Books by Vitali Bartash
This book explores the reasons for which weights and scales were used to measure goods in Early M... more This book explores the reasons for which weights and scales were used to measure goods in Early Mesopotamia (ca. 3,200-2,000 BCE). The vast corpus of cuneiform records from this period sheds light on the various mechanisms behind the development of this cultural innovation. Weighing became the means of articulating the value of both imported and locally-produced goods within a socioeconomic system that had reached an unprecedented level of complexity. This study provides a comprehensive analysis of this cultural and economic phenomenon, which simultaneously reflected and shaped the relationships between individuals and groups in Mesopotamia throughout the third millennium BCE.
You may order a free copy if you intend to review the book for a scholarly journal here: https://www.degruyter.com/dg/page/review-copy-order/order-review-copy
Please contact the author if you have any questions or remarks concerning the book and its topic: [email protected]
Publication and critical edition of 521 Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform tablets, archival records... more Publication and critical edition of 521 Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform tablets, archival records of palace and temple households, legal documents, and a number of school tablets.
The book contains the photographs, transliterations, translations, and commentary of these texts thus making these fascinating 3rd mill BC documents available to the broader public.
These cuneiform documents offer new data on the topics such as history of the early Sumerian states and the Akkadian Empire, management of irrigated land, management of personnel, textile and metal industries, slavery, hired labor, finanacial activities, agriculture and animal husbandry, food production, priesthood and cult, the role of women, and almost any aspect of the life how it was almost 5000 years ago.
Publication and critical edition of 212 Sumerian texts from Adab, Umma, and elsewhere: administra... more Publication and critical edition of 212 Sumerian texts from Adab, Umma, and elsewhere: administrative, legal, school (including an incantation), a fragment of a royal inscription, etc.
Edited volumes and special issues by Vitali Bartash
Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History (12/1), 2025
This special issue aims to move beyond the traditional binary of slavery and freedom in the study... more This special issue aims to move beyond the traditional binary of slavery and freedom in the study of ancient Mesopotamian societies. Legal texts have long shaped our understanding of social status in this region, but a broader approach incorporating diverse textual genres and diachronic comparison reveals a far more nuanced social landscape. The articles collected here argue that ethnic, legal, political, religious, and socioeconomic factors continually shaped groups with ambiguous statuses who were neither clearly citizens nor enslaved individuals. Rather than locating a fixed “third” legal category of “serfs,” the contributors emphasize distinctions such as citizens versus noncitizens or emancipated versus dependent household members – both free and enslaved. The volume refines the binary legal model, reaffirming that ancient Mesopotamia recognized only two legal statuses – free and unfree – but complicates how these were lived and perceived. Six key insights emerge, including the legal and social diversity within both categories, the importance of household structures, and the precarious positions of groups like muškēnū (“those who prostrate themselves”), un -il 2 (“menials”), temple dependents, war captives, freed slaves, and detained persons. Collectively, these studies challenge static interpretations and reveal the dynamic and context-dependent nature of social identity in ancient Mesopotamia.
Articles by Vitali Bartash
Beyond Slavery and Freedom in Ancient Mesopotamia, 2025
This special issue aims to move beyond the traditional binary of slavery and freedom in the study... more This special issue aims to move beyond the traditional binary of slavery and freedom in the study of ancient Mesopotamian societies. Legal texts have long shaped our understanding of social status in this region, but a broader approach incorporating diverse textual genres and diachronic comparison reveals a far more nuanced social landscape. The articles collected here argue that ethnic, legal, political, religious, and socioeconomic factors continually shaped groups with ambiguous statuses who were neither clearly citizens nor enslaved individuals. Rather than locating a fixed "third" legal category of "serfs," the contributors emphasize distinctions such as citizens versus noncitizens or emancipated versus dependent household membersboth free and enslaved. The volume refines the binary legal model, reaffirming that ancient Mesopotamia recognized only two legal statusesfree and unfreebut complicates how these were lived and perceived. Six key insights emerge, including the legal and social diversity within both categories, the importance of household structures, and the precarious positions of groups like muškēnū ("those who prostrate themselves"), UN-il 2 ("menials"), temple dependents, war captives, freed slaves, and detained persons. Collectively, these studies challenge static interpretations and reveal the dynamic and context-dependent nature of social identity in ancient Mesopotamia.
Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History 12, 2025
This article reexamines the origins and social status of the muškēnū ( maš.gag.en , etc., “those ... more This article reexamines the origins and social status of the muškēnū ( maš.gag.en , etc., “those who prostrate themselves”) in ancient Mesopotamia. Previously thought of as commoners, analysis of third-millennium sources reveals them to be settled outsiders, distinct from citizens of the communities they inhabited. This precarious position necessitated protection from rulers or other powerful figures. Evidence suggests the Semitic Middle Euphrates-Tigris region as the homeland of this phenomenon. Early Dynastic data (ca. 2600–2300 BC) portray the muškēnū as low-status outsiders by placing them in the context of male regular and house-born slaves, menial workers, robbers/seminomads, and female sex workers. Akkadian conquerors brought the phenomenon to Sumer during the twenty-third century BC. The muškēnū lived in imperial centers and traveled between Sumerian cities. The data on the muškēnū become more common during the Ur III period (2110–2003 BC). They lived primarily in royal settlements and on the kingdom’s periphery, suggesting a deliberate policy to establish a loyal social base, and they were “people” rather than “natives” of these towns. Male muškēnū were typically conscripted full time in low-income occupations involved in animal husbandry and cultivation, and they seldom held administrative positions. Male citizens, on the other hand, enjoyed a better economic position with part-time work and additional income opportunities. Few muškēnū women (feminine forms of the term are not attested) might have been forced into penal labor like some citizen women. Sex work was another profession for some muškēnū women, also mirroring the situation for some citizen women. During the Old Babylonian period (2002–1595 BC), muškēnum remained a term for a group of state-protected free individuals distinct from regular citizens of southern Babylonia. What was new is that Babylonian states used this category as a blueprint to conceptualize the entire free population as royal/state subjects, a concept originally alien in the south.
Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History 12, 2025
This paper examines the practice of donating people to deities in southern Mesopotamia between 26... more This paper examines the practice of donating people to deities in southern Mesopotamia between 2600 and 2000 BC. It offers a diachronic analysis of Early Dynastic, Old Akkadian, and Ur III sources and considers Old and Neo-Babylonian evidence to address questions raised in Gelb's (1972. "The Arua Institution." RA 66: 1-32) foundational study. This paper demonstrates, first, that donors and recipients were rarely close relatives, as the dedicatees often included foreign captives, former slaves, orphans, and incomplete families temporarily under patronage prior to donation. Secondly, despite becoming temple "servants" (performing mostly unskilled labor like water-drawing, weaving, and, rarely, cult-related tasks), officials recorded the names of the donors of many dedicatees. In some cases, this was because the dedicatees were former slaves who continued living with their former masters after donation (and manumission), supporting them in old age as part of the paramonē arrangement. Other dedicatees may have lived with temple officials and employees or even within temple complexes. Third, the paper challenges the "temple slaves" model in interpreting the status of dedicatees in early Mesopotamia. Although third-millennium sources describe them as a deity's "servants," similar to how slaves in private households were referred to as someone's "servants," the dedicatees faced a social and legal dead end: temple officials could neither sell nor release them because their master or mistress was a deity. In effect, thirdmillennium dedicatees became part of a broader "menial" class of full-time temple dependents. Their status resembled that of the Neo-Babylonian oblates (širkū), who were legally free but subject to strict temple control. Finally, building on Patterson's (1982. Slavery and Social Death. A Comparative Study. Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press) model of slavery as a substitute for death, this paper argues that the donation of humans to temples in southern Mesopotamia functioned as an alternative to slavery. For the local impoverished population, donating family members to temples provided an option other than outright sale into slavery.
