Cuneiform Digital Library Journal
2003:1
ISSN 1540-8779
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The Year: “Nissen returns joyous from a distant island”

Introduction

§1.  At the urging of the collaborators of the research project “Archaic Texts from Uruk”, the Berlin Senate purchased in 1988 a large portion of the former Erlenmeyer collection, consisting primarily of the then largest privately held group of proto-cuneiform tablets,[1] but also including a number of attractive Ur III tablets. Six documents of that group of texts have been dealt with in two earlier publications.[2] The text treated here was sold during the 1988 Christie's of London auction as lot no. 92 at a price of £ 14,000 (see figure 1).[3] This large Umma account of guruš workmen belongs to a select published group of at most two dozen large texts from the Ur III period, with a particular affinity to MVN 15, 94, MVN 21, 199, and TCL 5, 5674.

General observations

§2.  The text Erlenmeyer 152 dates from the second regnal year of Šu-Sin (ca. 2036 B.C. following the now less reliable middle chronology). It contains a year account of a 33-man workforce under a foreman named Lu-Šara. As with any planned economy, the production numbers posted in this account represent a mix of the artificial production norms that were attached to the workmen assigned the foreman by the agents of the household for which he worked, and the real production of the same workmen as confirmed in a large number of receipts. In both cases, the production was converted into “worker days” (guruš u₄ 1-še₃) by multiplying the number of workmen by the number of days they either worked, or were expected to work to complete a set task. The document has the characteristic structure (figure 2) of yearly accounts of the Ur III period, consisting of sections conveniently designated “debits”, “credits”, and “balance”.

§3.  We may imagine the composition of this account in the following way. At the end of Šu-Sin 2 or the beginning of Šu-Sin 3, a bookkeeper from the accounting bureau within the temple household of Šara gathers in his office

The accountant must proceed to order these perhaps dozens of tablets, presumably in the same sequence as that found in the account Erlenmeyer 152, with those primary records and the previous account of a-c) strictly distinguished from those primary records of d), for the most part sealed receipts probably gathered by the foreman in the course of the year, that represent the real and documented production of his workmen.

§4.  With the access to larger numbers of Ur III documents made possible by the continuing publication of administrative text collections and by the networked distribution of the text content within these publications, specialists have been able to identify more and more of the primary documents on which Babylonian scribes based their mid- and long-term accounts.[4] In the present case, twelve such primary texts have been located in collections that range from Istanbul to Barcelona, from New Haven to Ft. Myers, representing the most substantial coverage of a large Umma account heretofore achieved.[5] And yet if it were not for the fortuitous appearance of a receipt from a private collection in Florida (the text Hand 1, see below), this study would contain nothing entirely new. For this one text is to my knowledge the first known example of a receipt that documents the movement of real goods or services within the “debits” section of an Umma account.

§5.  All these records in hand, our scribe must have performed some preliminary calculations to judge the size of tablet he would need for this account, and he then proceeded to enter all the information before him, following a strict bookkeeping template that dictated the means by which data was standardized and “compressed” to form a meaningful yearly record. We expect to soon have the tools to fairly reconstruct the involved instruction that complex Ur III accounting presupposes. Certainly the concrete texts themselves are our primary sources for this reconstruction, but the growing numbers of exercise accounts, and of account duplicates, triplicates and so on, can be brought to bear on the question of how large running accounts were kept. The most involved examples of such documents from the Ur III period seem to derive not from Umma, but rather from the agricultural bureaus of Girsu, of which numerous examples have been offered in the work of K. Maekawa.[6]

§6.  Once entered in running accounts, the primary documents were, as is clear from the archaeological and textual record, stored in baskets from which stringed identifying bullae were hung. These bullae, so-called pisan-dub-ba, or “tablet-basket” texts, were of a standardized format that described in concise fashion the nature of the tablets thus archived:[7]

§7.  TRU 1[8]

Account structure (see figure 2)

§8.  The first section of the account, the debits (obv. i 1 to iii 4, described by the Sumerian term sag-nig₂-gur₁₁-ak-am, “it is the head of the goods”), consists of three subsections. In the first place, the scribe posted a record of arrears accruing to the foreman Lu-Šara from his previous running account. The notation obv. i 1 corresponding to 456 ¹/₆ workdays is not substantial relative to deficits posted in the accounts of comparably sized troops of workmen, and it will in the course of this account balloon to a total of over 1700 workdays recorded in rev. v 3. It is difficult to overstate the seriousness of these deficit workdays for the foremen involved, since a capricious central administration at the level of the province governors, or the crown in Ur, views them as effective loan debts that can be called in at will. In practice, their threatening nature is most obvious when the involved foremen go missing, either as a result of flight from service, or of death. In such cases, the households of the individuals are claimed by the state, including, dependent on the level of arrears, property, moveable goods, chattel slaves and family members.[9]

