The Correspondence of the Kings of Ur

General Editor
Jerrold S. Cooper, Johns Hopkins University

Editorial Board
Walter Farber, University of Chicago Jack Sasson, Vanderbilt University
Jean-Pierre Grégoire, C.N.R.S. Piotr Steinkeller, Harvard University
Piotr Michalowski, University of Michigan Marten Stol, Free University of Amsterdam
Simo Parpola, University of Helsinki Irene Winter, Harvard University

1. The Lamentation over the Destruction of Sumer and Ur

Piotr Michalowski
2. Schlaf, Kindchen, Schlaf! Mesopotamische Baby-Beschwörungen und -Rituale
Walter Farber
3. Adoption in Old Babylonian Nippur and the Archive of Mannum-mešu-liṣṣur
Elizabeth C. Stone and David I. Owen
4. Third-Millennium Legal and Administrative Texts in the Iraq Museum, Baghdad
Piotr Steinkeller and J. N. Postgate
5. House Most High: The Temples of Ancient Mesopotamia
A. R. George
6. Textes culinaires Mésopotamiens / Mesopotamian Culinary Texts
Jean Bottéro
7. Legends of the Kings of Akkade: The Texts
Joan Goodnick Westenholz
8. Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography
Wayne Horowitz
9. The Writing on the Wall: Studies in the Architectural Context of Late Assyrian Palace Reliefs
John M. Russell
10. Adapa and the South Wind: Language Has the Power of Life and Death
Shlomo Izre’el
11. Time at Emar: The Cultic Calendar and the Rituals from the Diviner’s Archive
Daniel E. Fleming
12. Letters to the King of Mari: A New Translation, with Historical Introduction, Notes, and Commentary
Wolfgang Heimpel
13. Babylonian Oracle Questions
W. G. Lambert
14. Royal Statuary of Early Dynastic Mesopotamia
Gianni Marchesi and Nicolò Marchetti
The Correspondence of
the Kings of Ur
An Epistolary History of an
Ancient Mesopotamian Kingdom

Piotr Michalowski

Winona Lake, Indiana

Eisenbrauns
2011
 © Copyright 2011 Eisenbrauns

All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America.

www.eisenbrauns.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The correspondence of the kings of Ur : an epistolary history of an ancient Mesopotamian
kingdom / [edited by] Piotr Michalowski.
    p. cm. — (Mesopotamian civilizations ; 15)
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
ISBN 978-1-57506-194-8 (hardback : alk. paper)
1. Sumerian letters—Translations into English. 2. Ur (Extinct city)—Kings and
rulers. 3. Ur (Extinct city)—History—Sources. I. Michalowski, Piotr, 1948–
PJ3882.C67 2011
899′.956008—dc22
2011015402

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Stan-
dard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-
1984. †Ê
 Contents

Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   ix
Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   xiii

Part 1
The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings in
Literary and Historical Perspective
Chapter 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Chapter 2. Sumerian Literary Letters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Chapter 3. The Royal Letters in Their Literary Setting . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Chapter 4. The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 1:
The Affairs of King Šulgi (Letters 1–12, 15–18) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
Chapter 5. The Amorites in Ur III Times . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
Chapter 6. The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 2:
Great Walls, Amorites, and Military History: The Puzur-Šulgi
and Šarrum-bani Correspondence (Letters 13–14 and 19–20) . . . . . . . 122
Chapter 7. The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 3:
Ur, Isin, Kazallu, and the Final Decades of the Ur III State
(Letters 21–24) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
Chapter 8. Afterword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216
Appendixes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225

Part 2
The Correspondence of the Kings of Ur:
Text Editions
Introduction to the Text Editions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235
1. Aradmu to Šulgi 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249
(ArŠ1, 3.1.1, A1, RCU 1)
v
vi Contents

1a. Aradmu to Šulgi 1a . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273

(ArŠ1a)
2. Šulgi to Aradmu 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275
(ŠAr1, 3.1.2, RCU 2)
3. Aradmu to Šulgi 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293
(ArŠ 2, 3.1.3 + 3.1.11. A2a, RCU 3+4)
4. Abaindasa to Šulgi 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305
(AbŠ1, B1, SEpM1, 3.1.21)
5. Šulgi to Aradmu 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325
(ŠAr2, 3.1.13.1, RCU 8)
6. Šulgi to Aradmu 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 326
(ŠAr3, 3.1.61, RCU 16)
7. Aradmu to Šulgi 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 330
(ArŠ3, 3.1.5, SEpM1a, RCU 7)
8. Aradmu to Šulgi 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 334
(ArŠ4)
9. Aradmu to Šulgi 5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337
(ArŠ5, 3.1.6, RCU 6)
10. Aradmu to Šulgi 6 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 341
(ArŠ6, 3.1.4, RCU 5)
11. Ur-dun to Šulgi 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 344
(UdŠ1, 3.1.11.1, 14)
12. Aradmu? to Šulgi? 7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 348
(ArŠ7)
13. Puzur-Šulgi to Šulgi 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 352
(PuŠ1, 3.1.7, RCU 11)
14. Šulgi to Puzur-Šulgi 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 364
(ŠPu1, 3.1.08, 3.1.10, RCU 9, 10)
15. Šulgi to Išbi-Erra 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 382
(ŠIš1, 3.1.13.2, RCU 15)
16. Amar-Sin to Šulgi 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 392
(AmŠ1, 3.1.12)
17. Šulgi to Amar-Sin 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 396
(ŠAm1, 3.1.13, RCU 13)
 Contents vii

18. Šarrum-bani to Šu-Sin 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 398

(ŠaŠu1, 3.1.15, RCU 17)
19. Šu-Sin to Šarrum-bani 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 408
(ŠuŠa1, 3.1.16, RCU 18)
20. Šu-Sin to Lu-Nanna and Šarrum-bani 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 414
(ŠuLuŠa1, 3.3.31)
21. Išbi-Erra to Ibbi-Sin 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 416
(IšIb1, 3.1.17, RCU 19)
22. Ibbi-Sin to Išbi-Erra . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 433
(IbIš1, 3.1.18, RCU 20)
23. Puzur-Numušda to Ibbi-Sin 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 439
(PuIb1, 3.1.19, A3, RCU 21)
24. Ibbi-Sin to Puzur-Numušda 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 463
(IbPu1, 3.1.20, RCU 22)
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 483
List of Sumerian Literary Texts Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 516
List of CKU Tablets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 518
List of Joined Elements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 522
Indexes to Passages Cited from Sumerian Literary Texts
and Royal Inscriptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 523
Indexes to the Text Editions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 525
 Foreword

My work on the royal letters of the Ur III kings began many years ago as a doc-
toral dissertation at Yale University under the direction of W. W. Hallo. Soon after I
began work on my thesis, I visited the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago
to examine the pertinent cuneiform documents that were in their care. Advised by
a friend to pay my respects to the great master, A. Leo Oppenheim, I knocked on
the frame of his open door and was granted an audience. After a minor exchange of
pleasantries, Prof. Oppenheim asked me what I was doing at the Institute; when I
told him that I was editing the Sumerian literary correspondence, he looked into my
eyes and stated dismissively: “This is work for an experienced scholar, not for a be-
ginner.” This was hardly what I wanted to hear at the time, and I left in a somewhat
depressed mood. I eventually finished my dissertation, and by that time I had come
to appreciate the wisdom of his prescient, if troubling statement, but I never saw him
again and was unable to acknowledge his advice.
Oppenheim was right, of course, and once I finished my dissertation I never
wanted to touch the topic again; I was tired of the subject, the material seemed too
difficult, and I could not imagine doing it justice. In addition, personal and political
affairs prevented me from traveling abroad for a time, and thus I could not collate
many of the sources. Over the years, colleagues would remind me of the obligation
I had taken on and implored me to publish my editions of the royal letters; periodi-
cally, I returned to the subject, only to be sidetracked by other interests and obliga-
tions. In 2005, I was able to visit the Museum of the Ancient Orient in Istanbul to
photograph all the relevant tablets in that collection, and this opportunity spurred
me on to make a serious attempt to finish this book. The final product bears little
resemblance to my original dissertation and I therefore decided to rename it, to dis-
tinguish it from the unpublished “Royal Correspondence of Ur” (RCU), which has,
in photocopy, often been cited in the literature. As I send this out into the world, I
still hear Oppenheim’s words in my head and worry that they may continue to ap-
ply to this difficult material, the only large body of Sumerian literary prose that we
possess at present.
This book is divided into two parts: an analytical section, and one that contains
the text editions. For practical reasons, I have used different citation conventions
for each: in the first part, scholarly works are referred to according to the social
science format, but in the commentaries to the text editions, which will only be
ix
x Foreword

used by philologists, I use standard familiar Assyriological abbreviations as listed by

the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) and used in the Database of Neo-
Sumerian Texts (BDTNS). Within the narrative, CKU items are cited according to
the abbreviations assigned to them in the letter list, in tandem with their consecu-
tive number; thus, the first letter, Aradmu to Šulgi 1, is referred to as Arš1 (1). The
new labeling and numbering replaces the system used for the letters decades ago in
RCU as well as the names used in ETCSL and elsewhere, and therefore a concor-
dance between the RCU and CKU is provided on p. 246. The manuscript of this
book was finished in the fall of 2009; I have updated it, within reason, in the proof
stage, but much of the text has remained the same.
Because it has taken so long to bring this research project to a close, I am in-
debted to many people and to numerous institutions for support, information, schol-
arly materials, and generosity of spirit. First, I must thank my teachers at Yale, J. J.
Finkelstein, Harry H. Hoffner, Richard Ellis, and above all, William W. Hallo, who
asked me to take on this topic, generously mentored me, and directed my thesis. I
could never have completed the work without fellowship support from the National
Endowment for the Humanities and from the University of Michigan. I am also be-
holden to the Committee on Mesopotamian Civilization of the American Schools
of Oriental Research for allocating funds from the Nies Trust to cover editorial work
on this volume.
I am grateful to many museums for permission to collate as well as make public
unpublished cuneiform tablets and to the people in these collections who facilitated
my work and provided assistance and hospitality: The Museum of the Ancient Ori-
ent in Istanbul (Asuman Dönmez, Veysel Donbaz, Fatma Yıldız), the Louvre (Béa-
trice André-Salvini), The British Museum (Irving Finkel, Jon Taylor, Christopher
Walker), De Liagre Böhl Collection of Leiden University (T. J. H. Krispijn), Frau
Professor Hilprecht Collection-Jena (Manfred Krebernik), the Jonathan and Janette
Rosen tablet collection at Cornell University (David I. Owen), the Babylonian
Section of the University Museum, Philadelphia (Steve Tinney, Åke W. Sjöberg,
Erle Leichty), the Yale Babylonian Collection (W. W. Hallo, Ulla Kasten, Benja-
min R. Foster), the Ashmolean Museum (Roger Moorey, Kathrine Wodehouse, Jack
Green), the Oriental Institute Museum (John A. Brinkman, Walter Farber), the
Tehran Museum (Mohammad R. Kargar), the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthro-
pology, University of California, Berkeley (Ann Kilmer, Leslie Freund, Alicja Egbert,
Niek Veldhuis), the Schøyen Collection, Oslo (Martin Schøyen), the Andrews Uni-
versity Archaeological Museum (Constance Gane), and the Cotsen Collection (Ivy
Trent, Lloyd E. Cotsen).
Tablets from the British Museum are published with permission of the Trustees
of the British Museum. The Uruk tablet is published with the permission of Dr.
Margarete van Ess, Deutsches Archäologisches Institut - Orient-Abteilung, Uruk-
Archiv. Photographs of texts from the Louvre Museum are published with permission
of Dr. Béatrice André-Salvini, Conservateur general, Directeur du department des
Antiquités Orientales, Musée du Louvre. Tablets from the Yale Babylonian Collec-
 Foreword xi

