drawn on a map must be based largely on conjecture. Available itineraries are confined to the primary routes of water transport, beginning with a most significant economic artery, a Tigris channel, whose course in the Ur III period cannot yet be accurately traced. Several subsidiary, probably partly canalized branches are also shown in Fig. 1 emanating from it, their exact locations similarly conjectural at this point. In any case, only a few large sites can now be located as well as given names. As will be seen, they are principally at points where barge traffic turned from an upstream to a downstream direction (or vice versa). Unsurprisingly, there is no mention of overnight stopping-places that might be associated with the scores of small hamlets. A further source of uncertainty is that there were "huge areas of arable land" held either directly by the royal family or by "the crown sector" (here repre sented essentially by themembers of Umma's military organization), which was subordinated directly to the central government (i.e., the king) and was run by the local generals (shagina) (Steinkeller 2003: 41, 2002: 115). Their product was never taxed but flowed directly into the control of the dynasty, so that the settlements and population associated with royal holdings are almost certainly not reflected in the provincial urban hierarchy we have. Only future archaeo logical surveys, accompanied by in situ epigraphic finds, are likely ever to clar ify this picture. Finally, there are major uncertainties about Umma province's northeastern boundary. Did it terminate at the (unlocated) course of the Tigris branch, pass ing near or a few kilometers north of the line of Sumerian cities shown in Fig. 1, or did it cross over into the entirely unsurveyed region further north where additional Tigris branches must have flowed? If the latter is more likely, to what extent, if at all was this land permanently occupied? All that can be said at pre sent stems from my examination in considerable detail of the Iraqi Directorate

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' General of Antiquities maps and catalogs of sites thathad been visited and recorded by its large corps of inspectors in the 1970s and earlier decades. These are highly imprecise, badly flawed records, clearly making no pretense of system atic coverage. But itmay be worth something to report that itwas not possible in them to identify archaeological sites earlier than the first millennium B.C. throughout the region across that first branch of the Tigris. A brief comparison with the province of Lagash in the Ur III period (its cap ital no longer in Lagash itself but in Girsu), is also in order here. Immediately to the southeast of Umma province, Lagash was far larger, perhaps the largest of all Ur Ill's heartland provinces. From a compilation of 485 known field names for which varying data is available, its cultivated lands alone have been estimated at 3,000 to 5,000 sq. km. (Sharlach 2004: 62). None of Lagash's provincial borders has yet been defined to a degree com parable to Umma's, and the uncertainties of their relationship to Tigris chan nel^) are of course the same. But from economic records, Sharlach has recently estimated that the province produced 20,000 gur (28,800 hectoliters) of barley per year, the principal crop (2004: 27). At (probably idealized) productivities claimed at the time, this would require something over 42 sq. km. of continu ous cultivation, doubled to account for alternate years in fallow. Another, more direct estimate of the extent of domain lands by Piotr Steinkeller in a forth coming publication (cited by Sharlach, ibid., p. 30) is of 21,600 iku, about 76 sq. km. Given that the province was also the source of sustained, very large deliveries of reeds and soft, rapidly growing willow and other wood, as well as of grazing lands for large numbers of livestock, these numbers offer little assis

tance in assessing size. The looting of Umma's ruins, primarily for tablets, seems to have occurred first around 1911, and then to have been largely suspended for many decades. Most of that earlier material is now widely scattered among theworld's museums and in private collections, and much of it is published. Evidence of internal organization in the original body of material suggests that it "clearly forms an integrated whole" and is largely or completely of a public character (Steinkeller 2003: 41). Of course, it is in the nature of looted cuneiform tablets that noth ing?other than what can be inferred from internal linkages of persons, settings and events?establishes with certainty their internal ordering and coherence. Looting began again on a serious scale in the mid-to-late 1990s as the Ba'athist Iraqi regime came under internal and international pressure, and this activity went on to assume even greater scale in the general absence of rural security and any other form of remunerative employment for many rural folk after the U.S.- led invasion in 2003. Reportedly, a number of other sites in the

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Umma region have also suffered extensive damage. All in all, somewhat more than 19,000 tablets thought to be from Umma have been at least briefly cata logued in the Cuneiform Digital Library, but the more recent entries are other wise little known at present.

Waterborne Transport

Geographic features of theMesopotamian plain centering on Umma have already been briefly outlined. More important for present purposes, however, were solu tions developed by the Third Dynasty of Ur to capturing the economic potential of water transport through the fuller exploitation of its river and canal net works?and itspeople. The massive scale, technological complexity, and repressive enforcement involved in this extraordinary pillar of the empire's economic strength anticipate characteristics that we shall encounter again in another such strategic pillar, Ur Ill's textile industry. Boat or barge transport of bulk commodities in theMesopotamian alluvium conferred enormous cost and time advantages, but to reach its potential had to confront severe challenges. One of these was that alluvial river systems are characteristically unstable, given to course changes through channel avulsion thatwould naturally disrupt established patterns of human use. Another was that Ur Ill's irrigation agriculture made competitive, no less important demands for water, but irrigation canals in use could interfere seriously with the human tow ing operations that were essential for large-scale water transport. And third, while some locally grown wood and fiber did indeed play a significant part in boat-building (Potts 1997: 126), wood suitable for framing and sheathing large scale boat construction (and obtainable with existing means of transport) was lacking anywhere closer than the upper Tigris and Euphrates watersheds inAnatolia. Cuneiform documents make it redundantly clear that all of these challenges were somehow brought under control (if hardly overcome). But they shed very little light on how this was done. Bulk water transport powerfully stimulated the concentration of commodities deemed essential by the dynasty in urban centers in the empire's inner core. They could be brought from their dispersed points of harvest or extraction and trans shipped quickly at little economic (not to say human) cost for further process ing, elite consumption, or cult sacrificial observances. The aggregate quantities and varieties of goods moved are admirably laid out by Tonia Sharlach, whose to recent study of the provincial taxation system contributes importantly the next section. To mention merely one, and always bearing in mind the incom at pleteness of the looted collections of tablets on which the Sumerologists rely,

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least 65,930 bundles of reeds were shipped from Umma to the religious capital of Nippur in the first regnal year of Amar-Sin alone (Sharlach 2004: 37). No less impressive is the apparent organization and relative speed of indi vidual, large-scale shipments sent under royal or provincial authority. A unique Umma document, for example, provides the province's estimate of a tax pay ment to be transferred to royal authority in an estimated 12 ships. Barley was the main constituent (there were also other commodities), but this alone amounted to more than 900 tons?or about 76 tons per barge, each with an assigned captain but with a total of only 69 V2 gurush thought to be sufficient for the towing in a downstream direction (ibid., pp. 32-33). Another set of texts that happen to be from Girsu, not Umma, represent a record of the number and types of vessels from Lagash province traveling to Ur or Nippur during three years of Amar-Sin's reign. The number at any one time could be as low as one or as high as (an exceptional) 98, but typically with dozens inmovement simul taneously (ibid., 87-89). The prevailing size of many of these vessels is surprisingly large, with con sequences for other aspects of the waterway system to be mentioned shortly. Perusal of Sharlach's many entries reveals much variation, and the number of vessels involved in a particular shipment is often ambiguous. But the median appears to lie in the range of 30 to 40 tons. If this is correct, many thousands of tons obviously were involved in shipment in those three years of Amar-Sin's

reign. While large-scale shipment may have been the regime's major priority, I should emphasize that this did not exhaust the differentiated range of activities, and perhaps shippers, the system served. We learn, for example, of two work men towing a raft upstream for five days between two smaller principalities within Umma province, then unloading the cargo (presumably something low value and unaffected by immersion, like bundles of reeds) and returning the raft to Umma (Steinkeller 2003: 14). Elsewhere, he relates that such rafts were quickly assembled of plaited reeds (Steinkeller 2001: 33). For some reason this little journey produced a record?but does thatmake it official, or was it only some official's duty to record every movement of any form of vessel? Somehow it seems more reminiscent of Mark Twain's account of life on the 19th-century Mississippi River than of the official trafficof an empire. But let us return to the prevailingly larger, more substantially constructed vessels for calculations of another kind. The available texts formy purposes are concerned only with shipping specified weights or volumes of different commodities to meet imperial demands, not with having to design the capacities and perfor mances of vessels and then build them. Focusing instead on the boats, however,