IRAQ, 2022
Through philological and historical analysis focused on Gudea's slave dossier, this article eluci... more Through philological and historical analysis focused on Gudea's slave dossier, this article elucidates the causes and mechanisms that brought Iranian slaves to early southern Mesopotamia. The slave dossier documents a brief but intensive influx of Elamite slaves to Lagash on the lower Tigris during the reign of Gudea, ca. 2130-2110 B.C., who fought the powerful polity of Anshan in Fars. The author argues that consequent political instability and economic inequality in Elam fuelled three mechanisms of slave relocation. First, royal troops brought captives. Second, the palace bought foreigners from abroad and locally. Third, royals received Iranians as gifts or tribute ("kids led by one's side") from locals and Iranian states in areas where Gudea campaigned. Finally, locals gave their Iranian slaves back to the palace as gifts. On a theoretical level, the study distils four elements shared by all forms of slave mobility: the giver and the receiver, the economic and political relations between them that cause slave transfer, the physical and social spaces between which the transfer occurs, and the slaves and their demographic characteristics
The article provides a historical analysis of cuneiform records concerning the circulation of unf... more The article provides a historical analysis of cuneiform records concerning the circulation of unfree humans among the political-cultic elite in southern Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf during the Early Dynastic IIIb period, ca. 2475-2300 BCE. The analysis of the written data from the Adab city-state demonstrates that the royal house used the unfree as gifts to maintain a sociopolitical network on three spatial levels-the internal, local, and (inter) regional. The gift-givers and gift-receivers were mostly male adult members of the local and foreign elite, whereas the dislocated unfree humans were heterogeneous in terms of age, gender, and the ways they lost their freedom. The author relates the social profiles of both groups to the logistics of human traffic to reveal the link between social status and forms and nature of spatial mobility in the politically and socially unstable Early Dynastic Near East.
This chapter discusses the terms by which the scribes of central urban households (temples and pa... more This chapter discusses the terms by which the scribes of central urban households (temples and palaces) recorded human resources in the Late Uruk–Early Dynastic IIIa (3350–2500 BC) southern Mesopotamia, modern Iraq. The author's main argument is that this terminology centered on age and gender,–those biological aspects of workers that were directly related to their labor value.
This article studies Sumerian terms for minors (dumu, di4-di4-la(2) and lu2 tur-ra) in texts of v... more This article studies Sumerian terms for minors (dumu, di4-di4-la(2) and lu2 tur-ra) in texts of various genres to define their precise meaning and relationship to kinship and age-grade terminologies. The author argues that dumu is essentially a kinship term “son/daughter, one’s own child, offspring,” which lacks any age connotations. In contrast, di4-di4-la(2) designates children as an age grade. As in other languages, words for children as kinship and children as minors often exchange their semantic domains. Lu2 tur-ra, lit. “minor” is another age-grade term. In contrast, it bears a pronounced social connotation and denotes those under patriarchal or professional authority, including children, youths, and young unmarried, or even recently married, individuals, as well as junior professionals.
The article discusses references to children in cuneiform records from Southern Mesopotamia datin... more The article discusses references to children in cuneiform records from Southern Mesopotamia dating to the Uruk III/Jemdet Nasr period (ca. 3000 B. C.). They confirm the presence of infants and children among the personnel of institutional households. Documents offer two patterns of classifying humans. The first describes individuals as male or female and then distinguishes between adults, children and babies. The second disregards gender but offers six age groups instead, four of which refer to children. The article summarizes and interprets the information these early economic records provide on the gender and age groups of children. It shows how officials of institutional households in ancient Sumer defined the childhood of their dependents.
Review article of C. Lecompe, Archaic Tablets and Fragments from Ur (ATFU) from L. Woolley’s Exca... more Review article of C. Lecompe, Archaic Tablets and Fragments from Ur (ATFU) from L. Woolley’s Excavations at the Royal Cemetery. Nisaba. Studi Assiriologici Messinesi (NSAM) 25. DiCAM, Messina, 2013.
Children constitute a large portion of every society. But the meaning of childhood varies from on... more Children constitute a large portion of every society. But the meaning of childhood varies from one society to another. This results in specific habits of child caring and raising, their legal status and overall life conditions.
Children and childhood remain largely understudied within cuneiform studies. The reason for this is not scarcity of data. On the contrary, according to my preliminary estimations, about 1500 cuneiform texts within the corpus of approximately 100,000 written records from Southern Mesopotamia dating to ca. 3300 – 2000 BCE offer insights into lives of children.
My ongoing research investigates a remarkable social phenomenon alluded to in archival records from early Mesopotamia. It appears that Sumerian temples and palaces supported and subsequently employed children from underprivileged social strata. My aim is to tell where this practice originates, its forms and consequences for the larger society. I suggest that the support of children had a clear socioeconomic purpose. On the one hand, socially unprotected children were not left to the mercy of fate, to roam the streets begging. On the other hand, both as children and eventual adults they were supported as an important source of cheap labor for the temple and palace economies.
I concentrate on studying three aspects: terms for children attested in texts and their demography, influx of children into households, and their support vs. labor employment. This article exemplifies briefly these aspects.