tion are published by permission of Prof. Benjamin R. Foster, Curator of the Yale
Babylonian Collection. Tablets from the Babylonian Section of the University Mu-
seum, Philadelphia are published with permission of Prof. Steve Tinney, Associate
Curator-in-Charge of the Babylonian Section. Tablets from Jena are published with
the permission of Prof. Dr. Manfred Krebernik, Curator of the Frau Professor Hilpre-
cht Collection of Babylonian Antiquities, Friedrich Schiller University, Jena. Texts
from the Tablet Collection of the Oriental Institute, Chicago are published with
the permission of Prof. Walter Farber, Curator. The copy and photograph of the Isin
tablet is published by permission of Prof. Dr. Claus Wilcke and Prof. Dr. Berthold
Hrouda. Photographs of tablets from the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropol-
ogy, Berkeley, are published with permission of the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of
Anthropology and the Regents of the University of California. The photographs of
tablets from the Cotsen Collection are published with the permission of the UCLA
Library Special Collections; photography courtesy Lloyd Cotsen. Photographs from
the Schøyen Collection are published by permission of the Schøyen Collection,
Oslo and London. The Cornell University, Carl A. Kroch Library tablet is published
by permission of Prof. David I. Owen, Curator of Tablet Collections. The photo-
graph of the tablet from the De Liagre Böhl Collection is published by permission of
its owner The Netherlands Institute for The Near East (NINO), Leiden, The Neth-
erlands. Photographs of tablets from the Istanbul Archaeology Museums (İstanbul
Arkeoloji Müzesi) are published with the permission of the Director Zeynep Kızıltan
and the assistance of Asuman Dönmez, director of the Archive of Documents with
Cuneiform Inscriptions (Çiviyazılı Belgeler Arşivi). The photograph of the tablet
in the Tehran National Museum is published with the permission of Mrs. Zahra
Jafarmohammadi, now the Ex-Curator of Central Treasury of the National Museum
of Iran. All photographs published herein are subject to copyright and cannot be re-
produced without permission of the owners of the objects and of the photographers.
Many other friends and colleagues have helped me in his undertaking over the
years, providing advice, support, information, photographs, hand copies, and good
fellowship; I thank them all: Robert Mc. Adams, Jeremy Black, Harold Borkin, Ni-
cole Brisch, Miguel Civil, Jerrold S. Cooper, Parsa Daneshmand, Daniel A. Foxvog,
Alhena Gadotti, Andrew George, N. Ilgi Gercek, Alexandra Kleinerman, Renee
Gallery Kovacs, M. Ghelichkhan, Lisa Kinney-Bajwa, Manfred Krebernik, Marie-
Christine Ludwig, Peter Machinist, M. Malyeri, Catherine Mittermayer, Manuel
Molina, Andreas Müller-Karpe, Jeremy Peterson, Eleanor Robson, Aaron Shaffer,
Marcel Sigrist, Steve Tinney, Piotr Steinkeller, Matthew W. Stolper, Margarete
van Ess, Konrad Volk, Claus Wilcke, Henry T. Wright, Norman Yoffee, Richard L.
Zettler, and others.
I am profoundly indebted to Jerry Cooper for his friendship and help over the
years but, more specifically, for his firm and insightful editorial hand. He was kind
enough to accept this manuscript for publication, encourage its completion, and
his comments on the draft made me rethink many faulty assumptions. I am equally
indebted to Wolfgang Heimpel, who also served as a reader of the book and offered
xii Foreword

much important learned advice. Robert McAdams, Henry T. Wright, and Norman
Yoffee read some chapters and offered valuable comments, for which I am most grate-
ful; Wright’s wise insights have been particularly helpful. I thank Laura Culbertson
and Gina Konstantopoulos for reference checking, helping with indexes, and other
editorial assistance. I am indebted to Kay Clahassey of the University of Michigan
Museum of Anthropology for her artistry in preparing the maps. I must also express
my full gratitude to Billie Jean Collins for years of friendship, collaboration, and col-
legiality; her copyediting, indexing and academic skills very much helped make this
book possible. Many thanks are due to Jim Eisenbraun for agreeing to publish this
work, for his excellent editorial assistance, for his diligence, and for his patience in
seeing it through to press. I am also indebted to all the other members of his publish-
ing company for first-rate professional work.
Most of all, I must thank my wife Deanna Relyea for her love and patience,
my small but intense family, and the grandkids, Levi, Josephine, Jamisen, Nicholas,
Charlie, and Jeremy for making it all worthwhile.
 Abbreviations

A tablets in the collections of the Oriental Institute, University of

Chicago
Aa lexical series á A = nâqu
AAICAP Archives administratives et inscriptions cunéiformes: Ashmolean
Museum, Bodleian Collection, Oxford, by J-P. Grégoire. Paris: Paul
Geuthner, 1996.
AbB Altbabylonische Briefe in Umschrift und Übersetzung
AEM Archives épistolaires de Mari
AfO Archiv für Orientforschung
AHw Akkadisches Handwörterbuch, by W. von Soden. 3 vols. Wiesbaden,
Harrassowitz, 1959–1981.
AJSL American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures
Ali, SL Sumerian Letters: Two Collections from the Old Babylonian Schools, by
F. A. Ali. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1964.
Alster, Proverbs Proverbs of Ancient Sumer: The World’s Earliest Proverb Collections, by
B. Alster. Bethesda, MD: CDL, 1997.
Alster, Wisdom The Wisdom of Ancient Sumer, by B. Alster. Bethesda, MD: CDL,
2005.
Amorites The Amorites of the Ur III Period, by G. Buccellati. Naples: Istituto
Orientale di Napoli, 1966.
ANL Ancillary Nippur Letters
ANN tablets in the collections of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
(formerly Ashm.)
AnOr Analecta Orientalia
AnSt Anatolian Studies
Antagal lexical series antagal = šaqû
AO tablets in the collections of the Musée du Louvre
AoF Altorientalische Forschungen
AOAT Alter Orient und Altes Testament
AOS American Oriental Series
ARA Annual Reviews of Anthropology
ARES Archivi reali di Ebla. Studi
ARM Archives royales de Mari
ARMT Archives royales de Mari, traduction. Paris, 1950–
Arnaud, Emar VI Recherches au pays d’Aštata: Emar 6/1–4. Textes sumériens et
accadiens, by Daniel Arnaud. Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les
Civilisations, 1986.
xiv Abbreviations

ArOr Archiv Orientalní

ARRIM Annual Review of the Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia Project
AS Assyriological Studies
ASJ Acta Sumerologica
Attinger, Eléments Eléments de linguistique sumérienne: la construction de du11/e/di “dire,”
by P. Attinger. Fribourg: Editions universitaires / Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993.
AUCT Andrews University Cuneiform Texts
AUCT 1 Neo-Sumerian Account Texts in the Horn Archaeological Museum, by
M. Sigrist. Andrews University Cuneiform Texts 1, Berrien Springs:
Andrews University Press, 1984.
AUCT 2 Neo-Sumerian Account Texts in the Horn Archaeological Museum, by
M. Sigrist. Andrews University Cuneiform Texts 2, Berrien Springs:
Andrews University Press, 1988.
AuOr Aula Orientalis
AUWE Ausgrabungen in Uruk-Warka. Endberichte / Deutsches
Archäologisches Institut, Abteilung Baghdad. Mainz: von Zabern,
1987–
Babyl Babyloniaca
BaM Baghdader Mitteilungen
BBVO Berliner Beiträge zum Vorderen Orient
BCT 1 Catalogue of Cuneiform Tablets in Birmingham City Museum 1, by P. J.
Watson. Warminster: Philip & Aries, 1986.
BCT 2 Catalogue of Cuneiform Tablets in Birmingham City Museum 2, by P. J.
Watson. Warminster: Philip & Aries, 1993.
BDTNS Base de Datos de Textos Neosumerios. Online: http://bdtns.filol
.csic.es
BE The Babylonian Expedition of the University of Pennsylvania
BibMes Bibliotheca Mesopotamica
BIN Babylonian Inscriptions in the Collection of J. B. Nies
BiOr Bibliotheca Orientalis
BM tablets in the collections of the British Museum
BMAC Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex
BOAM Bulletin of the Ancient Orient Museum
BPOA Biblioteca del Proximo Oriente Antiguo
BSA Bulletin on Sumerian Agriculture
BSOAS Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies
CAD The Assyrian Dictionary of the University of Chicago
Cavigneaux, Uruk Uruk, Altbabylonische Texte aus dem Planquadrat Pe XVI-4/5, nach
Kopien von Adam Falkenstein, by A. Cavigneaux. AUWE 23. Mainz:
von Zabern, 1996.
CBS tablets in the collections of the University Museum of the
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (Catalog of the
Babylonian Section)
CDLB Cuneiform Digital Library Bulletin. Online: http://cdli.ucla.edu/pubs/
cdlb.html
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings xv

CDLI Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative

CDLJ Cuneiform Digital Library Journal. Online: http://cdli.ucla.edu/pubs/
cdlj.html
CH Code of Hammurabi
Charpin, Archives Archives familiales et propriété privée en Babylonie ancienne: étude des
documents de “Tell Sifr,”by D. Charpin. Geneva, Librairie Droz,
1980.
Charpin, Lire Lire et écrire à Babylone, by D. Charpin. Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 2008.
Charpin, OBO 160/4 Die altbabylonische Zeit, by D. Charpin, D. O. Edzard, and M. Stol.
OBO 160/4. Fribourg: Academic Press; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 2004.
CHEU Contribution à l’histoire économique d’Umma, by G. Conteau.
Bibliothèque de l’école des Hautes Études, sciences philologiques et
historiques 119. Paris 1915.
Civil, Forerunners The Forerunners of Marû and Ḫamṭu in Old Babylonian. Pp. 63–71
in Riches Hidden in Secret Places: Ancient Near Eastern Studies in
Memory of Thorkild Jacobsen, ed. T. Abusch. Winona Lake, IN:
Eisenbrauns, 2002.
Civil, Instructions The Farmer’s Instructions: A Sumerian Agricultural Manual, by
M. Civil. Sabadell: AUSA, 1994.
CKU Correspondence of the Kings of Ur
CM Cuneiform Monographs
CM 33 Cuneiform Inscriptions in the Collection of the Bible Lands Museum
Jerusalem: The Old Babylonian Inscriptions, edited by J. Goodnick
Westenholz and A. Westenholz. CM 33. Leiden: Brill, 2006.
Cooper, Agade The Curse of Agade, by J. S. Cooper. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1983.
Cooper, Death Apodotic Death and the Historicity of “Historical” Omens. Pp. 99–
105 in Death in Mesopotamia, ed. Bendt Alster. Mesopotamia 8.
Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag.
Cornell tablets in the collections of the Jonathan and Janette Rosen tablet
collection at Cornell University
Cotsen tablets in the collections of the Cotsen Collection (now at UCLA)
Crozer tablets in the collections of the Crozer Theological Seminary
(dispersed)
CST Catalogue of Sumerian Tablets in the John Rylands Library, by T. Fish.
Manchester, The Manchester University Press, and the Librarian,
the John Rylands Library, 1932.
CT Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets in the British Museum
CTMMA Cuneiform Texts in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
CUSAS Cornell University Studies in Assyriology and Sumerology
DAS Documents administratifs sumériens, provenant du site de Tello
et conservés au Musée du Louvre, by B. Lafont. Paris, Éditions
Recherche sur les Civilizations, 1985.
xvi Abbreviations

DP Documents présargoniques, by M. F. Allotte de la Fuÿe. Paris:

E. Leroux, 1908–1920.
Ea lexical series ea A = nâqu
ECTJ Early Cuneiform Texts in Jena: Pre-Sargonic and Sargonic Documents
from Nippur and Fara in the Hilprecht-Sammlung vorderasiatischer
Altertümer, Institut fur Altertumswissenschaften der Friedrich-
Schiller-Universität, Jena, by A. Westenholz. Det Kongelige
Danske Videnskabernes Selskab Historisk-Filosofiske Skrifter 7, 3.
Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1995.
ED Early Dynastic
Edzard, Grammar Sumerian Grammar, by D. O. Edzard. HdO 1/71. Leiden: Brill, 2003.
ETCSL Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature. Online: http://
www-etcsl.orient.ox.ac.uk
FAOS Freiburger altorientalische Studien
FAOS 15/2 Altsumerische Verwaltungstexte aus Lagas, Teil 2, Die altsumerischen
Wirtschaftsurkunden aus amerikanischen Sammlungen, by G. Selz.
2 vols. FAOS 15/2. Stuttgart: Steiner, 1992.
FAOS 19 Die sumerischen und akkadischen Briefe des III. Jahrtausends aus der
Zeit vor der III. Dynastie von Ur, by B. Kienast and K. Volk, FAOS
19. Stuttgart: Steiner, 1995
FS Adams Festschrift in Honor of Robert McCormick Adams, ed. E. Stone. Los
Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology.
Fs. Baumgartner Hebraïsche Wortforschung: Festschrift zum 80. Geburtstag von Walter
Baumgartner, ed. B. Hartmann. Leiden, Brill, 1967.
FS Biggs Studies Presented to Robert D. Biggs, June 4, 2000, ed. M. T. Roth,
W. Farber, M. W. Stolper, and P. von Bechtolsheim. Chicago: The
Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 2007.
FS Civil Velles Paraules: Ancient Near Eastern Studies in Honor of Miguel
Civil on the Occasion of His Sixty-fifth Birthday, ed. P. Michalowski,
P. Steinkeller, E. C. Stone, and R. L. Zettler. Barcelona: Editorial
AUSA, 1991.
FS Hallo The Tablet and the Scroll: Near Eastern Studies in Honor of William W.
Hallo, ed. M. E. Cohen et al. Bethesda, MD: CDL, 1993.
FS Houwink ten Cate Ancient Near Eastern Studies Presented to Philo H. J. Houwink ten
Cate on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday, edited by T. P. J. van den
Hout and J. de Roos. Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije
Oosten, 1995.
FS Kienast Festschrift für Burkhart Kienast zu seinem 70. Geburtstage dargebracht
von Freunden, Schülern und Kollegen, ed., G. J. Selz. AOAT 274.
Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2003.
FS Kraus Zikir Šumim: Assyriological Studies Presented to F. R. Kraus, edited by
G. van Driel. Leiden: Brill, 1982.
FS Lambert Wisdom, Gods and Literature: Studies in Assyriology in Honour of
W. G. Lambert, ed. A. R. George and I. L. Finkel. Winona Lake, IN:
Eisenbrauns, 2000.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings xvii

FS Leichty If a Man Builds a Joyful House: Assyriological Studies in Honor of Erle

Verdun Leichty, ed. Ann K. Guinan, et al. Leiden: Brill, 2006.
FS Oppenheim Studies Presented to A. Leo Oppenheim, June 7, 1964. Chicago: The
Oriental Institute, 1964.
FS Reiner Language, Literature, and History: Philological and Historical Studies
Presented to Erica Reiner, ed. F. Rochberg-Halton. AOS 67. New
Haven: American Oriental Society, 1987.
FS Renger Munuscula Mesopotamica: Festschrift für Johannes Renger, ed. B. Böck,
E. Cancik-Kirschbaum, and T. Richter. AOAT 267. Münster: Ugarit
Verlag, 1999.
FS Sjöberg DUMU E2-DUB-BA-A: Studies in Honor of Åke W. Sjöberg, ed.
H. Behrens, D. Loding, and M. T. Roth. Philadelphia: University
Museum, 1989.
Fs. Veenhof Veenhof Anniversary Volume: Studies Presented to Klaas R. Veenhof
on the Occasion of his Sixty-fifth Birthday, ed. W. H. van Soldt et al.
Leiden, Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, 2001.
FS Wilcke Literatur, Politik und Recht in Mesopotamien: Festschrift für Claus
Wilcke, ed. W. Sallaberger, K. Volk and A. Zgoll. OBC 14.
Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2003.
FTS fat-tailed sheep
HANES History of the Ancient Near East Studies
HANES 5 Akkad. The First World Empire: Structure, Ideology, Traditions, ed.
M. Liverani. HANES 5. Padova: Sargon 1993.
HdO Handbuch der Orientalistik
Hg Lexical series HAR.gud = imru = ballu
Hh Lexical series HAR.ra = ḫubullu
HJAS Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies
HLC Haverford Library Collection of Cuneiform Tablets or Documents from
the Temple Archives of Telloh, by G. Barton. Philadelphia: John C.
Winston, 1905–14.
HMA tablets in the collections of the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of
Anthropology, University of California at Berkeley
HS tablets in the collections of the Frau Professor Hilprecht-Collection
of Babylonian Antiquities, Jena
HSAO Heidelberger Studien zum Alten Orient
HSAO 1 Heidelberger Studien zum Alten Orient. Adam Falkenstein zum (60.
Geburtstag) 17. Sept. 1966, edited by D. O. Edzard. HSAO 1.
Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1967.
HSM tablets in the collections of the Harvard Semitic Museum
HSS Harvard Semitic Studies
HTR Harvard Theological Review
HUCA Hebrew Union College Annual
IB tablets excavated at Ishan Bahriyat (Isin), in the collections of the
Iraq Museum in Baghdad
IM tablets in the collections of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad
ISET Istanbul Arkeoloji Müzelerinde bulunan Sumer edebî tablet ve parçaları
xviii Abbreviations

ISET 1 Istanbul Arkeoloji Müzelerinde bulunan Sumer edebî tablet ve parçaları

– I (Sumerian Literary Tablets and Fragments in the Archaeological
Museum of Istanbul – I), by Muazzez Çığ and Hatice Kızılyay. ISET
1. Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1969.
ISET 2 Istanbul Arkeoloji Müzelerinde bulunan Sumer edebî tablet ve parçaları
– II (Sumerian Literary Tablets and Fragments in the Archaeological
Museum of Istanbul – II), by Samuel Noah Kramer. ISET 2. Ankara:
Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1976.
IT Inanna Temple (Nippur)
ITT Inventaire des tablettes de Tello conservées au Musée Impérial
Ottoman
JA Journal Asiatique
Jacobsen Memorial Sumerological Studies in Honor of Thorkild Jacobsen on His Seventieth
Birthday June 7, 1974, ed. S. J. Lieberman. AS 20. Chicago: The
Oriental Institute, 1976.
Jaques, Vocabulaire Le vocabulaire des sentiments dans les textes sumériens. Recherche sur
le lexique sumérien et akkadien, by M. Jaques. AOAT 332. Münster,
Ugarit-Verlag, 2006.
JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society
JAR Journal of Anthropological Research
JCS Journal of Cuneiform Studies
JCSSup Journal of Cuneiform Studies Supplements Series
JEOL Jaarbericht Ex Oriente Lux
JESHO Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient
Jeyes, OBE Old Babylonian Extispicy: Omen Texts in the British Museum, by
U. Jeyes. Istanbul: Nederlands Historisch-Archaeologisch Institut te
Istanbul, 1989.
JFA Journal of Field Archaeology
JHS Journal of Hellenic Studies
JMS Journal of Magan Studie
JNES Journal of Near Eastern Studies
JSS Journal of Semitic Studies
JWP Journal of World Prehistory
Karahashi, Verbs Sumerian Compound Verbs with Body-Part Terms, by F. Karahashi.
Ph.D. Dissertation, The University of Chicago, 2000.
Koch-Westenholz, BLO Babylonian Liver Omens: The Chapters Manzāzu, Padānu and Pān
Tākalti of the Babylonian Extispicy Series Mainly from Assurbanipal’s
Library, by U. Koch-Westenholz. Copenhagen: Museum
Tusculanum Press, 2000.
Kramer, The Sumerians The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character, by S. N.
Kramer. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1963.
Krecher, SKLy Sumerische Kultlyrik, by Joachim Krecher. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz,
1966.
Kutscher, Brockmon 1 The Brockmon Tablets at the University of Haifa: Royal Inscriptions, by
Raphael Kutscher. Haifa: Haifa University Press, 1989.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings xix

Lafont, Documents Documents administratifs sumériens provenant du site de Tello

et conservés au Musée du Louvre, by B. Lafont. Paris: Éditions
Recherche sur les Civilisations, 1985.
Lambert and Millard, Atra-ḫasīs Atra-ḫasīs: The Babylonian Story of the Flood, by W. G.
Lambert and A. R. Millard, Oxford: Claredon, 1969; repr., Winona
Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1999.
LAPO Littératures anciennes du Proche-Orient
LAPO 16–18 Les documents épistolaires du palais de Mari, by Jean Marie Durand.
LAPO 16–18. Paris: Cerf, 1997–.
MAD Materials for the Assyrian Dictionary
MAOG Mitteilungen der Altorientalischen Gesellschaft
M.A.R.I. MARI, Annales de Recherches Interdisciplinaires
MC Mesopotamian Civilizations
MCS Manchester Cuneiform Studies
MDAI Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts
MDP Mémoires de la Délégation en Perse
Mélanges Birot Miscellanea Babylonica. Mélanges offerts à Maurice Birot, ed. J.‑M.
Durand and J.-R. Kupper. Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les
Civilisations, 1985.
Michalowski, LEM Letters from Early Mesopotamia, by Piotr Michalowski. Atlanta, GA:
Scholars Press, 1993.
Michalowski, Royal Letters Royal Letters of the Ur III Kings, by P. Michalowski.
Pp. 75–80 in The Ancient Near East, ed. M. Chavalas. Blackwell’s
Sourcebooks in Ancient History. Oxford: Blackwell.
Mittermayer, aBZL Altbabylonische Zeichenliste der sumerisch-literarischen Texte,
by C. Mittermayer. Fribourg: Academic Press; Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006.
MM tablets in the collections of the Abbey of Montserrat
MS tablets in the collections of the Schøyen Collection, Oslo
MSL Materialien zum sumerischen Lexikon/Materials for the Sumerian
Lexicon
MVN Materiali per il vocabulario neosumerico
N tablets in the collections of the University Museum of the
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (Nippur)
N.A.B.U. Nouvelles Assyriologiques Bréves et Utilitaires
NATN Neo-Sumerian Archival Texts Primarily from Nippur, by D. I. Owen.
Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1982.
NBGT Neo-Babylonian Grammatical Texts
Ni. tablets excavated at Nippur, in the collections of the Archaeological
Museum of Istanbul
Nigga lexical series niggur = makkūru
Nik. 2 Dokumenty khozaistvennoij otčetnosti drevneijšeij epokhi Chaldei
iz sobrania N.P. Lichačeva čast’ II: Epokha dinastii Agade i epokha
dinastii Ura, by M. V. Nikol’ski. Drevnosti Vostochnya 5. Moscow:
Tipografija G. Lissnera, 1915.
Nisaba Nisaba. Studi Assiriologici Messinesi
xx Abbreviations