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Daniel Potts has offered an account based on cuneiform, archaeological and his torical sources that is a good general guide (Potts 1997). Embracing more rig orous seagoing requirements as well as those for inland waterways, his discus sion is particularly helpful on component materials and some general properties of the vessels themselves. Although little of the technical details of boat construction is presently known, it seems certain that, for reasonably watertight vessels carrying large, often perishable cargoes, primary construction must have been of planks cut by hand from log rafts floated down the Twin Rivers. Bitumen, obtained in sub stantial amounts from the vicinity of Hit on theMiddle Euphrates, is known to have been an essential constituent for caulking. Rope strong enough for towing was fashioned, Potts tells us, from reeds. But how watertight, and at what depth below the waterline, would such a vessel be when carrying a heavy cargo of barley? Boat-builders at the time would have had practical knowledge of this, but apparently not scribal administrators. As Potts rightly observes, "it is clearly no easy matter to calculate actual car rying capacity from the very general rubrics of volumetric size used to describe ancient Mesopotamian watercraft" (ibid., 129). Forty metric tons of cargo, how ever, had to displace a roughly similar amount of water. Continuing this (admit tedly hypothetical) line of reasoning, was it not likely that the loaded waterline of such a boat or barge could not have reflected even two meters of additional depth more than an unloaded one, or perhaps only a meter or so? If so, the "footprint" of a forty-ton vessel at its waterline had to cover 80 square meters. Very provisionally, itwould then appear that the prevailing size of the heavy transport fleet must have been?admittedly, very roughly?on the order of 5-7 meters or so in breadth and 12-15 in length, with some vessels larger still. Vessels of this size, with their own weight in addition, have implications for the crews of tow-men compelled to pull them and the channels carrying them. As a general rule, tow-paths would have needed to be kept in good condition, with limited, carefully bridged interruptions for irrigation canal offtakes. If chan nels were uniformly 6-10 meters in width and well in excess of 2 meters in depth, careful maintenance would have been required, again, to keep them. Can we assume this was a provincial, not a royal, responsibility? Weirs might have been highly desirable to maintain proper water-levels and flow, but isn't their presence unthinkable if vessels of the size indicated and carrying more than forty tons of cargo had to be dragged across them? At this point, however, the generalities break down in the face of local con ditions. Documents place threeweirs at different canal outlets leading southward from the Tigris north of Umma. Were they in the main bed of this branch, so

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that all of the heavy traffichad to get around or pass them, or at the mouths of the smaller inlets? Unfortunately we are not told, and there are alternative inter pretations that contradict one another. We learn, on the one hand, that boat loads had to be laboriously transferred when vessels passed from the smaller branches or city-canals into the larger Tigris course. Was that to get them across a weir at theminor canal intake? But what good would it do there? The real need was to raise the water-level in the Tigris bed as high as possible. After all, we also learn that water that was being drawn from along this bed for irrigation purposes had to be hoisted by hand, by specified numbers of corv?e laborers in enormous, 300-liter clay pithoi (Steinkeller 2001: 29, 36-37). So ifwe opt for durable weirs of impressive size across a major Tigris branch, how did boat trafficpass over them? (If we are lucky, traces of these ancient weirs may even be found on good satellite imagery!) Enigmas like this multiply when working with texts alone, in other words, inviting future collaborative fieldwork by Sumerologists and archaeologists. It does appear that the demands of irrigation and water-transport were not easy to reconcile?but that theywere somehow reconciled. And it also does appear that the system heavily depended on extremely onerous corv?e labor for its installa tion, operation, and maintenance. I am not aware that any of this receives direct attention in cuneiform texts yet identified.

The Web of State-Imposed Taxes, Deliveries and Services

With our focus here on the much larger, lower-status population, not all aspects of the Ur III tax menu are equally relevant. Some taxes, like mashdaria, fell on provincial officials and others who were in a position to pay them in livestock and silver, and "these seem to have benefited the king and the royal family directly" (Sharlach 2004: 162). But by far the heavier burden was met with products resulting directly from the compulsory labor of the relatively unskilled, agricultural population. While retaining some elements of ceremony associated with cultic calendars, the Ur III tax system concentrated especially on securing large quantities of bar ley and its milled derivatives, and on livestock both for cult offerings and for elite, military and official consumption. Many other commodities were also req uisitioned, including reeds, soft, quick-growing wood like willow and poplar, ceramic vessels, roof-beams, and leather sacks, often in very large quantities. Another major contribution was the supplying of human services through periods of corv?e labor by both unskilled groups and craft specialists. To a very large extent, this was allocated for projects in support of the dynasty's material

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or cultic interests, remote from any direct contribution to well-being within Umma Province. This fell under the overall administration of a number of offices established by the ensi, among which were ones devoted to livestock and wool, to which I will turn presently (Steinkeller 2003: 42). Other offices were concerned with the conscription of laborers for public service, also to be dealt with shortly under another heading. Such services were partly performed in the originating province, but also in dynastic or cult capitals like Ur and Nippur; near the latter, one text records the expenditure of 24,500 man-days, 67 full time years, of labor by Umma workers at Tummal (Sharlach 2004: 55). Other duties included the packing, shipping, and sailing or towing of boats in both "centrifugal" and "centripetal" movement of taxed commodities along the highly articulated river and canal system. Barley allotments, graded in quantity by sta tus,were provided during periods of service, as was an annual allotment of low grade wool or wool textiles. As a general statement of this character invites, the devil may well lurk in quantitative and other details. Existing records do not allow annual totals of commodities to be clearly established for Umma, and still far less precision is possible for the imposed deliveries to be calculated as a proportion of gross output. Multiple variant and overlapping records do suggest with considerable confidence, however, that from 43 to 48 percent of the gross barley output on Umma province's domain lands was a required delivery (Sharlach 2004: 160). The 48 percent rate was apparently also in effect for neighboring, much larger Lagash, and more de tailed, impressive numbers were recorded there.Total cereal production was 103,861 gur, of which the bala share alone would have amounted in volume to about 24,940 cubic meters (ibid., p. 69). But apart from the appropriation of nearly half of the gross cereal output, there was also corv?e labor. The lower-status population was seldom recorded by name except in work-gangs on some specific tasks, and was not enumerated on any scale except in similar settings. Hence it is exceptionally difficult to esti mate annual aggregates of labor service, and still more so to project an esti mated total as a proportion of the unrecorded total population. I will deal with some imputed labor shortages thatmight have some relevance to this question later, but it seems likely that they are primarily a reflection of volatile supply and demand factors and hence tell us little. The bala system, to which Sharlach devotes major attention, was "the pri mary system for the transfer of commodities between the provinces and the cen tral government" (2004: 17). Fundamentally rotational, it involved one or more months of specifically assigned service for each province, but the flow of req uisitioned commodities and services in fact continued throughout the year. Our

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Thu, 21 Jan 2016 18:04:17 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 144 ROBERT McC. ADAMS knowledge of it is closely associated with the ancient establishment of Puzrish Dagan (modern Drehern), of which some account needs to be taken. Today this is a site of the relatively modest size of about 15 ha. (Adams 1981: 269), about 10 km. south of the dynasty's cultic capital city of Nippur. Like Umma in never having been formally excavated, it was the source more than a century ago of many thousands of looted cuneiform tablets almost exclu sively from the Third Dynasty of Ur. Apart from other subordinate functions (e.g., serving as a treasury for costly gifts), itwas a fattening and transfer cen ter for livestock as well as a major repository of records accounting for the receipt, transfer and disbursement of a massive, mainly compulsory, flow of domestic animals. This took primarily a "centrifugal" or outward direction, from centrally maintained royal herds to the provinces, or (after fattening) transferred onward for votive offerings in nearby Nippur and other major centers, or for the culinary pleasure of the dynasty and its high officials and favorites, or further for military garrisons that may have been the real glue holding the empire together.

The bala contributions were delivered either to redistribution centers or directly to the ... interested parties, especially if neighboring provinces were involved. A substantial portion of the bala contribution was withdrawn by the central administration within the provinces themselves, mostly in the form of provisions for various types of royal depen .. . dents. [But] there are no records of livestock being delivered as the bala of indi vidual Babylonian provinces to Puzrish-Dagan; on the contrary, it was the Babylonian governors or their representatives who withdrew livestock from Puzrish-Dagan as their bala.... In this light, the bala of Puzrish-Dagan must be seen as a livestock fund, in which each Babylonian province was entitled in exchange for its own specific bala con tributions (Steinkeller 1987b: 28-29).

There are unresolved anomalies in the way in which the bala system incor porated livestock, but that it was an aspect of the tax system seems beyond question (Sharlach 2004: 21,161-63), Elucidation of those details is not impor tant for present purposes. Provincial fodder, and almost certainly also provincial herdsmen, fed and maintained the animals thatwere being fattened for cult sacrifices, and while the animals themselves may have been transferred technically from large royal herds to provincial accounts, these were not "centrifugal" gifts but debits added to the larger bala accounts of the provinces. Cumulatively, in fact, the annual numbers themselves are not insignificant, at least for Lagash: one text records a total of 408 cattle and 5,537 sheep. (Sharlach (131-32) is of the opinion that these animals were "in all probability" eaten after the sacrificial ceremony!). Moreover, as will become clear when we look at Umma in more detail, all the domain livestock (and wool and meat, its principal products) came immediately under the control of the ensi's administration rather than being

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Thu, 21 Jan 2016 18:04:17 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SHEPHERDS AT UMMA IN THE THIRD DYNASTY OF UR 145 physically transferred to Puzrish-Dagan or Ur?seemingly, the final destination was a distinction without a difference for the wider Umma populace. Refining an understanding of the upper, administrative side of those opera tions has long been an important Assyriological objective in which many schol ars have taken part. An anthropological perspective like my own is more con cerned with probing the limitations and peripheries of that structure. To me, the more urgent and useful objective is to assess the degree of fit between the stated or inferred decisions and rationales of the scribal administrators and the realm of practical action that constituted the empire's economic and agri cultural infrastructure. Ur III cereal cultivation, which I have recently addressed elsewhere (Adams 2005), constitutes one of the two major agricultural sectors whose examination is relevant to this question. My conclusion in that earlier case was that "all in all, [Ur Ill's] voluminous record-keeping has to be seen as an example of the practical uses of literacy in its service to a higher administrative system with somewhat obscure, self-enclosed values and objectives of its own" (Adams 2005: 6). Implicit but undeveloped in this cautious statement was the recogni tion of a highly stratified society with very circumscribed intercommunication between its upper and lower levels. A hierarchical administrative apparatus, it found, was superimposed over, but played an acquisitive and didactic but other wise limited, to no small degree unrealistic, part in the effective management of the agricultural base on which the empire rested. How can we find a way to probe beneath this self-defined, upper plane of recorded vision in order to obtain a glimpse of the virtually anonymous world that lay beneath it?