§9.  The second subsection of the account debits lists the workmen in the charge of Lu-Šara, in this case individually named, but in like accounts often simply recorded as a number. Such long-standing “crew workers” are qualified in Sumerian as giri₃-se₃-ga, literally “laid to the foot”. Twenty-four of these workers were qualified with the Sumerian designation “dumu-gi₇” and the numerical notation meaning “one half”, that is, they were qualified as workers from whom only one half of a norm production was anticipated.[10] The remaining workmen were qualified as “porters” (ug₃-ga₆, often abbreviated to ug₃, in the literature usually transliterated un-il₂) from whom the foreman expected full production. One of the porters was included in the workforce for just 4 of the twelve-month period of this account. Since the debits sections of Ur III labor accounts list ideal and therefore artificial work performance of a planned household, the calculations of the workdays assigned to foremen is straightforward, in this case (obv. ii 23-24):

24 dumugi × ¹/₂ × 12 months × 30 days (per month[11]) = 4320 workdays

8 ¹/₃ ugga[12] × 12 × 30 = 3000 workdays

§10.  The three workmen listed in obv. ii 10-14 of this subsection were received by the foreman Lu-Šara from two named individuals. The first of these two entries was copied from a primary text now in the private collection of C. Hand in Ft. Myers, Florida (see figure 3).[13] Although the name of the foreman Lu-dingira, from whose crew the dumugi workman was transferred to Lu-Šara, is not preserved, there can be little doubt that this text was the source for the Erlenmeyer entry. The name and work-norm qualification of the laborer is the same; it is dated to the precise moment (beginning of the first month of Šu-Sin 2) of the beginning of this man's work under Lu-Šara; the laborer was booked as having been received from another ugula, consistent with the format and seal of Lu-Šara on Hand 1. Indeed, this latter consistency in format and sealing was a central search criteria in identifying all other primary documents used by the scribe of Erlenmeyer 152, but, as sources for the credits section of the account, flipped to name another official as receiving and therefore also sealing agent, and Lu-Šara as agent of delivery (usually noted as “Foreman: Lu-Šara”, so that Hand 1 rev. 1 might be reconstructed with [ugula] ˹lu₂˺-[dingir]-˹ra˺).

	Hand 1 (private collection)		translation:
	obv.
	1)	1/2 un-da-ga	1/2 (work norm): Undaga
	2)	iti  ŠE.KIN-ku5-ta	from the month “Harvest” (on)
	3)	lu2-dšara2 i3-˹dab5˺	Lu-Šara seized (administratively).
	4)	[                 ]	[                 ]
	rev.
	1)	[ugula] ˹lu2˺-[dingir]-˹ra˺(?)	[ foreman: ] ˹Lu-dingira˺(?)
	2)	mu ˹ma2 d˺en-ki ba-ab-du8	Year: “The boat of Enki was caulked”.
		Seal legend
	1)	lu2-dšara2	Lu-Šara,
	2)	dub-sar	scribe,
	3)	dumu lugal-inim-gi-na	son of Lugal-inim-gina
	Erlenmeyer 152 obv. ii 10-11:
		1/2 un-da-ga dumu u-bar	1/2 (work norm): Undaga, son of Ubar,
		ki lu2-dingir-ra ugula-ta	from Lu-dingira, the foreman

§11.  The third subsection of debits contains two numerical entries. The second of these, 420 workdays described as “the production of 'dumugi apprentices' in bala service,” seems to represent a sort of tax assessed against the foreman, since no compensatory allowance of laborers is evident in the text.[14] The first entry of 24 workdays is qualified as a₂ u₄ du₈-a ug₃-ga₆ sag-ba zi-ga, “the production of free days of the porter already booked out of the debits[15]”. 24 days correspond to ¹/₁₀ of the work period of 8 months recorded in the debits section of the account as sick-leave time of the porter Ea-lubi (obv. i 21 and obv. v 27-31). The period in which this worker was missing due to illness, that is, the final eight months of the fiscal year covered by this account, were qualified as work performance and this labor time was “received” by the official Ur-E'e. This accounting procedure presumes a certain social quality within the organization of the household that ultimately acted as slave master to such laborers, for their rations were distributed entirely independent of their specific production. Nonetheless the Ur III social state remained punctilious; those 24 days which had, for accounting technical purposes, been deducted from the debits in rev. iv 2-3, were here retrieved for the state, in exact parallel to other cases in Ur III accounts of the retrieval of free time accorded, again for technical reasons, sick or dead workers.[16]