NRVN Neusumerische Rechts- und Verwaltungsurkunden aus Nippur, I, by

M. Çığ and H. Kızilyay. Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi,
1965.
NSGU II Die Neusumeriche Gerichtsurkunden II, by Adam Falkenstein.
Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften (München) Kommission
zur Erschliessung von Keilschrifttexten, Bayerische Akademie der
Wissenschaften (München) Philosophisch-Historische Klasse.
München: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1956.
NT field numbers of tablets excavated at Nippur by the Oriental
Institute and other institutions
NYPL Les tablettes cuneiformes de l’époque d’Ur de la New York Public
Library, by H. Sauren. Louvain-la-Neuve: Université catholique de
Louvain, Institut orientaliste, 1978.
OB Old Babylonian
OBC Orientalia Biblica et Christiana
OBGT Old Babylonian Grammatical Texts
OBO Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis
OBTR Old Babylonian Texts from Tell al Rimah, by S. Dalley, C. Walker,
and J. D. Hawkins. London: British School of Archaeology in Iraq,
1976.
OECT Oxford Editions of Cuneiform Texts
OECT 5 Sumerian Literary Texts in the Ashmolean Museum, by O. R. Gurney
and S. N. Kramer. OECT 5. Oxford: Clarendon, 1976.
OIP Oriental Institute Publications
OIS Oriental Institute Seminars
OLP Orientalia Lovaniensia Periodica
OLZ Orientalistische Literaturzeitung
Ontario 1 The Administration at Drehem, by M. Sigrist. Neo-Sumerian Texts
from the Royal Ontario Museum 1. Bethesda, MD: CDL Press,
1995.
OPBF Occasional Publications of the Babylonian Fund
OrNS Orientalia, Nova Series
OrAn Oriens Antiquus
OrSP Orientalia, Series Prior
OSP Old Sumerian and Old Akkadian Texts in Philadelphia
OSP1 Old Sumerian and Old Akkadian Texts in Philadelphia Chiefly
from Nippur. Part One: Literary and Lexical Texts and the Earliest
Administrative Documents from Nippur, by A. Westenholz. OSP 1.
BibMes 1. Malibu: Undena, 1975.
OSP 2 Old Sumerian and Old Akkadian Texts in Philadelphia, Part Two: The
‘Akkadian’ Texts, and the Enlilmaba Texts, and the Onion Archive,
by A. Westenholz. OSP 2. Carsten Niebuhr Institute Publications
3, Copenhagen: The Carsten Niebuhr Institute for Ancient Near
Eastern Studies, 1987.
PBS Publications of the Babylonian Section, the University Museum,
Philadelphia
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings xxi

PDT 1 Die Puzriš-Dagan-Texte der Istanbuler Archäologischen Museen Teil

I: Nrr. 1–725, by M. Çığ, H. Kızilyay, and A. Salonen. Helsinki:
Soumalaisen kirjallisuuden kirpajaino Oy, 1954.
PDT 2 Die Puzriš-Dagan-Texte der Istanbuler Archäologischen Museen II:
Nr. 726–1379, by F. Yıldız and T. Gomi. Freiburger Altorientalische
Studien 16. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1988.
PH private house
PIHANS Publications de l’Institut historique-archéologique néerlandais de
Stamboul
Potts, Civilization Mesopotamian Civilization: The Material Foundations, by D. T. Potts.
Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1997.
PPAC 1 Sargonic Inscriptions from Adab, by Y. Zhi. Chanchun, Institute for
the Study of Ancient Civilizations, 1989.
PRAK Premières recherches archéologiques à Kich, by H. de Genouillac. Paris:
Champion, 1924–1925.
Princeton 1 Tablettes du Princeton Theological Seminary: Époque d’Ur III, by
M. Sigrist. Occasional Publications of the Samuel Noah Kramer
Fund 10. Philadelphia: The Samuel Noah Kramer Fund, 1990.
Princeton 2 Tablets from the Princeton Theological Seminary. Ur III Period. Part 2,
by M. Sigrist. Occasional Publications of the Samuel Noah Kramer
Fund 18, Philadelphia: The Samuel Noah Kramer Fund, 2008.
PSD Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary Project. Online: http://psd
.museum.upenn.edu/epsd/nepsd-frame.html
RA Revue d’assyriologie et d’archéologie orientale
RCU The Royal Correspondence of Ur, by Piotr Michalowski. Ph.D.
Dissertation, Yale University.
Rev. Sem. Revue Semitique
RGTC Répertoire Géographique des Textes Cunéiformes
RIME Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia, Early Period
RLA Reallexikon der Assyriologie
Robson, Mathematics Mesopotamian Mathematics 2100-1600 BC: Technical Constants in
Bureaucracy and Education, by E. Robson. Oxford, Oxford University
Press, 1999.
Robson, Metrology More than Metrology: Mathematics Education in an Old
Babylonian Scribal School, by E. Robson. Pp. 325–66 in Under One
Sky: Mathematics and Astronomy in the Ancient Near East, ed. J. M.
Steele and A. Imhausen. Münster, Ugarit-Verlag, 2002.
Rochester Documents from Tablet Collections in Rochester, New York, by
M. Sigrist. Bethesda: CDL, 1991.
RT Recueil de travaux relatifs à la philologie et à l’archéologie égyptiennes et
assyriennes
RTC Recueil de tablettes chaldéennes, by F. Thureau-Dangin. Paris:
E. Leroux, 1903.
Sallaberger, Kalendar Der kultische Kalendar der Ur III-Zeit, by W. Sallaberger. Berlin,
de Gruyter, 1993.
SANTAG SANTAG. Arbeiten und Untersuchungen zur Keilschriftkunde
xxii Abbreviations

SAOC Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization

SAT 1 Texts from the British Museum, by M. Sigrist. Sumerian Archival
Texts 1. Bethesda: CDL, 1993.
SAT 2 Texts from the Yale Babylonian Collections, by M. Sigrist. Sumerian
Archival Texts 2. Bethesda: CDL, 2000.
SAT 3 Texts from the Yale Babylonian Collections II, by M. Sigrist. Sumerian
Archival Texts 3, Bethesda: CDL, 2000.
SCIAMVS Sources and Commentaries in Exact Sciences
SEEJ Slavonic and East European Journal
SEL Studi Epigrafici e Linguistici sul Vicino Oriente Antico
SEpM Sumerian Epistolary Miscellany
SET Sumerian Economic Texts from the Third Ur Dynasty. A Catalogue and
Discussion of Documents from Various Collections, by T. B. Jones and
N. Snyder. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1961.
Si. field numbers of tablets excavated at Sippar, in the collections of
the Archaeological Museum of Istanbul
Sjöberg, Nanna-Suen Der Mondgott Nanna-Suen in der sumerischen Überlieferung, by Å. W.
Sjöberg. Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell, 1960.
SLFN Sumerian Literary Fragments from Nippur, by J. W. Heimerdinger.
Occasional Publications of the Babylonian Fund 4. Philadelphia:
The University Museum, 1979.
SCT Smith College Tablets: 110 Cuneiform Texts Selected from the College
Collection, by C. H. Gordon. Smith College Studies in History 38.
Northampton: Smith College, 1952.
SMM tablets in the collections of the Science Museum, University of
Minnesota
SNAT Selected Neo-Sumerian Administrative Texts from the British Museum,
by T. Gomi. Abiko: The Research Institute, Chuo-Gakuin
University, 1990.
Starr, Rituals of the Diviner The Rituals of the Diviner, by I. Starr. Malibu, 1983.
Steinkeller, Sale Documents Sale Documents of the Ur III Period, by Piotr Steinkeller.
Stuttgart: Steiner, 1989.
Stol, OBO 160/4 Wirtschaft und Gesselschaft in Altbabylonischer Zeit, by
M. Stol. Pp. 643–975 in Mesopotamien. Die altbabylonische Zeit,
by D. Charpin, D. O. Edzard, and M Stol. OBO 160/4. Friburg:
Academic Press; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004.
STVC Sumerian Texts of Varied Contents, by Edward Chiera. OIP 16.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1934.
Sullivan, Sumerian and Akkadian Sentence Structure Sumerian and Akkadian Sentence
Structure in Old Babylonian Literary Bilingual Texts, by B. B. Sullivan.
Ph. D. Dissertation, Hebrew Union College, 1979.
SumRecDreh Sumerian Records from Drehem, by W. M. Nesbit. Columbia
University Oriental Studies 8. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1914.
Susa field numbers of tablets excavated at Susa
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings xxiii

ŠA Šumer et Akkad. Contribution à l’histoire de la civilisation dans la Basse-

Mésopotamie, by C-F. Jean. Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1923.
TAPS Transactions of the American Philosophical Society
TCL Textes cunéiformes, Musées du Louvre
TCS Texts from Cuneiform Sources
TCS 3 The Collection of the Sumerian Temple Hymns, by Å. W. Sjöberg and
E. Bergmann. TCS 3. Locust Valley, NY: Augustin, 1969.
TCTI 1 Tablettes cunéiformes de Tello au Musée d’Istanbul: datant de l’époque
de la IIIe Dynastie d’Ur. Tome I. ITT II/1, 617-1038, by B. Lafont
and F. Yıldız. PIHANS 65. Leiden, Nederlands Instituut voor het
Nabije Oosten, 1989.
TCTI 2 Tablettes cunéiformes de Tello au Musée d’Istanbul, datant de l’époque
de la IIIe Dynastie d’Ur. Tome II. ITT II/1, 2544–2819, 3158–4342,
4708–4714, by Bertrand Lafont and Fatma Yıldız. PIHANS 77.
Leiden, Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, 1996.
TÉL Tablettes économiques de Lagash (époque d’Ur III), by C. Virolleaud.
Cahiers de la Société asiatique 19. Paris: Société asiatique, 1968.
TIM Texts in the Iraq Museum
Tinney, Nippur Lament The Nippur Lament: Royal Rhetoric and Divine Legitimation in
the Reign of Išme-Dagan of Isin (1953–1935 b.c.), by S. Tinney.
Occasional Publications of the Samuel Noah Kramer Fund 16.
Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Museum, 1996.
TLB Tabulae Cuneiformes a F. M. Th. De Liagre Böhl collectae
TLB 3 Sumerian Archival Texts, by W. W. Hallo. TLB 3. Leiden, Nederlands
Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, 1963.
TMHNF Texte und Materialien der Frau Professor Hilprecht Collection,
Neue Folge
Torino 1 Testi cuneiformi neo-sumerici da Drehem. N. 0001–0412, by A. Archi
and F. Pomponio. Catalogo del Museo Egizio di Torino 7. Milan,
Istituto Editoriale Universitario, 1990.
Torino 2 Testi Cuneiformi neo-Sumerici da Umma. NN. 0413-0723, by
A. Archi and F. Pomponio. Catalogo del Museo Egizio di Torino 8.
Turin: Ministero per i bent culturali e ambientali, 1995.
Trouvaille La trouvaille de Dréhem. Étude avec un choix de textes de
Constantinople et Bruxelles, by H. de Génouillac. Paris: Paul
Geuthner, 1911.
TRU Les temps des rois d’Ur. Recherches sur la société antique d’après des
textes nouveaux, by L. Legrain. Bibliothèque de l’École des Hautes
Études 199. Paris, Champion, 1912.
TSA Tablettes sumériennes archaïques. Matériaux pour servir à l’histoire de la
société sumérienne, by H. de Génouillac. Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1909.
TSDU Textes sumériens de la IIIe dynastie d’Ur, by H. Limet. Documents du
Proche Orient Ancien: Epigraphie 1. Brussels: Musées Royaux d’Art
et d’Histoire, 1976.
TUAT Texte aus der Umwelt des Alten Testaments
xxiv Abbreviations