PROSOPOGRAPHY AND THE DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE FOR SHEEP HUSBANDRY

One of the virtues of a prosopographic approach (Charle 2001) that deserves to be recognized (cf. Steinkeller 1987: 101) is that systematicity of approach and sought-for (but always qualified) comprehensiveness of coverage of some population unit or defined set of activities encourage other studies like my own, undertaken with entirely different objectives. Nor does a collection of texts embracing everything that was pertinent at a particular moment of scholarly study irreversibly lose its lasting value as a sample from which behavioral infor mation can be drawn. Large accretions of later information do not automatically supersede it until they have been screened to be coterminous in coverage with the original unit of study, or until they provide a superior alternative unit. Unless otherwise specified, page references in sections of what follows dealing directly with Umma are to the Stepien 1996 monograph.

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It is my argument that there is a barrier of fundamental ignorance, probably based on assumed superiority, between Ur Ill's largely self-directed and self enclosed bureaucratic elite and the mass of often more or less servile and dependent workers at the empire's base. Without question, that very large, indis pensable labor force had to be far more familiar with the realities of the mate rial environment and its practical exploitation than were most or perhaps even all of those issuing orders to them. How then do we understand the state's over all mode of operations, and in this case its (to be sure, relatively brief) pros perity and effectiveness? Focusing on animal husbandry, Stepien's prosopographic study examined the known supply of relevant information prior to the time of its publication in 1996: 7,200 tablets housed in more than 150 collections. Very considerable internal coherence is indeed evident in this focused collection. But of what pro portion of the aggregate, originally recorded information on animal husbandry is it a valid representation? The answer to thatmay only emerge as the more recently looted collections slowly begin to be visible in the half-light of delayed and disorderly publication. The first step taken by the author of this monograph was to assemble and organize all the recorded activities and associations of the 380 individuals named in the textual corpus who were associated in various ways with theman agement of domestic animals. On that foundation, he then reconstructed domi nant patterns of decision-making. Ultimately, the Ur III dynasty's administrators seem to have taken for granted?a view still generally echoed in current schol arly interpretations?that at least in any mundane field like animal husbandry higher-level decisions took effect in all of their essentials without either oppo sition, perceived need for modification, or divergence in outcome from formula or objective. Nor is empirical evidence readily available from which a post hoc calculation is possible of how uniformly (if indeed ever) stated expectations were met.

For all of its promise as a tool of analysis, a prosopographic approach encoun ters special problems with the Ur III state. In the first place, those who were lit erate were not only very limited in number but were also narrowly focused on serving as the administrative arm responsible for implementing the state's immediate interests. The language of the administration (or at least its records) was Sumerian, taught only in scribal schools instituted under King Shulgi. The term dub-sar, usually translated simply as 'scribe,' became at this time synonymous with themiddle and lower ranks of administrative service. Yet "there is, in fact, . very little evidence . . that a majority of bureaucrats could read and write" (Michalowski 1987: 62). Thus the orders and accounts that have come down to us

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are to some uncertain extent only the literate redactions of copyists with some thing lost in translation. And it is important to bear in mind the differentiating impact of the barriers with common speech that were created in this way:

What, then, was the purpose of drilling native speakers of various Semitic languages and dialects in the intricacies of the Sumerian language and literature? The answer, I think, is quite clear. The school was an ideological molder of minds, the place where future members of the bureaucracy were socialized, where they received a common stock of ideas and attitudes which bound them together as a class and in many ways separated them from their original backgrounds (ibid.: 63).

Michalowski's analysis prompts two observations that are relevant to this study. First, with reference to the term "bureaucracy," there is a need for cir cumspection in applying such a widely used modern termwith many rhetorical connotations to an ancient administration. It is evident that there was a new and heavy emphasis on procedural regularity and accountability between different hierarchical levels and administrative offices. This is certainly reminiscent of modern usage, although probably departing from it in subtle ways that are difficult to detect. And Shulgi's intent in establishing scribal schools in a lan guage no longer in common use almost certainly was to establish administra tive cadres explicitly demarcated from the rank and file of imperial subjects. But how far did this process proceed in the thirtyyears or so of the dynasty's remaining, uncontested authority until its years of waning power under Ibbi-Sin? Younger office-holders disproportionately responsible for the mass of adminis trative records by which Ur III is known to us must have come to embody most fully the new ethic the dynasty sought to impose. But this leaves open the pos sibility that higher-level decision-making often took place in a more vernacular setting and took account informally of a wider range of inputs. More immediately relevant, and indeed central, to this study is a second observation. There needed to be many active points of articulation between a Sumerian superstructure and the much larger mass of the population. Organiza tionally, those points focused on persons at the bottom of the administrative hierarchy with the rank of 'foreman' (ugula), who were given (or sometimes assumed?) responsibility for gangs of workmen during their assigned periods of corv?e duty or for other, related activities. The shepherds, to whom I will turn shortly, belong in this general 'foreman' category. To be effective in this role they needed to come out of a world of practical experience, so that years of arduous training in a scribal school must have been very uncommon. Moreover, while they had to be responsive, even submissive, to higher administrators' directions, shepherds' prior backgrounds involved them in multiple ties? the most demanding of them often those of kinship?with the larger population

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they were now called upon to supervise. Divided loyalties were absolutely inescapable in the situations foreman-shepherds occupied, introducing elements of dynamism and uncertainty into relations between the Sumerian administra tion and the larger population. I will argue that these were fundamental, although they have heretofore received very little attention. The large body of available written testimony ranges from year-long balanced accounts of wide scope and relatively lengthy temporal coverage to far more frequent receipts and directives at an almost microscopic level of interest. But in spite of this apparent involvement with detail, close inspection of the types of actions reportedly taken strongly suggests that whatever involved directly working with animals was left almost entirely in the hands of anonymous lower orders of the population about whom the texts tell us almost nothing at all. Indeed, it is obvious that effective implementation had to take place, not in a world of self-imposed order but in the quite different world of plants and ani mals, soils, climate, tools, and the processing of raw materials. This was a domain the manipulation of whose properties, possibilities and uncertainties called for experience and learning to which scribal training supplied no ready avenues of access. Not entirely incidentally, it is a domain that I had an oppor tunity to become quite familiar with during many seasons of archaeological sur vey in southern Iraq. A second impediment arises from the flatness of style and absolute lack of individuality or awareness of context in all of the available communications and reports. To be fully effective, prosopography requires written materials in which different actors make manifest, and contend with each other over, alternative courses of action. But there is none of that here, since we cannot tell whether the decisions and actions we learn of were ever being communicated in the first person by those with the authority to make them or instead reflect an interven ing screen of administrative tone and narrowed content inserted by attendant scribes. The net effect, in summary, is effectively tomask the intentions and motivations behind routine administrative actions. Before long, we may hope, renewed access to fieldwork in Iraq will permit anthropological archaeologists to furnish new and independent insights on some aspects of this larger set of issues. But traditional archaeology has not been very helpful since most of it has long concentrated heavily on precisely the "great institutions" like palaces and temples that were the physical expressions and habitats of the scribes and administrators. Only when archaeologists excavate the remains of lower-level institutions and activities, in rural sites as well as urban centers, can there be a serious archaeological contribution to such discussions.

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Shepherd-Agents as the Interface Between the Elite and Pastoral Sectors

Finally addressing the sector of animal husbandry, we can find a point of entry into the textual data by recognizing that there had to be interlocutors between its only indifferently communicating upper and lower levels for the imperial system to operate effectively. The only interlocutor in Umma who can be recognized as having directly to do with sheep, and is identifiable by name and activity through participation at the bottommost rungs of the administrative network, is the 'shepherd' (sipa). Herds of temple- and state-held sheep were consigned to shepherds for care, subject to annual enumeration and inspection, and prescribed deliveries of wool, proportions of offspring, and dairy products. The assumption is reasonable, although unrecorded, that the institutionally- owned herds that were placed in their care on a renewable basis were merged informally with any thatmay have belonged to the shepherds themselves. Although we have no information or how shep herds were recruited, it seems very likely that they would have had previous experience managing herds, and thus would also have had some familiarity with pasturage conditions in the province. If so, scribal schooling in Sumerian is unlikely to have been the route of their recruitment. The arrangements with shepherds may have some resemblance to contracts, but the negotiations were decidedly one-sided even if individuals may have sometimes maneuvered to obtain this position. Reporting requirements were onerous, and annual enumerations were painstaking to forestall diversions of animals that were held to be state property. It is quite possible that administra tively set rates of return were intended to allow a suitable margin of return to the herdsman to serve as an inducement, although this cannot be established from existing records. In any case, taking responsibility for flocks was an inher ently risky business, and nothing in the existing records suggests that the set rates were forgiven in the event of serious losses. Above all, the principal prod ucts of the arrangements, in wool, meat, hides, and live animals for fattening and then sacrifice or elite consumption, were apparently wholly appropriated by the state with no reference to a division. Within a century or two afterUr III there were indeed management contracts in which private entrepreneurs may have held the upper hand. But Ur III shepherds had not yet arrived at that position. Shepherds did not?probably most or all could not?leave written records of their own, although they would have had to familiarize themselves with some Sumerian terms formajor administrative categories. Still, itwould be a mistake to assume that there were no gradations of literacy, and certainly numeracy, below the level of the scribal elite. If this was the language and means in which