§12.  We thus have the following entries subsumed in the debits total obv. iii 2:

§13.  The following “credits” section of the account (obv. iii 5 to rev. v 2, Sumerian ša₃-bi-ta——zi-ga-am₃, “therefrom (viz., from the debits) deducted”) demonstrates that the crew under Lu-Šara performed above all agricultural jobs, including, however, the transportation of products and the maintenance of the irrigation system.[17] We must again imagine that the Sumerian bookkeeper drawing up this account had before him all sealed receipts gathered in the course of the year by the foreman Lu-Šara, and that these primary documents were ordered roughly according to the type of work they confirmed. Thus the first documents entered in the account dealt with what was likely the primary assignment of this work crew, namely, the field tasks of harvesting grain and maintaining the system of canals upon which Babylonian agriculture depended, including the labor-intensive dredging of established, and the excavation of new canals. A second set of tasks consisted of the assistance of his crews in the transportation of various commodities by barge along the canals of lower Mesopotamia: reeds, leather bags, processed and unprocessed cereals, fish, dairy products and even oxen.[18]

§14.  A wide variety of officials from within the household economy of the province of Umma act as receiving agents of the labor performed by the workmen of Lu-Šara. Upon the completion of tasks assigned the work crews, a sealed tablet confirming the work was issued, of which twelve have been located in the published record of Ur III texts (those reference texts below in parentheses are merely close parallels to the account passage cited; see figure 4):

§15.  These primary documents follow a strictly standardized format: so-and-so many work days; description of the task completed; foreman of the crew involved; notice of the seal of the receiving agent (kišib PN); the physical impression of the cylinder seal; date formula.[20]

Both of the pieces of information corresponding to MVN 16, 1567, rev. 2 and 4, are supplied in the colophon of the account Erlenmeyer 152: the year formula, and the general qualification rev. v 5-6: nig₂-ka₉-ak a₂ erin₂-na-ka / lu₂-^dšara₂ ugula dumu lugal-inim-gi-na, “account of the production of the erin workers. Lu-Šara is the foreman, son of Lugal-inim-gina”.

§16.  The very common practice in neo-Sumerian account-writing of combining the associated information of two or more receipts into one entry is evident also in our text with its two explicit and several implied references to multiple sealed tablets (kišib 2+ PN), and the nature of this combination made clear in the two passages obv. v 21-23 and rev. i 9-11. In the former case, we have the correspondence (one of two sealed tablets):

It is safe to assume that the second sealed tablet is a copy of this one, exchanging 42 for 2.15 in the first line.

§17.  Similarly, in the latter case:

§18.  The accountant responsible for Erlenmeyer 152 employed a standard method of calculation of the credits section of the text, consisting as it did of a large list of numerical notations (see the transliteration, and figure 2 above). Partial sums inscribed at the bottom of each column were evident tools to simplify the final summations, and to serve as a second control of the accuracy of entries. Despite the difficulties introduced into the calculation flow by the various modern “improvements” in the damaged surface of the tablet (see the notes below in the transliteration), it has been possible to reconstruct the entire account with little likelihood of error. This reconstruction demonstrates that the scribe calculated with untiring precision, and raises anew the question of the calculation tools he must have employed to achieve this result. We unfortunately cannot state with confidence what these tools were, whether for instance the scribes had a set of counting tables or abacuses, and whether preliminary tablets were first written and then copied onto a master text. It would seem unlikely given the high number of erasures evident in this text that it should have represented the final of two or more drafts. Moreover, the traces of numerical notations in obv. iii 1, giving the impression of an ancient “scratch pad”, are suggestive of the use of ad hoc calculation aids, including these but doubtless other simple techniques.[24]

§19.  The last section of Erlenmeyer 152 (rev. v 3-10) includes global qualifications of the account (i.e., that it involved the work crew of Lu-Šara and covered the twelve months of Šu-Sin 2) and the balance of the total of the debits section minus the total of the credits section. This balance is negative (debit greater than credit) and therefore qualified with the technical term la₂-ia₃, “deficit” (not preserved, but certain in rev. v 3). This means that insofar as we have a full accounting of the work performed by the foreman's crew for the year, the total of their real production fell well below the production expected in the debits section of the account, so that the deficit compared to that of the preceding year increased nearly four-fold. We can hope that, with renewed Iraqi excavations of Umma/Djokha and its surroundings, more accounts will surface that inform us of the ultimate fate of this foreman.

Version: 15 February 2003