Umma was one of the most prominent Sumerian city-states. 3rd mill. BCE cuneiform documents record... more Umma was one of the most prominent Sumerian city-states. 3rd mill. BCE cuneiform documents record several names for what the previous scholarship believed to be a single city of Umma. Recent discussions and archaeological investigations strongly suggest that these writings refer to two neighboring cities Gesha and Umma. Due to the abandonment of the former at the end of the Early Dynastic period its writing has been passed to the latter. The article concentrates on the earliest writing for the city of Umma (UB-me), reevaluates the existing evidence and amplifies the “Umma debate” with the earliest textual attestation of the city UBme dating to the Early Dynastic IIIa period.
This paper looks at the earliest appearances of the Sumerian term e2-mi2 in written evidence from... more This paper looks at the earliest appearances of the Sumerian term e2-mi2 in written evidence from cities other than Girsu. The word is variously translated as ‘women’s quarters’, ‘queen’s household’, etc. Combining evidence from lexical, literary and economic texts, an attempt is made to outline the morphology and possible semantics of the term.
The sign combination E2-MUNUS is found as early as the Uruk III period, in which it might have designated a building or an institution.
The 3rd-millennium BC institution hiding behind the term e2-mi2 has to be identified with the ‘women’s part of the house’, where women lived and were children were born and probably lived until a certain age. This institution is found in the ED IIIb – Ur III administrative accounts and probably even earlier, in ED IIIa administrative, lexical, and literary texts. The term e2-mi2 might have been a part of each patriarchal house and was not confined exclusively to ‘palaces’.
The distribution of the material shows that the term is mentioned in archives from southern Mesopotamian, thus proper Sumerian, cities: Adab, Girsu, Nippur, Umma, and Zabala.
Addendum to my edition of the text CUSAS 23, no. 151 (Bartash 2013). This note adds the copy of t... more Addendum to my edition of the text CUSAS 23, no. 151 (Bartash 2013). This note adds the copy of the text's reverse. The document is a ration list which records barley allocations to officials, craftsmen and dependents of a Sargonic institutional household. Women, children and blind workers are mentioned among dependents.
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Books by Vitali Bartash
You may order a free copy if you intend to review the book for a scholarly journal here: https://www.degruyter.com/dg/page/review-copy-order/order-review-copy
Please contact the author if you have any questions or remarks concerning the book and its topic: [email protected]
The book contains the photographs, transliterations, translations, and commentary of these texts thus making these fascinating 3rd mill BC documents available to the broader public.
These cuneiform documents offer new data on the topics such as history of the early Sumerian states and the Akkadian Empire, management of irrigated land, management of personnel, textile and metal industries, slavery, hired labor, finanacial activities, agriculture and animal husbandry, food production, priesthood and cult, the role of women, and almost any aspect of the life how it was almost 5000 years ago.
Edited volumes and special issues by Vitali Bartash
Articles by Vitali Bartash
Children and childhood remain largely understudied within cuneiform studies. The reason for this is not scarcity of data. On the contrary, according to my preliminary estimations, about 1500 cuneiform texts within the corpus of approximately 100,000 written records from Southern Mesopotamia dating to ca. 3300 – 2000 BCE offer insights into lives of children.
My ongoing research investigates a remarkable social phenomenon alluded to in archival records from early Mesopotamia. It appears that Sumerian temples and palaces supported and subsequently employed children from underprivileged social strata. My aim is to tell where this practice originates, its forms and consequences for the larger society. I suggest that the support of children had a clear socioeconomic purpose. On the one hand, socially unprotected children were not left to the mercy of fate, to roam the streets begging. On the other hand, both as children and eventual adults they were supported as an important source of cheap labor for the temple and palace economies.
I concentrate on studying three aspects: terms for children attested in texts and their demography, influx of children into households, and their support vs. labor employment. This article exemplifies briefly these aspects.
The sign combination E2-MUNUS is found as early as the Uruk III period, in which it might have designated a building or an institution.
The 3rd-millennium BC institution hiding behind the term e2-mi2 has to be identified with the ‘women’s part of the house’, where women lived and were children were born and probably lived until a certain age. This institution is found in the ED IIIb – Ur III administrative accounts and probably even earlier, in ED IIIa administrative, lexical, and literary texts. The term e2-mi2 might have been a part of each patriarchal house and was not confined exclusively to ‘palaces’.
The distribution of the material shows that the term is mentioned in archives from southern Mesopotamian, thus proper Sumerian, cities: Adab, Girsu, Nippur, Umma, and Zabala.