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power was exercised, obtaining some access to itwould "concentrate the mind wonderfully" (as Dr. Samuel Johnson once said of the prospect of being hanged in a fortnight). Access to some scribal learning could not be completely sealed away, leaving an unbridgeable chasm across which the working population had no opportunities at all to venture. There is the case, for example, of the son of the overseer of the Umma foresters who "would have been interpreted, depending on the context of the occurrence and the term used to describe him, as a 'scribe' (dub-sar), as a 'semi-free serf (gurush, eriri), or a 'member of the oppressive class of state supervisors' (ugula). It was only by integrating the different pieces of informa tion pertaining to this individual that we have been able to learn something concrete about his status" (Steinkeller 1987: 101). Or at present only more hypothetically, consider the possibility of a stone-cutting artisan approaching upwardly from the nether side of the permeable boundary of skill into glyptic art or monument-carving artistry.Was he not as likely to find a way to learn something of cuneiform writing as was a product of scribal schooling to reach that same level of craftsmanship in stone? But, in general, the pattern was clear and exclusive: "all of the higher administrative posts were filled with persons having a scribal education" (Waetzoldt 1987: 123). With particular regard to Umma's shepherds, even in their silence we can learn something from the complexity and multiplicity of the demands made of them by administrative superiors, about the larger social as well as environ mental realities in which the Ur III state's modes of politico-economic opera tions were embedded. Seventy-nine of the 380 identified individuals were shepherds, somewhat unevenly distributed through a major part of the Ur III dynasty's duration from Shulgi 25 through Ibbi-Sin 3 (192-94), a span of about 57 years. Conceivably, as many as fifty or so could have been operating at any one time, but reported references to them tend to be more limited and episodic. Only a total of 39, for example, were reported at one time or another to be in action under a particularly active supervisor within his 29-year period of active service (Shulgi 26?Shu-Sin 7). With considerable uncertainty as well as probable variability, 25 or so may have been the number optimally if not normally in place in any one year. Now to begin with, what can we say of the size of the flocks (not to speak of the aggregate of all Umma's flocks) for which they were responsible? Nothing with precision, and very little with any certainty. Animals moved in and out, partly in response to heavy demands for bala payments (82, 90). But there were also demands for drafts of animals to be delivered on specified occasions (pre sumably by the shepherds or their agents) for gods, shrines, and holy days at

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prominent locations in the Umma region (80). Shifts also were repeatedly made from grass-feeding to a specialized fattening pen, where shepherds continued to play a role. (The available texts from Umma happen to say little of the fatten ing process; much fuller information is available from Lagash and Girsu. Cf. Durand and Charpin 1980, Maekawa 1983). Fodder (barley, barley flour, bran, sometimes young reeds), where provided, was calculated in amounts from (mainly) 1 to (as much as) 2 72 sila (approxi mately liters) per day. But unexplained mid-course shifts make it difficult to establish the numbers of animals served from stated requisitions of fodder. Then, seeking another approach, there are tabulations purportedly including the sizes of individual shepherds' flocks. The numbers vary so widely, however, as to undermine their credibility as a basis for functional management. A tabula tion for 18 shepherds (herding goats as well as sheep), for example, gives flock sizes ranging from 38 to 1,287. Even the median of about 400 is far in excess of the herding ability of any individual shepherd. But apart from the unresolved issue of maximum effective shepherd/flock ratios under field conditions, if the median of 400 is tentatively accepted as an at least reasonable figure and is multiplied by 25 shepherds active at a time, we arrive at a provisional estimate of 10,000 for the aggregate size of at least the state-administered herds of sheep and goats in Umma province. While substantial, this number was dwarfed by the 66,095 fat-tailed sheep reported for adjacent Lagash (Waetzoldt 1972: 17). The disproportion must reflect better and more extensive pasturage, not merely a greater extent of set tled, cultivated areas. Uncertainties over the location of several lower Tigris branches complicate this, as already discussed earlier for Umma. But it seems likely that Lagash had greater, perhaps exclusive, access not merely to a large easterly portion of the lower alluvial plain but to the lowermost slopes leading up toward the Zagros ridges beyond. There lay a corridor leading far to the northwest that long attracted pastoralist movements (and no less, Ur III gar risons and imperial messengers). With better grass because of greater rainfall, it remained lightly settled because it was difficult to irrigate (Jones and Snyder 1961: 301-2). There is no concern in the existing records for the age-structure of the sheep population. Yet this surely should influence administrators' calculations of the carrying capacity of existing pasturage, sustainable rates of withdrawal for cultic and dietary purposes, and more. The assessment of modern villagers is that sheep become "old" at an age of 5 to 6 years (Ochsenschlager 2004: 208). Umma's shepherds must have had a similar understanding, but beyond the gross category of maturity, no later distinctions were recorded. Puzrish-Dagan records

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Thu, 21 Jan 2016 18:04:17 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 152 ROBERT McC. ADAMS have led to the plausible surmise that older or weaker sheep might have been simply disposed of (Sigrist 1992: 39). (But how was this verified by the supervisors?) There are many scattered references in the Umma texts to sheep death and slaughtering, but coherent information is elusive and sometimes disputed. "The dead (ri-ri-ga) sheep usually outnumber those adult sheep submitted for clear ance" (46), and (Robert Englund informs me) this term really applies to natural deaths rather than intentionally (fattened and) slaughtered animals (ba-ush). The former went to dogs and servile women, while the latter were destined for cult observances and elite consumption. Were deaths of some grass-fed animals due to the non-delivery of fodder during those critical months when supplementation was necessary? Then, how were animals destined for consumption distributed? Rare mentions of a kitchen and the lack of recorded data about the Umma fattening pen inhibit our efforts to reconstruct the circulation of animals used for ordinary consumption. This is a process more discernible in the administrative documents from Puzrish-Dagan and Lagash, perhaps because the available Umma texts happen to pertain instead particularly to temple utilization (82). Nothing informs us what (presumably rather small) proportion of sheep carcasses reached beyond the elite to the general population. Since that larger population is essentially ignored in these records as a whole, this reinforces the impression that Umma's commoners had to depend essentially on their own, autarchic sources of protein, of which we still know nothing. Twice a year shepherds brought their flocks before a supervisor for enumer ating, "shearing" (i.e., plucking), recording of wool output and quality, register ing by gross age-category and sex, and then return to the shepherds' custody (91). Dead sheep, too, had to be submitted for clearance (46), presumably to guard against their being diverted into private ownership. It seems unlikely that entire carcasses or even hides would always need to be brought considerable distances in order to be presented for inspection, but the records are silent on this point. Another potential approach to determining flock sizes and shepherd/flock ratios involves amounts of wool that are reported as having been collected in the plucking of the wool of flocks of individual shepherds. A well-replicated average of 1.8 mina (about 0.9 kg.) of wool per sheep (40) yields a close approximation of total flock size by simple division of the recorded total. A sampling of a dozen or more shepherds' balanced accounts in this way (47, 92 93) indicates that almost all of them fell in the range between 370 and 900 sheep, very roughly confirming the median size of 400 suggested earlier. But unfortunately no texts presently available cover what must have been the full collectivity of active shepherds at a given time. What is clear is that large

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amounts of wool were collected, sorted by quality, and transferred to storage under the ensi's control. Individual shepherds are recorded as turning over up to 19 talents of wool (570 kg.), the product of plucking more than 600 sheep (93, 94). Some wool also was sent to a local textile production facility, its loca tion sporadically reported either at Umma itself or at nearby Apishal (Waet zoldt 1972: 102). The limited size of this facility is suggested by its one recorded intake of raw wool in the amount of 30 talents (900 kg.), the product of only about 1000 sheep (93). Nor are there any reported texts in this collec tion or elsewhere that deal with the transfer of wool to the central collection depot at Puzrish-Dagan, modern Drehern. As we shall see presently, much more may have gone to one or more local weaving establishments or to giant pro duction centers at nearby Lagash. Missing from the collection of Umma texts dealing directly with animal hus bandry are any that provide information on how barley fodder was collected, transferred, stored, and ultimately dispensed for fattening.We are probably safe in assuming these tasks were carried on by corv?e labor under the jurisdiction of another administrative department. Many of the known requisitions were quite small?the "vast majority" for just one sheep's daily ration (34). But a few are exceptionally large?up to 143,000 or more sila or roughly liters (34). This could feed a flock of 3600 sheep for a month, as Stepien notes, but in the absence of further details might instead have been intended to feed 300 sheep for a year or anything in between. In any case, a requisition of this size placed a heavy, sudden demand on storage and porterage facilities somewhere in the Umma region. But personnel directly associated with animal husbandry opera tions do not seem to have played any part in this. All of the shepherds covered by these texts were in the employ of the seven other substantial cult centers in the province, including Apishal, Kian, Zabalam and Anzubabbar, in addition to Umma itself (81, 191). There is no reference to the inclusion of any privately owned animals in their herds, although we do know that the herds could include sheep belonging to temples other than a shep herd's primary institutional attachment (52). There may be a presumption that pasturage assigned to shepherds normally lay in the vicinity of these primary attachments, although nothing is said directly about where and how flocks were sent out for grazing. Indirectly, however, there are strong indications that some of the pasturage used?probably chosen by the shepherds themselves?lay at no great distance from Umma and perhaps in the immediate vicinity of the shepherds' own tem ples or cult centers. We learn, for example, that individual shepherds had the responsibility to bring in hides from animals in their herds that had died (94), losses that generally must have occurred in small numbers and therefore fairly