TUT Tempelurkunden aus Telloh, by G. A. Reisner. Berlin, Spemann,

1901.
Tutub Die Texte der Akkad-Zeit, 1. Das Dijala-Gebiet: Tutub, by
W. Sommerfeld. IMGULA 3/1. Münster: Rhema, 1999.
U. field numbers of tablets excavated at Ur
UCP University of California Publications in Semitic Philology
UDT Ur Dynasty Tablets, by J. B. Nies. AB 25. Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1920.
UET Ur Excavations, Texts
UF Ugarit-Forschungen
ULC Uruk Letter Catalog
UM tablets in the collections of the University Museum of the
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
USFS Une saison de fouilles à Sippar, by V. Scheil. Cairo: Imprimerie de
l’Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 1902.
UTI 4 Die Umma-Texte aus den Archaologischen Museen zu Istanbul 4, by
T. Gomi and F. Yıldız. Bethesda, MD: CDL, 1997.
UTI 5 Die Umma-Texte aus den Archaologischen Museen zu Istanbul 5, by
T. Gomi and F. Yıldız. Bethesda, MD: CDL, 2000.
UTI 6 Die Umma-Texte aus den Archaologischen Museen zu Istanbul 6, by
T. Gomi and F. Yıldız. Bethesda, MD: CDL, 2001.
VDI Vestnik Drevneij Istorii
Veldhuis, Elementary Education Elementary Education at Nippur: The Lists of Trees and
Wooden Objects, by N. C. Veldhuis. Ph.D. Dissertation, University
of Groningen, 1997.
VN Votivnyija nadpisi sumeriijskih praviteleij, by V. K. Šileiijko. St.
Petersburg: Tip. M. A. Aleksandrova, 1915.
VO Vicino Oriente
VS Vorderasiatische Schriftdenkmäler der (Königlichen) Museen zu
Berlin
W field numbers of tablets excavated at Uruk (Warka)
Wasserman, Style and Form Style and Form in Old Babylonian Literary Texts, by
N. Wasserman. Leiden, Styx, 2003.
Wilcke, Early Ancient Near Eastern Law Early Ancient Near Eastern Law: A History of its
Beginnings: The Early Dynastic and Sargonic Periods, by C. Wilcke.
Winona Lake, Eisenbrauns, 2007.
Wilcke, Kollationen Kollationen zu den sumerischen literarischen Texten aus Nippur in
der Hilprecht-Sammlung Jena, by Claus Wilcke. Berlin: Akademie
Verlag, 1976.
Wilcke, Lugalbandaepos Das Lugalbandaepos, by C. Wilcke. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz,
1969.
Wilson, Education Education in the Earliest Schools: Cuneiform Manuscripts in the Cotsen
Collection, by M. Wilson. Los Angeles: Cotsen Occasional Press,
2008.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings xxv

WMAH Wirtschaftsurkunden aus der Zeit der III. Dynastie von Ur im Besitz
des Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Genf, by Herbert Sauren. Istituto
orientale di Napoli. Pubblicazioni del seminario di semitistica.
Ricerche, 6. Napoli : Istituto orientale, 1969.
WO Die Welt des Orients
w/n without number
WF Wirtschaftstexte aus Fara, by Anton Deimel. WVDOG 45. Berlin,
J. C. Hinrichs’sche Buchhandlung, 1924.
WVDOG Wissenschaftliche Veröffentlichungen der Deutschen Orient-
Gesellschaft
WZKM Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes
YBC tablets in the collections of the Yale Babylonian Collection, Yale
University Library
YBT Yale Babylonian Texts
YN Year Name
YOS Yale Oriental Series
YOSR Yale Oriental Series, Researches
ZVO Zapiski Vostočnago Otdelenija Russkago Archeologičeskago Obščestva,
Petersburg
 Chapter 1

Introduction

This book is about the Sumerian-language letters of the kings of the Third Dy-
nasty of Ur (2112–2004 b.c.), texts known to us through the medium of school
exercises left behind by young elite students who were learning to read and write
in eighteenth-century Mesopotamia. The main part of the monograph consists of
editions of all twenty-four items of this literary correspondence; in the pages that
follow, I will provide background material and analysis that will facilitate the further
study of these intriguing letters. The preserved copies may be Old Babylonian, but
the setting of these compositions—real, imaginary, or a mixture of both—lies in the
time when all of Babylonia was ruled by a highly centralized territorial state with the
capital located at the city of Ur. 1
This short century of Ur’s hegemony was only the second time that anyone had
managed to bring the disparate city-states of southern Mesopotamia under one ban-
ner, about a hundred years or so after the collapse of the previous experiment of this
kind under the kings of the Sargonic Dynasty. The founder of the new state, Ur-
Namma (2112–2095 b.c.) and his long-lived son and successor Šulgi (2094–2047
b.c.), took great pains to create a unified polity in a political landscape dominated by
regionalism and local autonomy. 2 Following in some ways the patterns established
by the Sargonic rulers, the new dynasty consolidated power, in theory at least, in the
person of the charismatic supreme monarch, transcended local traditions without
completely suppressing them by means of cooption as well as coercion, developed
an elaborate road and water transport system, and created a new training system for
bureaucrats. They also imposed centralization by partly standardizing the official
mechanisms of communication and control—namely, weight measures, calendars,
and the writing system itself. This allowed for increased monitoring capacity or, at

1. For a comprehensive overview of all things Ur III, with extensive bibliography, see Sal-
laberger 1999.
2. When citing ancient personal and geographical names, I have used conventional rendi-
tions and not etymological or phonological approximations, eschewing length marks, etc.; after
all, to paraphrase Charpin and Ziegler (2003: vi), this is a book about epistolary history, not about
onomastics.

3
4 Introduction

Figure 1. The Ur III state at the time of maximum expansion.

least, a potential for such activity, a factor that some modern scholars consider es-
sential for the development of bureaucracy (e.g., Kiser and Cai 2003: 512).
At the same time, these kings and their commanders conducted an incessant se-
ries of skirmishes and raids, as well as outright major wars, on their northeastern and
southeastern border areas, fighting on the frontier as well as deep in enemy territory.
One can observe certain patterns in all of this martial excess: the search for booty,
preemptive strikes against raiders, or the defense of trade and communication routes
to areas that were sources of prestige goods, but much of it also seems haphazard and
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 5

pointless, even taking into account the poor state of our knowledge. In the end, all
they achieved was the consolidation of powerful new rival polities in the east and
this, coupled with an exhaustion of resources and military power, brought about the
collapse of the Ur III experiment.
For most Assyriologists, Ur III studies are synonymous with research on archi-
val documents. The study of ideological matters, of official self-representation, and
of state-integrating strategies, has lagged behind the abundant research on socio-
economic matters and has been split between different disciplines. Art historians
have focused on contemporary Ur III materials such as seals, while literary specialists
have looked at royal hymnography and epic texts, which are attested primarily in
later, altered versions. The letters that are the subject of this work belong together
with these literary compositions, all of which were incorporated into the various
school curricula of Mesopotamia sometime after the fall of Ur. Since we cannot es-
tablish definitively when most of the later poetic and prose texts about Ur-Namma
and his successors were originally composed, it is difficult to know which of them
belong together, which provide evidence of contemporary royal legitimization and
self-representational strategies, and which were composed or radically altered in Old
Babylonian times and are thus part of a later portrait of the earlier age.
Legitimation and legitimacy are often invoked to explain the ideological mes-
sages of Mesopotamian writings. These concepts, with their Weberian overtones,
have rarely been systematically debated within Sumerology, and one suspects that
they are often used in a vague manner as a substitute for intuitive notions concerning
propaganda and acceptance of central authority. There are, of course, many views on
the theoretical aspects of these issues; here it will be useful to cite a recent statement
by Rodney Barker (2001: 30), who writes:
[Self-legitimation] is an activity, which can be observed and which comprises all
those actions which rulers, but not only rulers, take to insist on or demonstrate, as
much to themselves as to others, that they are justified in the pattern of actions that
they follow. Self-legitimation is an inherent and characterizing activity of govern-
ment, just as worship is one of the characterizing activities of religion or singing one
of the characterizing features of choral music.

In this formulation, self-legitimation is an inherent characteristic that helps to de-

fine the very essence of royal rule (or any other type of rule, for that matter), one that
simply has to be taken for granted as an essential attribute of kingship. In any given
society and historical formation, one must investigate the tools used by the monarch
as well as the intended audience for such display. Most important for our purposes is
the observation that the self-justification of personal rule is usually concerned with
legitimating the ruling individual, not the corporate state. This is useful, because we
have very little information on the structural fabric of early Mesopotamian states
on elite levels; it is difficult enough to determine who the elites were and what
their relationships to the crown were. Equally important, we cannot investigate the
continuity or lack of continuity of social and economic structures between specific
6 Introduction

formations such as the Sargonic and Ur III polities. There is no doubt that certain le-
gitimating strategies of earlier rulers were adopted and transformed by dynasties that
were to follow, but we cannot at this time say anything about the carry-over of elite
strata between these states, and thus the continuity of the audience is a moot point.
There is still much to be learned about early Mesopotamian kingship, but there
can be little doubt that the ideological and representational aspects of supreme rule
changed radically with the rise of larger territorial states—specifically, with the ad-
vent of the Sargonic and Ur III dynasties. Sargon (2334–2279 b.c.), the first king of
Agade, had to create new ways of controlling and representing power in a manner
that subjugated and subordinated various smaller political units with long traditions
of independent rule, and these mechanisms were eventually refashioned by his suc-
cessors, most notably by his grandson Naram-Sin (2254–2218 b.c.). 3 When, a cen-
tury or so after the collapse of Akkad, Ur-Namma founded a new territorial state, he
had only that single precedent to work with, and he had to rework the ideological
foundations of centralized rule anew into a manner that was right for the times.
Although the details of his conception still elude us, it seems that his project was
successful in the short term, since we cannot detect any large-scale opposition to the
central government for the three or more generations that he and his first three suc-
cessors occupied the throne.
The person of the king, in Sargonic as well as in Ur III times, was represented in
a manner that meant to portray the monarch as the focal axis of the state and of the
universe as well. For city dwellers and visitors, the visible signs of royal authority per-
meated daily experience. The Ur III kings virtually remodeled the urban landscapes
of their realms. Although we have only limited archeological confirmation of these
activities, the votive texts, year-names, and monumental inscriptions document ex-
tensive building and rebuilding work throughout the land. The organizational and
fiscal efforts were considerable, to say the least. During his eighteen-year reign, Ur-
Namma initiated and perhaps even completed work on at least four massive stepped
temples (ziggurats) in the most important cities of his realm: Ur, Eridu, Uruk, Nip-
pur, and possibly Larsa. 4 These massive works required immense labor and invest-
ment resources, not to mention logistical support. The ziggurats dominated the inter-
nal and external view of the cities, drawing the gaze to the ceremonial center and to
the royal patronage that made these structures possible. And this royal patronage of
select cities resulted in major expansion. Thus, we know that “the city of Nippur had
been much smaller until Ur III times, when it had expanded greatly. Subsequently,
it shrank in size and presumably population, growing to its full size in only two other
periods (Kassite and early Neo-Babylonian)” (Gibson 1998–99). In the countryside,
the vigorous work on major canal networks likewise affected the rural landscape. On
a smaller scale, royal public messages were encoded on monuments, of which only