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Thu, 21 Jan 2016 18:04:17 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 154 ROBERT McC. ADAMS frequently. But a much larger number of such hides in one case (1,225) empha sizes that various contingencies such as epidemic disease might sometimes call for large, if temporary, increases in personnel assisting a particular shepherd. The prevailing practice of small and frequent deliveries by the shepherds, on the other hand, seems to rule out the maintenance of grazing herds at distances involving lengthy, repeated travel for them. It is clear from these foregoing, in themselves mundane and insignificant details that the individuals identified as shepherds had a wide array of interme diary functions having to do both with sheep and with higher-level administra tors. No small part of their time would have had to be spent reporting in official settings, and therefore also in a demanding schedule of local travel to reach the flocks that were their primary responsibility. There they would have had to be working closely with groups of subordinates moving with the herds. Some of their supporting staffs probably were their own minor children. But more senior ones needed to be able to act with independent responsibility, to have broad regional familiarity, and to be adept in a variety of semi-specialized pastoral skills. It seems most unlikely that these personnel needs could have been met entirely from periodic, temporary drafts of men without specialized skills who were recruited on a rotational-term basis as corv?e labor. At least some of the assistants to the formally designated shepherds must have tended to be at least semi-permanent, acquiring themultiple, complimentary skills both to sustain the herds alone in various contingencies and to help inmeeting official disbursement and inspection requirements. Such groups very likely were, or presently became, semi-permanent, held together by their enforced mobility and perhaps by bonds that presently took on a quasi-kinship basis. We know that the workers attached at this time to wood-cutting in a given forest can almost always be identified as members of the same nuclear family (Steinkeller 1987: 78), so why should that not also apply to pastoralists taking their herds into familiar pasturage? But no hint of themake-up of the groups attending the herds under the senior shep herds has yet appeared in the Umma records of state administration. Often there surely were discrepancies when shepherds brought their herds before their supervisors for enumeration. Suggesting the tense atmosphere at those times, animals that had died were written off only when their remains (or some unstated portion thereof) were presented to supervisors by the shepherd responsible. Formulas mandating rates of expected herd growth were in place (Heimpel 1995), which on average must have been assumed to allow a margin of net gain. If strictly enforced, there would often be defaults. In other bodies of contemporary records this frequently led to the imposition of fines and other penalties, including dismissal (Hruska 1995: 89). Beginning with the well-recorded case of the annual performance of a female work-crew

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whose arrears left its foreman with a debt of more than twice his annual com pensation, Robert Englund gives a telling account of one such outcome. The posted debit against an expectation of labor performance was "in all likelihood simply beyond the capabilities of the normal worker," who in any case, receiv ing "the minimum amount of grain and clothing to keep them able to produce" lacked any incentive to do more. We are not informed about the outcome in this case, but Englund has "no doubt that such norms really existed in explicit form and that they were strictly enforced in dealings with foremen of work gangs." And meanwhile, "almost no information about the fate of the male and female workers is given in the documents" (1991: 279-80). The interstitial, interlocutory position of the ugula 'foreman,' of which the shepherd was also one, was clearly difficult and exposed. At a low level in the administrative hierarchy, they had few or no inducements at their disposal to enhance the performance of their work-crews, yet bore the full burden of any shortcomings. But to be sure, conditions may have differed in different areas of responsibility. There is little in the Umma texts to suggest that severe punish ments of shepherds were a frequent outcome. In Stepien's texts (92, 95), out of 17 shepherds listed in Amar-Sin 6, eight were still active in Shu-Sin 5 eight years later. This could well reflect merely normal turnover in difficult positions that had to bridge two worlds. The complex nature of the interlocutory functions of Umma's shepherds, as noted earlier, may have given their positions greater permanence and made punitive action less threatening. Their direct attachment to particular temples, and perhaps as well to the critically needed groups of supporting assistants who would not be easy to replace, could have made a further difference. Umma's province is known to have been populous and hence densely settled with a checkerboard of agricultural communities and larger towns, although it is strik ing that they are almost completely unmentioned in the records studied here. Moving herds to detached temple pasturage, or to marginal areas of steppe adjoining discontinuous areas of cultivated land, as has been suggested (Nissen 1975: 33-35), would have been facilitated by not disrupting an incumbent shep herd's long-established ties of familiarity with local people.

further insights into pastoralism from arab village Sheep Husbandry

An account of contemporary Arab village life only 50 km. or so southeast of Umma provides us with a record of direct observations of rural life that deserves a brief excursus. The modern community of al-Hiba lies in the immediate vicin ity of ancient Lagash (Ochsenschlager 2004). Tending of sheep played a con

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siderable part in the pattern of mixed farming there a generation or so ago (and probably still today), and this newly published description of prevailing features in the maintenance of herds there gives details of much that is entirely missing in the cuneiform records. Perhaps the most critical, unnoted aspect of sheep maintenance on pasturage of sheep on grasses and natural growth in this setting is the inadequacy of this source of forage alone. Supplementation with fodder is now found essential for up to four months of the year, although this extensive a period is neither con stant nor predictable. With unusual winter rains or high levels of water in the river and canal system itmay be needed for as little as a month or two, and the early availability of new growth along marsh-edges can be another favor able factor. But the basic need is ever-present (Ochsenschlager 2004: 203). Clearly, the determination of when and how much supplemental feeding is nec essary can only be made by the shepherd in the field. But the numerous Umma texts touching on the allocation of fodder describe a process generated only within the bureaucracy, and uncertainties and delays in transmission of the deci sion, and in the resulting allocation of supplies from central storehouses accord ingly have to be taken for granted. Many other features of contemporary sheep-rearing practice, of varying degrees of importance, similarly find no mention in the administrative records. Some, like the dependence on sheep manure as fuel, have surely always been an important part of the daily life of herdsmen but would not be expected in administrative records of any kind. The issue of security, however, must have been more central. The role of dogs today, for alarm and protection but to a less evident extent in herding, is viewed as indispensable by villagers. Dogs were indeed kept and kenneled by the state, but theirpresence and role is unrecorded in the cuneiform records of husbandry. Predators (other than human) are no longer a serious problem, but were salient four millennia ago since losses to lions appear in Puzrish-Dagan records (Sigrist 1992: 30). Such omissions remind us of the starkly different world that shepherds faced than even their most immediate supervisors show any awareness of. Another difference that plays a part in herd productivity is the higher rate of modern birthing of lambs than the constant ratio of only 16 percent that the Umma texts report (46). That could reflect greater ancient pr?dation?or merely a decided preference for young lamb in the Ur III elite diet. As noted earlier, there is a curious silence in these texts on how the proceeds of sheep-raising?principally wool for textile production and fattened animals for sacrifice and priestly as well as elite consumption elsewhere?were con veyed within and beyond Umma province to meet local administrative as well as imperial requirements. Wool was certainly the highest-value local export,

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since industrial-scale textile production provided crucial commodities to exchange for needed imports. It was mainly moved in large quantities (35-40 ton shipments) by boat or towed barges along the rivers and well-developed canal system, and apparently directly to major production centers like those in Ur and Lagash rather than to an intermediate collection depot like Puzrish Dagan. In one recorded year a total of 421 tons thus reached industrial estab lishments around Ur in this way (Waetzoldt 1972: 69). But "die Schwerpunkte der Textilindustrie" at this time lay much closer at hand in Lagash, where there was a textile industry with a total of about 15,000 employees, and the single facility at Guabba employed a workforce, mainly of women weavers, of about 6,800 (ibid., pp. 94, 99). After modest withdrawals for Umma's own local fac torymentioned earlier, the bulk of Umma's raw-wool production probably made that short downstream journey. Meanwhile, the main thrust of Umma's own agricultural productivity lay in another direction, with its primary rotating oblig ations under the bala tax system in barley. Dates are also listed in the Puzrish Dagan records (Sigrist 1992: 344). But sheep and other livestock, when they were to be moved any distance even in small numbers, presented other challenges. The records make clear that this was commonly done by towed boats or barges. The unavailability locally of any hardwood flooring material could have been met by shipping the animals prone, with tied feet, or by tough, and in any case easily replaceable, reed mats But in addition there are some records of movements of substantial numbers of animals on-the-hoof, presumably driven along the levees (Sharlach 2004: 139). And the practical possibility of this is confirmed by recent ethnographic obser we vations at nearby al-Hiba, where hear of . . . large flocks of sheep and goats owned by Bedouin tribes who regularly arrived in the area at the end of September and moved on during the month of December (Ochsenschlager 2004: 2003).

In view of [the lack of sufficient pasturage], it is difficult to understand the easy accep . . tance of the Bedouin. The Bedouin flocks graze on the newly emerged and emerg ing grasses and sedges along the edges of the marshes that would otherwise be used by the local villagers' sheep. Although this would seem, in effect, to limit the size of local herds by depriving them of additional forage, it is tolerated because it is both customary and economically advantageous [because of other customary reciprocities] (ibid., 208).

No one would suggest that the familiarity and informality accompanying sea sonal Bedouin movements are a close analog to the in-gathering of tax and trib utary resources by the Ur III state for its own votive offerings and elite's con sumption. (Moreover, violent struggles between Bedouin and settled villagers are widely reported elsewhere.) But this contemporary practice does serve as a reminder that reciprocal, accommodative processes of the kind that Umma's

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shepherds seem to have stood for and depended upon still may well deserve a vital place behind the bureaucratic screen that captures so much of our atten tion. This admonition is worth keeping inmind, not to forget to look behind the scribal screen and outside the self-defined administrative peripheries.

The Gradations and Dynamics of the Allotment and Employment System

Taking advantage of insights obtained from themore detailed and better doc umented example of the duties and responsibilities of shepherds, it is worth while to broaden the scope of the discussion to the lower-status population more generally. One cannot assume a uniformity of administrative approaches in all areas, and still less that conditions of work and life in the pastoral sector were necessarily representative of the general population as well. But remaining sen sitive to possible differences as well as parallelisms, I believe a new basis has been provided for proceeding further. Given the prevailing silence of the administrative records about the conditions of life of the ordinary population, our ignorance about its status and prevailing standard of living is virtually absolute. But we must resist the temptation to oversimplify and "proletarianize" the bulk of the population into an anomic, structureless, dehumanized mass. As the example of Umma's foresters that was mentioned earlier illustrates, ties of kinship may often have penetrated into craft and even unskilled labor groups in ways that the administrative records ordi narily did not take into account. The same surely applied to the whole fabric of residential community life, which must have been characterized by formal and informal hierarchies of authority, complementary roles geared to gender, age and skill, and traditional patterns of sharing and reciprocity tomitigate the onset of disasters for particular individuals or families. Enslaved or indentured women in the textile industry, for example, worked under repressive supervision at remunerative levels very little above subsistence. Yet children born during their service remained with them at least until puberty (no spouses or other immedi ate family attachments are recorded). It is difficult to see how this could have been a fairly common pattern unless adaptive measures were in place involving wider community support (Wright 1996: 93, 98, 103). But let me turn to what can be learned more generally from the administra tive records:

Among the Umma labour records, particularly numerous are those concerned with the work provided by the menials (UN-il) and the unskilled labourers of the free class (eren). Both types of labourers would be incorporated into single work-gangs, each a ... headed by different foreman (ugula). the UN-il members of such work-gangs were

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employed and provided with rations all the year round. In contrast, the unskilled free citizens working in the same gangs were employed and provided with rations for only half of the year. This working half of the year bore the designation bala gub-ba 'per forming the duty'. During the other half of the year, called bala tush-a 'sitting out the duty', the same labourers would hire themselves out for wages (a hun-gd), usually to work in the same gangs to which they were assigned during the bala gub-ba period (Steinkeller2003: 45).

Implicitly stable and straightforward, this system was complicated by several kinds of gradations. First, there were very wide differences in the allotments of barley. The normal level for males was 50 to 60 liters per month, women receiving less, but for men could rise to 100 per month. When higher levels of skill and authority were added in, the level could rise to 900, 1200, and for an exceptional scribe even 5000 (Waetzoldt 1987: 122-23). At one end of the scale was a bare subsistence wage, at the other a source of appreciable, discretionary wealth. What would that be used for? Then there is thematter of allotment of land as well as barley, not only very substantial grants to high officials but in varying but lesser gradations to some, more privileged members of the eren class of 'soldier-workers' or 'free citi zens.' This was, in effect, private (although inalienable, and probably subject to cancellation) land. Sumerologists differ considerably on how it was cultivated, perhaps largely on the basis of newer sources available only to some. The ear lier view was that cultivation was largely carried on by individual allotment holders during their alternating periods when they were not on corv?e but "sit ting out the duty." Waetzoldt, citing plot-sizes that range from 0.9 to 39 ha., argues instead that at the lower end individuals might have worked their land themselves with their families and rented oxen, while at the higher-end an official holding an allotment "probably would have required a farmmanager (engaf) as well as a fairly substantial labor force and draft oxen" (1987: 129). Steinkeller's later, decidedly different interpretation (personal commiunica tion), however, is as follows:

. . . SHUKU plots were not cultivated individually by their respective holders, being rather tilled en masse. This is demonstrated beyond any doubt by a variety of sources. Most important, there are matching texts in which the same individual is first assigned a a plot of SHUKU land, to be later given, in separate document recording the distrib ution of harvest conducted by the central administration, a volume of grain proportional to the size of his plot. This appears to have been the rule as far as the institutional hold ings (i.e., those under the control of the local governor) are concerned. However, it is possible (and even likely) that the situation was different in the case of the land held, within the same province, by the royal eren, i.e., those controlled by the local gener . . . als. These were completely different lands, much larger than the institutional hold ings, which were managed directly by the crown without any interference from the governor. There, the SHUKU plots appear to have to be tilled by their holders, who, however, conducted all the work (irrigation, plowing, and harvest) collectively.

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While we encounter here again the basic uncertainty over the disposition and management of royally held lands, it thus appears that allotment holders within the governor's domain played an essentially passive role in relation to this stream of income, with all work provided by corv?e labor. The larger number of eren received no such benefit. Described above as rejoining the same gangs as voluntarily employed labor, they were at least partly induced to do so by wages three times higher than they received in barley while on corv?e. Possibly, this can be interpreted as a measure intended to equalize income for the entire class of eren (although with the larger number having to work to receive it). Finding that kind of humanitarian intent conspicuously lacking in Ur III admin istration, however, I am strongly inclined instead toward the interpretation that there were competitive demands for labor that are simply not reflected in the kinds of records we have. This then would have required the payment of very significantly higher wages in order to supplement the labor supply that the corv?es alone could provide. Believers in the imposed uniformities of Ur III administration may recoil from the term, but for me this argues quite persua sively for the existence of a labor market. I should note that Steinkeller has been firmly and extensively on record as believing in "the virtual nonexistence of a free labor market" (2002: 117). However, in a still unpublished paper he seems to take a more nuanced posi tion thatmay leave the issue awaiting further investigation open to differences of definitions and degree rather than wholly opposed positions:

While it is safe to assert that there was no bona fide (= fully developed) labor market in ancient Mesopotamia, at the same time it needs to be acknowledged that, throughout Mesopotamian history, individuals?in smaller or greater numbers?were nevertheless available for hire, to be employed as skilled or unskilled laborers. The task before us will be to ascertain the magnitude of this phenomenon in various periods of Meso potamian history (n.d.)

A major, omitted subject in the above discussion: the position, working and living conditions, remuneration, and status of women in the Ur III workforce. Since this has been done both effectively and quite comprehensively by Rita Wright (1996), there is nothing I can add here. The negative differentials were, in virtually every respect, enormous. Administrative terminology uniformly assigned women to the lowest-status, dependent and often unambiguously servile ranks, and the records often permit multiple forms of corroboration that this was car ried out in practice. In any consideration of the socioeconomic context of sheep husbandry, the role of wool textile production as the source of a high-value/low weight product to sustain long distance trade obviously played a central part. And itwas crucially dependent on a very large population of menial or enslaved women and their children.

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Turning to the probably less rigidly constrained, better documented male labor force, most of the more dynamic issues involved cannot presently be elu cidated with data from Umma itself. From Girsu-Lagash, on the other hand, very large state and temple archives have been recovered not only for the Ur III period but also for the late Early Dynastic period, roughly two and a half centuries earlier. The additional time-depth may be helpful in suggesting trends of long-term change, although once again there is disagreement on this among Sumerologists. Kazuya Maekawa has suggested that an "essential feature" across this tem poral span was the gradual invalidation of the principle that the great public institutions (the royal household and the temples) should conscript, for collec tive labor, the men to whom these institutions allotted land (1987: 49). While acknowledging that the details are ambiguous, he holds that for Ur III times it is "safe to say only that [those without land] did their regular service [and thus received pay] for at least sixty days in a year" (ibid., 65). If so, this was a very substantial reduction indeed in their income. On this reading, hired labor may have been a category of emergent importance, with the details of the demand for it not very clearly specified. But Steinkeller sharply disagrees with this interpretation. He has offered a thoughtful and comprehensive account of the background for his analysis of Ur III society that deserves attention I cannot give itwithin the limited compass of this article, but its direction is perhaps suggested by the following brief passage:

The whole Ur III society formed one vast vessel of royal dependents, who were sup ported by the state, either directly, as in the case of the military organization.. ., or indirectly, through the medium of provincial economies, represented by the governors. The state support took the form of alimentation, whose form and economic value on an individual's in the and was on the continued depended ' place society, predicated performance of vis-?-vis the state. Members of the higher and middle ranks of the soci ... ety were granted allotments of arable land as well as staples, for the duration of their work-duty obligations toward the state. The lower strata of the society were supported exclusively through staple alimentation" (202: 114-15).

While I warmly acknowledge Steinkeller's unparalleled knowledge of the Ur III sources (having depended heavily on his publications and generously given advice in writing this article!) his invocation of historical and ethnographic par allels invites my greater skepticism. To the extent that the analysis offered here is found persuasive, it supports a less holistic, stable, smoothly and effectively operating structure than Steinkeller projects. In essence, my characterization as it has emerged thus far is that the regime was myopic and extractive, and has left us little evidence of any concern or capacity to identify and overcome its deficiencies.