3. See the essays in Liverani ed., 1993.

4. Sauvage 1998: 45 with n. 4. On Ur-Namma’s work on the Ekur in Nippur, see Frayne
1997: 17.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 7

one significant example, the Ur-Namma stele from the ceremonial center of Ur,
survives (Canby 2001). And on an even smaller scale, the relationships between the
crown and elites were visually rendered on cylinder seals and on the surfaces that
carried their impressions.
The scribes of the land, who in their youth had to memorize and copy various
texts extolling the magnificence of their prince, were not exempt from daily remind-
ers of royal accomplishments, as they had to copy the same year-name countless
times daily for twelve months or more. But in the surviving sources the most vivid
examples of royal self-representation come from the hymnography (Hallo 1963b).
The Old Babylonian corpus of such texts, selectively preserved, rewritten, modern-
ized, and perhaps even archaized, now comprises more than forty compositions, al-
though the exact number very much depends on various opinions about generic
adscription. Just how much is lost to us at present can be gauged from the Ur III Yale
catalog of unknown origins published by William W. Hallo (1963a), which contains
forty-two incipits, of which only one, the ubiquitous hymn Šulgi A, can be identified
with certainty. 5 The rhetoric and contents of these hymns is well known; suffice it
to say that most of the central themes that run thorough all of Ur III royal literature
are designed to place the figure of the king in the center of the universe and to link
him with the maintenance of order in the state as well as in the universe at large.
Divine birth, divine care and nurture, mythological foundation in the time of Uruk
heroes, as well as extraordinary and all-encompassing personal abilities—martial,
sexual, linguistic, and intellectual—all locate the individual of the king at a central
locus where both state and cosmos achieve immanent harmony and order. Analo-
gies to this are not hard to find. Consider the following statement by Sarit Helman
(1989: 126–27):
The Javanese concept of order assumed the immanency of the sacred in the world.
Thus, it lacked the perception of a separateness and consequent tension between
the mundane and the cosmic realm. The immanency of the sacred in the world and
its very embeddedness in the center of society implied that there were no criteria
beyond those of the center in which the performance of institutions could be evalu-
ated. Therefore, any instability, any event which destabilized the socio-political or-
der and the smooth functioning of nature, was interpreted in catastrophic terms, as
driving both society and the cosmos into chaos.
This description could easily be applied to the central ideas of early Mesopotamian
political world order as represented in Sumerian royal literature: in hymns, city la-
ments, and in the Gilgamesh stories, which in their original formulation articulated
the foundation myth of the family of Ur-Namma. It may also reveal the ideological
fragility of the state and help us understand why it was so easily toppled. Neverthe-
less, one must be careful not to over-interpret the evidence, reducing all literary
analysis to politics and ideology. I am by no means espousing such reductionism: I

5. Line 42, dumu an-na, may perhaps be the Baba hymn of “Luma” (CT 36 39–40).
8 Introduction

concentrate on these issues as they are pertinent to the discussion at hand and by
no means renounce poetics. A few examples will illustrate some of the more salient
points.
An exceptional pair of examples can be found in two texts that in a sense bracket
the literary portrait of Ur-Namma. The first is Ur-Namma Hymn B, which provides
divine sanction for his rule at Ur, and the second is his Hymn A, written after his
death, which attempts to deal with his untimely demise. The latter is unique, and its
poetic depiction of the death and burial of the king serves as the best example of Ur
III concepts of the temporal embeddedness of the sacred in the political center of the
state. The premature, violent death of the ruler could only signal divine displeasure
and must have precipitated an ideological crisis that threatened to undermine the
fragile fabric of the new state, which was only eighteen years old and in which local
ideas of independence far outweighed the burden of imposed state authority. The un-
usual nature of this event and of the text that commemorated it becomes particularly
vivid when we observe that, with very few exceptions, the death of kings appears to
have been a taboo subject in early Mesopotamian literature. The Ur-Namma text
aside, there are only two other compositions that touch on this subject—namely,
a cultic text that lists the burial places of early kings (Jacobsen 1963: 476–77 n. 8)
and an incompletely preserved Akkadian-language text that is concerned with the
death of Naram-Sin (J. Westenholz 1997: 203–20). Anecdotes about unusual royal
deaths appear sporadically in the omen literature (Glassner 1997: 101–5), but this is
undoubtedly a separate tradition that belongs to a different semantic space.
We often assume that the Old Babylonian school life of older royal hymns is a
secondary development: that is to say, we assume that they were originally written for
specific occasions and were only secondarily and quite selectively inscribed into the
school curriculum after undergoing various degrees of orthographic, grammatical,
and even thematic modernization. This may indeed be the case with some texts, but
there is actually no evidence to support this view as far as the vast majority of royal
hymns are concerned. To the contrary, a number of such poems written in the name
of Šulgi and his latter-day admirers specifically refer to the glorification of the king
in the edubaʾa, that is in the place where the literary arts were taught in Ur III and
Old Babylonian times (Sjöberg 1975a; George 2005).
The meaning of the word edubaʾa remains elusive. As is well known, there is a
strong disjuncture between archaeological evidence that strongly suggests schooling
was done in private and institutional settings and the literary depictions of more-
formally organized schoolhouses. For the Ur III period, the only school texts we have
come from the Inana temple in Nippur (Rubio, in press). What did Šulgi have in
mind when he stated that he had established centers of learning? Adam Falkenstein
(1953) was certain that the crown controlled schooling, but this interpretation has
not been in favor of late. I suggest that in a sense Falkenstein was right, namely, that
there were royal academies where poems were composed and elements of the cur-
riculum were established, although these were probably quite separate from the pri-
vate houses where instruction of a few schoolboys at a time actually took place. It is
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 9

possible, although one cannot prove this at present, that some of this compositional
and redactional activity took place in places designated as é-eštu2-dnidaba, the
“establishments of Nidaba’s wisdom.” The term edubaʾa may have been antiquated
by Old Babylonian times, referring back to Ur III and early Isin reality (George 2005:
7). 6 In this context, royal self-representation addressed the schoolmasters, to use a
somewhat anachronistic term, as well as their pupils, the future bureaucrats and elite
scribes of the land.
These were the places from which knowledge emanated to those who taught in
the large institutions and in their own houses. The masters of the edubaʾa adapted
various existing compositions for pedagogic uses and composed hymns in honor of
rulers for the use of other teachers and of their students. One might also speculate
that these were the places where the Ur III writing reform, as well as the whole-
sale revision of the contents of the curriculum, took place. Although contemporary
evidence is still sparse, it appears that sometime under Ur-Namma and Šulgi the
masters of the academies wiped the literary slate clean and discarded all but a few
of the old compositions that went back to Early Dynastic times. They kept most of
the lexical teaching tools but discarded old narratives, replacing them with materi-
als written in honor of the contemporary ruling house—royal hymns, stories about
their Uruk ancestors, and so on. Once again, I suggest that the literary texts had a
circumscribed social role—that is, they were addressed to the literate minority and
to select schoolchildren. 7
The Ur III state has often been described as a patrimonial state, a distinctive form
of rule typified by segmentation of sovereignty between rulers and corporate elites
(Garfinkle 2008). If we continue to view the house of Ur through a patrimonial lens,
then the identification and description of such corporate groups is absolutely neces-
sary for any meaningful analysis. Certainly, we can speak of a few powerful families
such as the well-known dynasty of grand viziers, discussed in chap. 3, the hereditary
governors of Umma (Dahl 2007), the house of Ur-Meme at the Inana temple in
Nippur (Hallo 1972; Zettler 1984), or the clan of the cantor Dada (Michalowski
2006b). Our knowledge of these groups is suggestive, but it is hardly adequate for a
broad-ranged analysis.
Current knowledge sheds little light on the origins and formation of the Ur III
state. We simply have no way of establishing the degree of force or co-option that
was required to bring together various local power centers that rose to promise in
the wake of the Akkad collapse and to subject them to a new central authority. Here
the distinction made by social scientists between consent—understood as behav-

6. Various etymologies of é-dub-ba-a have been proposed, but none of them have found
general acceptance. The Akkadian translation bīt ṭuppi points to the simplest solution—that it
indeed does mean “house of tablets” and that the additional final ‑a is there to distinguish it from
é-kišib3(DUB)-ba, “storehouse.”
7. There is evidence that suggests, however, that the study of literature was only available
to elite schoolchildren and that the majority of Old Babylonian scribes-to-be learned to read and
write by means of basic exercises only; see Michalowski 2011.
10 Introduction

ioral acceptance and legitimization, perceived as normative assent—is particularly

important (Della Fave 1986: 477). To what extent did the various strata of society,
including the important elites, simply consent to the rise of a new center, what was
the degree of coercion, and how was the legitimating process used to arrive at norma-
tive assent? Were the existing elites co-opted and integrated into the power structure
of the new state or was it dominated by a few families from Uruk and Ur? We know
that during the Akkad period local elites were dominated by officials sent from the
center, and it appears that similar methods may have been used by Ur-Namma and
his successor, but the fact remains that, while data on civilian and military governors
grows, we actually know very little about most of them, especially about their origins
and corporate allegiances.
One of the most powerful methods of vertical social integration in this period
was the familial expansion of the patrimonial state. Multiple royal wives resulted in
a multitude of children. When one considers that the Drehem texts alone provide
us with the names of almost a hundred princes and princesses during a period that
spans no more than two generations, the issue is thrown into particularly sharp relief.
A hundred children means many more mothers than are currently known; more im-
portant, these children could potentially have at least a hundred spouses, and even
if we subtract a dozen or two who became unmarried priestesses, the number is still
imposing (Sigrist 1992: 361 n. 41). One of the best-known uses of royal children is
for international alliances by means of dynastic marriages; the Ur III kings managed
to create such bonds with most of the bordering and outlying polities, including
Mari, Hamazi, Simanum, Bašime, Marhaši, Zabšali, Simanum, and Anšan, as well as
others, including possibly Nineveh. These marriages did not always have the desired
effect, and not all hostilities were averted. More important, they did not prevent a
number of these polities from taking part in the wars that ended the Ur III state.
These dynastic marriages have received much attention, but other familial al-
liances may have been more significant for internal integration and for the domi-
nance of the royal family. The evidence is incomplete, but there are good reasons
to believe that the top echelons of state organizations, including the military, were
occupied either by members of the extended royal family or by men who had married
into the family of Ur-Namma. Princely generals aside, prominent examples include
Arad-Nanna, the grand chancellor, whose wife was a daughter of Šulgi, and Babati,
the queen’s brother, who was perhaps as important during the reign of his nephew
Šu-Sin. The Garšana archive offers a unique picture of a strategic rural estate run
by a princess and her spouse (Owen and Mayr 2007). Royal children who did not
marry into other elite families—within and without the state—became high priests
and priestesses; in one sense, they were betrothed to divinities, thus extending royal
familial control over central religious institutions.
The manner in which the rulers represented themselves to these corporate elites
is only partially recoverable. In addition to the visual manifestations of power de-
scribed above, we have to take into account the pomp and circumstance of public
ceremony, the constant banquets, royal progresses, and ceremonial events during
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 11

which kings affirmed their power, status, and charisma, constantly defining their
place in the world to their elite subjects, their large extended family, as well as to
themselves. These were the primary loci of self-representation, and literature, so dear
to many of us, had only a minor role in this game.
In the works of our time, the short century when Sumer and Babylonia were
ruled by the house of Ur-Namma is uniformly described as a marvelous time of great
architectural, military, literary, and of scholarly achievements, albeit one that, for
some, was also a period when the heavy hand of a strongly centralized government
oppressed various strata of the population. Until recently, the period was often de-
scribed as a “Neo-Sumerian Renaissance,” and even though most now think that
it was neither “neo” nor a “renaissance” of anything and although opinion is more
divided on the matter of its “Sumerianness” and what that might have actually en-
tailed, the descriptive term is not completely dead in some circles. 8 Much of this
requires reexamination for the simple reason that the manner in which we often de-
scribe that period is in essence not much more than a paraphrase of ancient sources,
in concert with the self-representation strategies of the monarchs of Ur. The propa-
gandistic language of the royal hymns, particularly those of Šulgi, and the hyperbolic
touting of accomplishments in year-names have survived the ages and have had their
desired effect on an audience that the ancient authors could not have even imag-
ined. One has to admit to an admiration of their efforts.
Šulgi is remembered as a semidivine polyglot who could outrun and outfight
any opponent, whose strategic and martial efforts created a world-class empire, and
whose organizational, legal, and bureaucratic imagination reinvented ancient state-
craft, while his second successor Šu-Sin lives on in the Assyriological imagination as
a gentle but charismatic lover (Šu-Sin Hymn B 1–8):
Youth of my heart, my beloved man;
Your allure is sweetness, sweet as syrup.
Lover of my heart, my beloved man;
Your allure is sweetness itself, sweet as syrup.
You have captivated me, I will come to you on my own,
I will snatch you, o youth, right into the bedchamber!
You have captivated me, I will come to you on my own,
I will snatch you, o youth, right into the bedchamber!
But his scribes also wanted the world to obey him out of fear, anticipating what A. T.
Olmstead (1918) so felicitously described as the “calculated frightfulness” of the
Assyrian kings. An Old Babylonian copy of an inscription placed on an illustrated
stele with representations of scenes from a victory over the highland land of Zabšali
contains these words:
(Šu-Sin) killed both the strong and the weak, heads of the just and wicked he piled
up like (heaps) of grain, corpses of their people he piled up like sheaves. . . . their