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The issue of (degrees of) alternative, overall characterizations will not be quickly settled, but I believe Ur III ultimately will be viewed as a deceptively smooth administrative fa?ade, repressively imposed over a weak and irregular substructure with contradictions and tensions that the written records do not reflect. In time, with further quantitative insights from prosopographic and other approaches, and presently from archaeology as well, I would hope we might begin to discern sequences of interrelated trends thatwill help to make the tran sition to the following Old Babylonian period less disjunctive than it appears to be at present. I readily concede the possibility that Steinkeller (2002) may turn out to have been right all along, while Steinkeller (n.d.), on the other hand, leads me to wonder just how far apart we really are any longer. Ill-defined and uncertain as they are, there are many tensions implicit in the relationships described above between the Ur III administration, large and small allotment holders, corv?e laborers, and hired workers. They come to a focus especially on the lowermost levels of supervisory personnel, those of eren status responsible for securing some previously established standard of performance from those at the very bottom of the system consigned to nothing but indefinite, full-time, menial labor. The sipa or shepherd with whom this study began, with a wholly anonymous body of assistants behind him, may be one example. On the other hand, the comparative freedom of movement and absence of drudgery gave herding obvious advantages as a form of employment. More generally, it was the position of ugula or foreman who was caught in a vise of contradictions. As noted above, it has been suggested that labor was in seriously short sup ply during the Ur III period. If this were so, one might suppose that the regime would moderate harsh treatment of menials and lower-status workers in order to improve their performance and reduce their impulse to flee. Clearly, there must have been shortages at least at times during the labor-intensive planting and harvesting months (Garfinkle 2004: 6; cf. Van Driel 1998). But how gen eral were such shortages? Periods of intensified demand for labor do not ap pear to correspond closely with a concentration of corv?e term assignments (Maekawa 1987: 67). Conditions on many corv?e assignments were so onerous that there were high death rates as well as many reported instances of escape through flight by persons "whether slaves, prisoners, semi-free, or free" (Waetzoldt 1987: 139-40). Moreover, indebtedness, with its risk of indefinite, indentured labor, must have been a growing problem for many who lacked land allotments. For them, alternate agricultural employment on allotments or estates held by members of the elite may have been the only response to shrinking corv?e assignments, growing indebtedness, and possible enslavement. All this, in short, might well have led to what is perceived as a general labor shortage

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Thu, 21 Jan 2016 18:04:17 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SHEPHERDS AT UMMA IN THE THIRD DYNASTY OF UR 163 but is instead an essentially sectoral problem. Laborers would have sought ways to evade state assignments, and non-institutional employment opportunities would have been in high demand even if something far less than open "labor market" conditions obtained. A related outcome worth noting involves holders of substantial tracts of allot ment land, or lessors of land, or craftsmen encountering substantial demand for their products. As individuals with comparatively higher disposable wealth, these were likely to be at the same time fairly highly placed, or at any rate influential, in the Ur III administration. Hence they were, on the one hand, under some pressure to conform in their official conduct to the prevailing code or of allotments compensation in barley at a uniformly low rate (and probably with enforced, relatively harsh disciplinary standards) for the unskilled labor of "men in gangs" engaged in their periodic corv?e assignments. Yet at the same time, in their private capacity as employers, their interests lie in "skimming the cream" of the labor pool, identifying capable, willing employees whom they over could count upon a longer term. In this conflict of interests, it seems highly likely that theywould be prepared to pay more for such individuals, and to treat them better, when they found them. Here again, there is likely to be a pretty good semblance of a labor market operating, although not one whose existence would have found its way into the prevailing pattern of administrative records. What if anything in the above discussion is immediately relevant to under standing the position of Umma's shepherds? References to "men in gangs," either as temporarily hired labor or as unspecialized corv?es on terms of rota tion, seem simply inapplicable to most of the pastoral services required in the sheep economy. New sources will probably be needed to clarify the conditions of employment for the shepherds and their assistants, but the sense in which the herds and theirday-to-day management lay largely outside the field of scribal/admin istrative action receives additional emphasis.

Seeing Beyond the Superimposed, Insular World of Scribal Administrators

Proceeding inductively from the exceptional details available for ancient Umma, I have argued that the Ur III administration of sheep husbandry lacked practical knowledge of, or direct involvement in and concern for, the day-to-day operations at the heart of this economically very important activity. Apart from single-mindedly pursuing its own priorities, it had walled itself off behind a self was created linguistic barrier. This a substantial bureaucracy, profusely effec tive in the production of routinized cuneiform communications. But those were

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Thu, 21 Jan 2016 18:04:17 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 164 ROBERT McC. ADAMS devoted largely to the extraction of perquisites for itself, its dynastic rulers, their military and service elements, and, finally, for assuring the delivery of votive offerings to its favored shrines and deities. What has also become evident is its pervasive indifference with regard to the subordinated human population on whom it ultimately depended. Lest it be thought that this overview may reflect particular, non-representa tive features confined to Umma, or of the looted collection of cuneiform texts that happened to originate there, it should be noted that the same interpretation has been broadly paralleled in an ethno-zoologist's study of the great animal fattening and record-keeping center of Puzrish-Dagan. Melinda Zeder's own, quite different interest lay in the hierarchical structure of administrative opera tions there, finding that its numerous, specialized levels accommodated multiple animal species and product goals. This was very similar to the focus of Stepien's prosopography of animal husbandry at Umma, but it has not been my subject here. Nevertheless, her concluding summary reflects a very high degree of con vergence that overrides the differences in our objectives and methods, and can be applied virtually as well to my findings as to hers: . . . Judging from the Drehern texts alone Ur III administrators do not seem as much as . . . concerned with animal production with their distribution. Directing animals in .. . . . ways that best suited the needs of the consuming institutions (1994: 186). . this discussion also highlights the fact that there is a segment of animal economy in the Ur III state (possibly a major segment) that is not attested in the texts, not those of Drehern, nor, perhaps, of any other site in the region.... To monitor this silent segment of the a economy would require.... excavation of broad spectrum of urban contexts, not just religious or administrative complexes (188).

Both approaches lead independently to recognition of the silence and appar ent indifference of Ur III administrators with regard to the non-elite bulk of the population. And there is, finally, the recent, broadly concurring judgment of Sumerologist Robert K. Englund, deeply familiar with the entire range of Ur III economic and administrative textual corpora, of "how limited is the view of day-to-day life in the many tens of thousands of documents from this period of Babylonian history. We are not parsing the records of the common man" (2003: 6). But there is a major contrast within the Ur III corpus of texts itself. This pre vailing silence differs completely from the well-documented pattern of careful planning and attention that was devoted by the state's administrators to the elaborate processing of large quantities of raw wool. The richly detailed account of this by Hartmut Waetzoldt (1972) contains much substantive information on every aspect of what has to be seen as a state-planned undertaking of truly industrial scale. Most of that substantive detail is not important for present pur poses, which highlight only the contrasting quality, intensity, and directness of

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this management input (cf. the excellent, detailed summary inWright 1996). Very briefly to summarize, Waetzoldt shows that every phase of the long and complex sequence of operations for producing woven wool cloth is meticulously planned: from initial classification and sorting of the raw wool into five grada tions of quality; to its cleaning, combing, and spinning; then to weaving; fol lowed by further washing, shrinking and thickening with the aid of alkaline salts made from different types of plant ash. Technical terminology and records of the equipment and raw materials needed in every successive stage were stan dardized in a closely supervised system of production throughout its entire course. The concern for uniform standards leading to five different gradations of quality strongly suggests the presence of a dedicated staff of inspectors. Nothing remotely comparable is in evidence in the form of any efforts of scribal admin istrators to assure the well-being and productivity of the herds of sheep until the shepherds finally had to present them for "shearing" and enumeration. It is of course not surprising that the Ur III regime devoted special efforts to the standards of quality of wool cloth production. Its own reward system for allies and subordinates, its concern to honor its gods with votive offerings, and its desire to protect its own patterns of consumption and adornment with sump tuary restrictions all would have dictated this. Perhaps even more important, wool of high quality was the overwhelmingly most important commodity to exchange in foreign trade for the many critical raw materials thatMesopotamia lacked. But the sharp contrast in the degree of administrative involvement, and even in basic attention and understanding, is significant as an important qualification of the reach and effectiveness of the Ur III state's administrative operations as a whole.