8. For a critique of the term “neo-Sumerian renaissance,” see Becker 1985.

12 Introduction

established cities and villages he turned into (empty) tells, destroyed their walls,
blinded all the young men of the cities he had conquered, and made them serve in
the orchards of Enlil, Ninlil, and in the orchards of all the great gods; he donated all
the women of the cities he had conquered to the weaving establishments of Enlil,
Ninlil, and of the great gods.” 9

These seemingly contradictory portraits of a Sumerian sovereign are, of course,

hardly unique as far as tyrants are concerned. And yet the word “tyrant” is scarcely,
if ever, used in describing ancient Mesopotamian kings. Instead, they are usually
portrayed, in the manner of their own propaganda, as heroic and patriotic, bringing
together quarrelling smaller political units for the common good. From the modern
nationalistic worldview, nation-states, especially one’s own, are superior, and the
bigger the better; but it is questionable if the projection into the past of such feelings
results in good history-writing. In the study of early Mesopotamia, we invariably fa-
vor periods of centralization of authority, if for no other reason than that such times
provide more ample documentation. But this sort of centralization is the anomaly
rather than the norm; in the third and early-second millennia, it accounts for 250
years or so at the most. We may celebrate the various civil accomplishments of the
famous kings associated with these times—namely, Sargon, Naram-Sin, Šulgi, or
Hammurabi—but we should also remember the piles of corpses and shattered lives
that they left in their wake. I. M. Diakonoff (1969) famously dismissed the glorious
vision of Ur, charging that it was a highly despotic state, and although his opinion is
often cited without approval, his insights may prove to be much more prescient than
is often assumed. And yet one has to also look at all of this from a different angle
and ask if the members of the Ur-Namma dynasty actually dominated their realm
to such a degree, or rather if “the Ur III state was centralized only in the sense that
the crown was the locus for the direction of resources from throughout the state,” as
Steven Garfinkle asserts (2008: 60).
These states were not only ephemeral, but, as Norman Yoffee (1995) keeps re-
minding us, relatively small affairs, even if they are sometimes described as “empires.”
The Ur III polity was undoubtedly more compact and less expansive than the Old
Akkadian kingdom, but we must keep in mind that it lasted only a few decades lon-
ger than the one-person “empires” of Puzur-Inšušinak or Šamši-Addu, which may
have been equal or even territorially more extensive in size. 10 Likewise, one must
be cautious not to overestimate the military power of Ur and the intensity of war at
the time. To be sure, some of the expeditions mounted by Ur-Namma’s successors
were serious military offensives that drove deep into the highlands of Iran, but the
Orwellian year-names—the main source of our knowledge of most of these events—
treat all battles, border skirmishes, and low-intensity warfare on the frontier quite
equally and describe them all as “destructions” of the enemy. The well-known case

9. Šu-Sin E3/2.1.4.3 iii 16–21, iv 11–31 (Frayne 1997: 303–4).

10. For a discussion of the Ur III state as much smaller and much less militarily effective
than is assumed by some modern scholars, see Michalowski 2009a.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 13

of the highland city of Simurum serves as the best illustration of the futility of some
of the martial successes proclaimed in the year-names: Šulgi claimed victory or, more
literally, the destruction of Simurum, nine times, and yet it still caused problems for
his successors.
This is, broadly sketched, the ideological and political background against which
we have to judge the stories that the Ur III royal correspondence purports to nar-
rate. As Old Babylonian literary pieces, they contribute to the manner in which
Mesopotamians looked at their past, but it is not at all clear if they can be used to
illuminate the issues that have been highlighted in the preceding paragraphs. Much
of this depends, as already noted, not only on when the texts were included in the
loosely structured school system but also on the date of composition of each indi-
vidual member of the royal letter collection. One author, in the context of defending
the “authenticity” of the letters, writes provocatively: “I defy anyone to write the
history of that period without its Royal Correspondence and other literary sources”
(Hallo 2006: 100). I hope my teacher will forgive me, but on the preceding pages, I
have, quite briefly to be sure, attempted to do just that. But the proper response to
this challenge must take into account many factors associated with the Sumerian
language school curricula and on how one confronts the information found in the
correspondence with the data of Ur III archival and historical records. In the chap-
ters that follow, I will address a range of literary, archival, philological, historical, and
historiographic issues associated with the interpretation of the letters. Because these
epistles straddle, in an often-messy manner, the borders between history and fiction,
reality and make-believe, as well as between literature and everyday writing, my own
approach will be equally discursive, mirroring to a degree the structural idiosyncra-
sies of this group of texts. I begin with an analysis of the place of the Correspondence
of the Kings of Ur in its most immediate setting: the Old Babylonian school tradition.
 Chapter 2

Sumerian Literary Letters

Letters came late in the history of cuneiform writing. The earliest examples
known to us have been found not in Mesopotamia but in Syria, in the third-
millennium archives of Tell Mardikh, and are written in Eblaite, the Semitic archi-
val language of the area (Fronzaroli 2003). It is hardly surprising that letters were
not composed before Early Dynastic times, because until then the cuneiform writing
system was not suitable for such expression. The five earliest Sumerian letters from
Mesopotamia itself were discovered in the city of Girsu and probably date to the
time of Urukagina, around 2390 b.c. (Kienast and Volk 1995: 25–35). Another Early
Dynastic text of this type of unknown provenience may come from roughly the same
time (Kienast and Volk 1995: 36).
Letter-writing in Sumerian and Akkadian came into its own during the Sargonic
period. More than a hundred texts of this type have been recovered to date, and
they were found in almost every place that has yielded cuneiform tablets from this
period, from Susa in Iran to Tell Brak in Syria, from the Diyala region as well as from
both northern and southern Babylonia (Kienast and Volk 1995: 37–198). There is
even an example of a training letter from this time (Foster 1982a, 1982b). The vast
majority of Sumerian letters come from the time of the Third Dynasty of Ur, even
if they are possibly to be counted as a different form of written expression than the
standard letter. Most of them are relatively simple orders or reports, and few of them
ever achieved the complexity that we find in Akkadian-language epistles (Sollberger
1966; Michalowski 1993). The generic epistolary of these texts differs contextually
from what we think of as “letters”; they may be ascribed to the genre on formal
grounds but from a pragmatic point of view they are artifacts of a different sort.
Individual letters, described in Western classical literature as part of a conversa-
tion between absent friends, are elements in a complex semiotic interchange and
are usually part of a theoretically endless epistolary chain. One can see this in the
literary ordering of the Correspondence of the Kings of Ur (CKU) and in the politi-
cal letters of the Sumerian Epistolary Miscellany (SEpM) (nos. 2–5), which tend to
be transmitted in pairs; that is, a letter to a king followed by an answer. The aptly
named letter-orders are not intended to elicit an epistolary response; they require an
action that may or may not be recorded in writing. When it is, the form is a receipt,
14
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 15

not another letter, and therefore they are to be thought of more properly as part of
the textual universe of the administrative recording archives. The letter-order is a
demand for an action and once the recipient fulfilled the order the original letter
was enveloped with clay, and the new surface became the vehicle for a receipt. D. I.
Owen published a rare preserved example of this sort of letter-order (1972; for an-
other fragmentary one, see CUSAS 3 1037):
Tablet (Letter-Order) Envelope (Receipt)
1. hé-sa6-ra 1. 1 (éš) 3 (u) 5 (aš) še gur lugal
2. ù-na-a-dug4 2. ki DIIR-ba-ni šabra-ta
3. 1 (éš) 3 (u) 5 (aš) še gur 3. šu-dIM kuš7
4. šà é dšára-ka 4. šu ba-ti
5. šu-dIM-ra 5. šà é dšára-ka
6. hé-na-ab-šúm-mu seal:
7. na-mi-gur-re šu-dIM, kuš7 lugal, dumu ga-mi-lum
“Tell Hesa to give 95 kor of grain “The animal-trainer Šu-Adad received
to Šu-Adad in the temple of Šara, 95 kor of grain from the administrator
and not to argue (about it).” Ilum-bani, in the temple of Šara.”
Seal: “Šu-Adad, royal animal-trainer, son
of Gamilum.”

In this case, someone ordered Hesa to arrange for the transfer of grain to the royal
animal-trainer Šu-Adad. The name of the person who made the request is now lost,
as it would have been certified by the seal impression on the original envelope that
Hesa, or his representative, had cracked open to reveal the message. Hesa then in
turn gave an order to Ilum-bani, who took care of the matter, disbursing the grain
to Šu-Adad; a new envelope was created around the original letter-order, and this
served as the surface for the receipt of the transaction, which was certified by the seal
of the recipient. The inclusion of both the order and the receipt thus provides the
“clay trail” for the transaction.
As one can see in this example, Ur III letter-orders do not as a rule include the
full letter-address formula, as the sender of the message is rarely mentioned in the
body of the letter but is identified by his or her seal impression rolled either on the
tablet or on the envelope. The recipient in the process of reading destroyed the
envelopes, and therefore these texts were not meant to be permanent records of any
kind. This is a pattern that will be continued in letter-orders from later periods, as,
for example, in the often unaddressed messages of this type known from the Late
Old Babylonian period (Finkelstein 1972: 4–6), although by Late Babylonian times
missives of this type include the names of both senders and recipients (MacGinnis
1995).
As things stand today, there is only one text from those times that can be con-
sidered a true narrative epistle. The letter was first published by D. I. Owen (1980)
16 Sumerian Literary Letters

and has largely been ignored, although H. Neumann (2006: 17–19) has recently
contributed to its understanding. The text is extremely difficult and will profit from
further study; it is presented here in full to show just how different it is, in tone and
in language, from both the Ur III letter-orders and from the Old Babylonian school
letters written in Sumerian (MVN 11 168 [HSM 7192]): 1
1. [ki]-⸢á⸣-ra
2. ⸢ù⸣-na-a-dug4
3. a-na-aš-àm
4. tur-tur-e-ne-ke4-eš
5. inim-sig-u10 íb-bé
6. 60 (diš) ninda šu-ùr-ra 2(bán) zíd
7. kuš-a-á-lá-šè ha-mu-ní-kéš
8. é-a še ì-ál-la-àm munus-ra la-ba-an-kéš
9. é-kišib3-ba-ka-na a-tu-da nu-me-a nu-un-ku4-re-en6
10. ní-gur11 me-en8-ál-la-ni á-e íb-bi-bi-re 2
11. é-a-na 1(u) 1(diš) bappir2 ì-ál-àm im-ta-è šà-gal é-a-šè ì-zi
12. še apin-lá-a nam-érin-e ba-ab-de6
13. é-a še na-me nu-ál
14. a-šà-ga-ke4-eš lú-dnanna-ra
15. in-na-dug4 ga-ra-ab-šúm-bi ma-an-dug4
16. tukum-bi a-šà šu-na nu-um-šúm
17. ki na-me-a apin-lá ga-ba-ab-dab5
18. gu4-du-ke4-eš lú-ús á-ar ha-mu-ši-in-gi4-gi4
19. še é-a nu-mu-da-ál
20. še šu ha-ma-ab-tak4-tak4
21. a-ma-ru-kam hé-em-du
22. igi-du8-e lú-kí-gi4-a dšára ba-an-ši-DU ma-an-dug4
23. na-àm-mu-dab5 hé-em-du
1–2  Say to Kiaa: 3–5Why am I being maligned about the children/servants, 6–7even

though I bound up sixty half-loafs of bread and two ban of flour in leather sacks
(for provisions for each of them)? 8 There is grain in the household but none
was bound up (in sacks as provisions) for the woman. 9 She would not allow me
to enter into the storehouse without Atu’s permission. 10  Would I squander the
property that belongs to him?
11 The eleven beer-breads that were in his house have been taken out; they have
been distributed as food for the household. 12 The troops/workers took away the
seed grain, 13and (now) there is no grain whatsoever in the household.