The pattern presented for sheep husbandry reflects, in short, a prevailing con cern on the part of the bureaucracy only for delivering the requisite outputs of wool and meat to further industrial processing or to elite consumers and shrines, and a reciprocal detachment and indifference with regard to even themost basic hazards, needs and personnel requirements of herd management. Yet along with the waterborne transport system discussed in an earlier section, and the cereal cultivation sector where I have previously discerned a very similar pattern, this neglect seems to extend to the roots of the operations and effectiveness of the entire agricultural?hence also economic?system. The very large quantities of cuneiform records create an initial impression of broad and painstaking super vision. In fact, however, they focus only on a handful of control points chosen to meet a given set of state goals for resource expropriation. Admittedly there may be some risk of overstatement in basing this assess ment simply on the absence of direct, positive statements in formal administra tive records indicating elite and scribal concern for the condition and day-to-day

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life of common people. Such statements would have had little to do with their narrowly construed purposes. But the observed pattern is far too widespread in many different contexts to be attributable, first, to the accidents of recovery in randomly looted materials. And secondly, no argument for some form of sim ple, culturally patterned or administratively directed reticence in such records (e.g., instructions to avoid statements of affect or preference) can explain the concurrent absence of many indirect traces of these concerns in the receipts and disbursement so massively recorded in relevant accounts. I believe there is no choice but to conclude that this lack of concern on the part of the elite was real and deep-seated. It brings into high relief the selective narrowness of the Ur III state's involvement in the very foundations of all its measures for responding effectively to its subsistence and economic require ments. To be blunt, the state appears to have been less comprehensively manager ial and more narrowly extractive in its primary orientation. And the prevailing silence of all presently known cuneiform sources on how supplies were circu lated and acquired to meet ordinary day-to-day needs of the population at large similarly suggests that this, too, proceeded in the absence of significant state concern, management or intervention. Clearly, there were effective systems in place thatmet these needs for urban populations, like Umma's, of no less than 20,000 inhabitants and possibly more. But we remain essentially uninformed about them by any cuneiform sources. Yet I believe it has been shown that indirect clues abound, even in the absence of direct testimony. Prosopography can provide some of them, as this study has sought to demonstrate. Another telling example is provided by the potting industry, as analyzed by Steinkeller (1996: 252). He finds there that a good part of professional potters' efforts,working in their own workshops and without state intervention, was devoted to fulfilling domestic demand. But much more awaits discovery when serious archaeological attention turns away from great public building, to rural and ordinary residential settings. While calling attention to the absence of any written evidence for the barter, sale, or exchange of any of a wide variety of subsistence goods and craft prod ucts, Steinkeller has recently argued strongly that "commercial activity of this . . . kind did exist, and that it was in fact exceedingly common since other wise there is no way of explaining how ordinary people obtained their house hold goods, such as pots and furniture, various personal articles, such as shoes and garments, and foodstuffs other than cereals, such as vegetable, fruits, dairy products, meat, and spices. This follows from the simple fact that none of the above products were distributed in any fashion by the central authorities." (2004: 95). Leaving aside as presently fruitless philosophical arguments as to exactly what did or did not constitute a "market" at city gates and canal-side

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quays, here were major, ongoing institutions whose direct and indirect effects ramified into every family's dwellings and activities. Written evidence for them or not, how can the absence of sustained scholarly attention to identifying and otherwise documenting them be justified? When peace and stability return to Iraq following the end of the American occupation, these are challenges calling for international, creative, necessarily interactive, efforts of Assyriologists, archaeologists, and many other problem oriented historians and social scientists.

REFERENCES CITED

Adams, Robert McC. and Hans J. Nissen, 1972. The Uruk countryside: The natural setting of urban societies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press -, 2004. The role of writing in Sumerian agriculture: Asking broader questions. Pp. 1-8 in J.G. Dercksen, ed., Assyria and Beyond: Studies Presented to Mogens Trolle Larsen. Nederlands Instituut Voor het Nabije Oosten. Leuven Barrelet, M.-T. ?d. L'arch?ologiede l'Iraq du d?but de l'?poque n?olithique a 333 avant notre ?re. Colloques Internationaux de la Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 580. Paris Charle, C. 2001. Prosopography (collective biography). International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences 18: 12236-41 Durand, J.-M. and D. Charpin 1980. Remarques sur l'?levage intensif dans l'Iraq ancient. Pp. 131-56 in Barrelet, ?d. Englund, Robert K. 1991. Hard work?where will it get you? Labor management in Ur III Mesopotamia, Journal of Near Eastern Studies 50: 255-80 -, 2003. Worcester Slaughterhouse Account. Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative 1003, 1: 6 Garfinkle, Steven F. 2004. Shepherds, merchants, and credit: Some observations on lending practices in Ur III Mesopotamia. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 47: 1-30

Gibson, McGuire and Robert D. Biggs, eds. 1987. The organization of power: Aspects of bureaucracy in the ancient Near Easr. Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization, 46. Chicago Heimpel, Wolfgang 1995. Sheep management in Ur III: Texts from Lagash and Umma. Acta Sumerologica 17: 135-44 Hrushka, Blahoslav 1995. Sumerian agriculture: New findings. Preprint 26. Berlin: Max Planck-Institut f?r Wissenschaftsgeschichte Maekawa, Kazuya 1983. The management of fatted sheep (udu-nigal) in Ur III Girsu/Lagash. Acta Sumerologica 5: 81-111 -, 1987. Collective labor service in Girsu-Lagash: The Pre-Sargonic and Ur III periods. Pp. 49-71 in M. Powell, ed. Michalowski, Piotr 1987. Charisma and control: On continuity and change in early Mesopotamian bureaucratic systems. Pp. 55-68 in Gibson and Biggs, eds. Nissen, H.J. 1976. Geographie. Pp. 9-40 in S. Lieberman, ed., Sumerological studies in honor of Thorkild Jacobsen on his seventieth birthday, June 7th, 1974. AS 20. Chicago -, 1980. The mobility betaeen settled and non-settled in early Babylonia: Theory and evi dence. Pp. 285-90 in Barrelet, ed. Ochscnschlager, E.L., 2004. Iraq's Marsh Arabs in the Garden of Eden. University of Pennsylvania Museum. Philadelphia Potts, D.T. 1997. Mesopotamian civilization: The material foundations. Ithaca: Cornell University Press

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Powell, Marvin A., ed. 1987. Labor in the ancient Near East. American Oriental Series, 68 Sharlach, Tonia M. 2004. Provincial taxation and the Ur III state. Leiden & Boston: Brill Styx Sigrist, Marcel 1992. Drehern. Bethesda: CDL Press -. 1995. Neo-Sunerian texts from the Royal Ontario Museum: The administration at Drehern. Bethesda: CDL Press Steinkeller, Piotr 1987a. The foresters of Umma: Toward a definition of Ur III labor. Pp. 73 115 in Powell, ed. - 1987b. The administrative and economic organization of the Ur III state: The core and the periphery. Pp. 19-41 in Gibson and Biggs, eds. -, 1996. The organization of crafts in third millennium Babylonia: The Case of Potters. Altorientalische Forschungen 23: 232-53 -, 2003. Archival practices in Babylonia in the third millennium. Pp. 37-58 in Maria Brosius, ed., Ancient archives and archival traditions. Oxford: Oxford University Press -, 2001. New light on the hydrology and topography of southern Babylonia in the third millennium. Zeitschrift f?r Assyriologie 91: 22-84 -, 2002. Money-lending practices in Ur III Babylonia: The issue of economic motivation. Pp. 109-37 in Michael Hudson and Marc Van De Mieroop, eds., Debt and economic renewal in the ancient Near East. Bethesda: Cuneiform Digital Library -, 2003. More on the locationof gthe tosn of NAGsu. Nouvelles Assyriologiques Br?ves et Utilitaires 1: 13-14. Paris -, 2004. Toward a definition of private economic activity in third millennium Babylonia. Pp. 91-111 in Robert Rollinger and Christoph Ulf, eds. Commerce and monetary systems in the ancient world: Means of transmission and cultural interaction. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag -, n.d. City and countryside in third millennium southern Babylonia. -, n.d. Introduction to "Labor in the Ancient Near East" conference, April 2005 Stepien, Marek 1996. Animal husbandry in the ancient Near East: A prosopographic study of third-millennium Umma. Bethesda: CDL Press

Trigger, Bruce G. 2003. Understanding early civilizations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Van Driel, G. 1998. Land in ancient Mesopotamia: "That which remains undocumented does not exist." Pp. 19-49 in B. Haring and R. de Maatjer, eds., Landless and Hungry? Access to land in early and traditional societies. Leiden:School of Asian, African, and Amerindian Studies Waetzoldt, Hartmut 1972. Untersuchungen zur neusumerischen Textilindustrie. Rome: Centro per le Antichita e la Storia dell'Arte Vicino Oriente, Studi Economici e Tecnologici, 1 -, 1987. Compensation of craft workers and officials In the Ur III period. Pp. 117-41 in M. Powell, ed. Wright, Rita P. 1996. Technology, gender, and class: Worlds of difference in Ur III Mesopotamia. Pp. 79-110 inR.P. Wright, ed., Gender and archaeology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press Yoffee, Norman 2004. Myths of the archaic strate: Evolution of the earliest cities, states, and civilizations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Zeder, Melinda 1994. Of kings and shepherds: Specialized animal economy inUr III Mesopotamia. Pp. 175-91 in Gil Stein and Mitchell S. Rothman, eds., Chiefdoms and early states in the Near East: The organizational dynamics of complexity. Madison: Prehistory Press

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Acknowledgments

As already affirmed in the text, I am heavily indebted to Piotr Steinkeller for continuing, enormously helpful advice, criticism, and encouragement during the preparation of this article. His generosity is even more striking since itwill have become apparent that there are some issues on which our interpretations may not be entirely in agreement. Robert K. Englund and Mogens Trolle Larsen have also provided very helpful advice and criticism in the same generous spirit. The spectrum of valuable advice then continues smoothly into more archaeo logical territory,with Guillemo Algaze, Henry T. Wright, Rita Wright, Gil Stein, Elizabeth Stone and Jason Ur having suggested many substantive improvements. Finally, to the degree that the argument will be found generally intelligible by non-specialists, I warmly acknowledge a debt to my daughter Megan Adams, and to Douglas and Lilyan White.

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