1. Collated on photographs kindly provided by James A. Armstrong. The translation is ad-

mittedly tenuous, and many lines could be rendered differently. I am grateful to Wolfgang Heim-
pel for helping me with the understanding of this letter, even if we do not agree on all points.
2. Read perhaps ní-gur11-me-en8 ⟨ní⟩-ál-la-ni á-e í b-bi-bi-re, and translate, per-
haps, as “That is my/your property, I would only squander it if it belonged to him/  her!”
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 17
14–15 Ispoke to Lu-Nanna about the field, and he gave me his word that he would
give it to me. 16 If he does not entrust it to me, 17then I will have to take (lease
of a field) somewhere else, 18and then he should send me a drover 3 in the mat-
ter of the oxen. 19 There is no grain in the household, 20and therefore he should
dispatch grain to me. 21 Please—let him come!
22 He(Lu-Nanna?) told me: “The dike worker   4 took along the messenger of the
(temple of) Šara.” 23 He must not be detained—let him come!
The exceptional nature of this piece is striking, but it may be that it represents the
kind of letter one might find in a private archive, and therefore it is possible that
when more such non-official tablet collections are recovered we will have a different
picture of Ur III epistolarity. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine that a text of this sort
could be unique; the extensive use of letters among entrepreneurs and state officials
in Old Assyrian and Old Babylonian times, some of whom could undoubtedly read
and write, could not have been completely unprecedented. While direct evidence
is admittedly extremely limited at the present time, the numerous references to the
circulation of messengers in Ur III times lead one to suspect that many of them may
have carried letter tablets. By analogy, it is interesting to note that in India there is
no direct evidence for early letter writing, and yet circumstantial evidence suggests
that there probably was a vigorous culture of international epistolary exchange al-
ready in the third century b.c.e. during the reign of Aśoka (Hinüber 2010).
The lack of proper epistolary materials from the Ur III period makes it difficult
to assess the elaborate Sumerian letters, some supposedly written during that period,
that were copied in the Babylonian schools of the eighteenth century when the lan-
guage was long dead and ordinary epistles were composed in Akkadian. These are the
letters that we consider to be “literary” simply because they were part of the school
curriculum and were written in the ductus reserved for such texts. Indeed, although
they are therefore considered “literary,” they are often not treated as true “literature”
and are thought to be found objects, somehow inferior to epic, myths, or hymns. But
a generic value judgment of this sort ignores cultural realities and perpetuates as-
sumptions about textual authority that can hardly be substantiated from a theoretical
or practical point of view.
The matter of letters as literature has been the subject of much debate. In the
words of one author, “since the seventeenth century, ‘letters’ have been made to
serve (as) ‘literature,’ that is letters have been made to serve the law of literary
genre” (Benstock 1985: 257). This implies a definition in which the law of genre is
a dominant force, an arbitrator of the social and epistemological status of texts as
literature. Although this type of generic imperialism has surfaced often in literary
studies, in theories as varied as those of Northrop Frye or Mikhail Bakhtin, to name
but two oft-cited authors, the immediate impetus for the statement cited above was

3. Assuming lú-ús = rēdû.

4. I provisionally assume that igi-du8 is the Umma equivalent of a-igi-du8 “dike/canal
worker” (sēkiru), commonly attested in Girsu.
18 Sumerian Literary Letters

the notorious Carte Postale of Jacques Derrida (1980), which dominated much late-
twentieth-century discussion of both epistolarity and genre. The epistles of the Carte
assembled together achieve the form of a love letter (Benstock 1985: 258), and this
has led many to debate the sexual aspects of the exchange of letters, desire, the body,
and the role of the feminine in Western letters. From the point of view of literary
reception, genre is above all a matter of model and tradition, and for European read-
ers, the erotic and gendered aspects of epistolarity reach at least as far back as Ovid’s
Epistulae Heroidum (de Jean 1989: 60; Cherewatuk 1993: 31 with n. 18).
Such a long continuous tradition of reading and misreading creates its own laws
and values, and therefore much of this discussion is historicist and culture specific;
whatever its intrinsic interest might be, it remains to be seen if it has much to offer
to the student of Mesopotamian writings. The same can be said, of course, about
any invocation of the matter of genre, but the issue is particularly delicate when the
epistolary genre is in focus. The letter has figured prominently in Western specula-
tions about literature and writing: since Greek times, letters have been at the center
of debates about genre and literature, truth and fiction, as well as gender and power
(Altman 1982). This makes sense in the Western environment, but one can question
just how relevant all of this is to writings from different places and different times.
Letters loomed large in the debate about mimesis, truth, and the ontological
status of literature itself because the literary form mirrored epistolary exchanges from
everyday life. The chaining of letters, or rather the seriation of epistolary exchanges,
has reappeared at various times in ancient Greece as well as in much later epochs
in the West, in a manner that has been seen as leading to a new genre, the novel.
Indeed, this is precisely why epistolarity has been so important in speculations about
genre. The rise of the epistolary novel, as well as those of the non-qualified garden
variety, has been linked to epistolarity and feminine discourse; genre and gender
have been engaged in this discussion, leading to the problem of power and authority
and the problem of the law of genre (e.g., Cherewatuk and Wiethaus 1993). These
Western debates are rooted in a variety of culture-specific hermeneutics and have
centered on specific bodies of epistolary texts that were often self-consciously com-
posed by authors well versed in the rhetorical and generic debates of their time.
Are the laws of genre universal, or do they only rule over the intellectual descen-
dants of Aristotle? More important, can one in any way link the debates over the
rise of the epistolary novel in ancient Greece or latter-day England with develop-
ments that took place thousands of years ago in Mesopotamia? To answer these ques-
tions, one would have to investigate synchronic and diachronic aspects of ancient
systems of categorization of discourse, but such an undertaking would undoubtedly
be hampered by the lack of any written native critical tradition, the uneven syn-
chronic and diachronic distribution of texts, as well as the incomplete recovery of
cuneiform documents. I have argued in a very different context (1999a: 89) that
“generic qualities were essential properties of Mesopotamian discourse, qualities that
surfaced in the way in which texts spoke to each other, in the way that they were
transformed, and in the way that they lived out their existence in the flow of literary
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 19

traditions . . . they found their expression not in external labels and taxa but in the
poetics of a complex written world.”
To the scribes of second-millennium Babylonia, the letter was emblematic, and
its complicated history may have some bearing on the native perception of the form.
The only old story that we have concerning the origin of writing is embedded in the
long poem that we call Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, and it deals, as chance would
have it, with the origin of the letter. The Borgesian paradox of this episode is worth
mentioning here because it sheds light on the native perceptions of epistolarity,
power, and corporate identity. I will limit my remarks to pertinent facts, since Her-
mann Vanstiphout (1983, 1989) has already written well about this matter. The set-
ting is a contest between a Sumerian city, Uruk, and its barbarian double, a mythical
place called Aratta, somewhere deep in a fantasy image of some area of present-day
Iran. The rulers of the two cities exchange riddles, and this requires that a messenger
travel with lightning speed across the mountain ranges that separate the two, carry-
ing in his brain ever-longer messages. To ease his burden, the Sumerian king invents
cuneiform writing on the spot and sends his rival a letter, which the latter cannot, of
course, read. I cite the pertinent passage according to Catherine Mittermayer’s new
edition (2009: 144–45), which she graciously put at my disposal before publication
(Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta 500–506):
du11-ga-ni-àm šà-bi su-su-a-àm
kí-gi4-a inim ì-dugud šu nu-mu-un-da-an-gi4-gi4
bar kí-gi4-a inim ì-dugud šu nu-mu-un-da-an-gi4-gi4-da-kam
en kul-aba4ki-a-ke4 im-e šu bí-in-ra inim kišib3-gin7 bí-in-gub
u4-bi-ta inim im-ma gub-bu nu-ub-ta-ál-la
ì-ne-šè dutu u4-ne-a ur5 hé-en-na-nam-ma-àm
en kul-aba4ki-a-ke4 in[im im-ma b]í-in-gub ur5 hé-en-na-nam-ma
This was his message but its meaning was lost;
The words were too difficult for the messenger, so he could not repeat (them);
Because the words were too difficult for the messenger, so he could not repeat
(them),
The king of Kulaba applied his hand to clay and stamped the message as if with
a seal.
Before that time no one had ever written down words on a tablet,
But now, under the sun of this very day, indeed it was so!
The king of Kulaba wrote down words on a tablet, indeed it was so!
The messenger takes the tablet with him and once again tackles the long road to
Aratta; he presents himself before the local ruler, and then the narrator informs us
that (Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta 537–541; Mittermayer 2009: 146–47):
en arattaki-ke4 kí-gi4-a
im šu niin2-na-ni šu ba-ši-in-ti
en arattaki-ke4 im-ma igi i-ni-in-bar
20 Sumerian Literary Letters

inim du11-ga gag-àm sa-ki mi-rí-da-àm 5

en arattaki-ke4 im šu-niin2-na-ni igi im-bar-bar-re

The king of Aratta received

The tablet on which all was recorded for him;
The king of Aratta looked at the tablet,
The spoken words seemed like nails , . . .
The king of Aratta continued to look at the tablet on which all was recorded for
him.
The symbolism of this episode is self-evident, but it also includes a critical absurdity.
It is obvious that a letter is useless unless it has a recipient, but one never doubts, in
correspondence, that the addressee can read or, in Mesopotamia, that the messenger
who carries it can read it to him or her. Here is a new twist on or, perhaps better, a
blind anticipation of the purloined letter, for the message of this particular epistle
lies not in its content, which is irrelevant, but in its form. The letter is in plain
sight but cannot be understood. The medium is truly the message—for once the
cliché fits—since the surface message of the letter is gibberish to the illiterate king
of Aratta. There is an underlying epistemological as well as epistolary theory here,
one that comes close to the way in which letters have been theorized in the West.
Consider the words of Claudio Guillén from his excellent essay on the Renaissance
letter (1986: 78):
In the history of our civilization letters have signified a crucial passage between
orality to writing itself—or a practical interaction between the two. As écriture,
it begins to involve the writer in a silent, creative process if self-distancing and
self-modeling, leading perhaps, as in autobiography, to fresh knowledge or even to
fiction.

I will pick up some of these strands below. For now, one can simply note that the real
message of the newly invented Sumerian letter is clear: it heralds the superiority of
literate Mesopotamian civilization, much to the despair of the highland king, who
must recognize the inferiority of his own culture, which had no writing and no let-
ters. This is the obvious ideological import of this story for a modern reader versed
in contemporary theory, but it is not necessarily the only or the best interpretation.
For the scribes who taught the Sumerian poem in school, as well as for their pu-
pils, this passage may have carried additional meanings, as they would recognize their
own power as writers and readers for nobles and kings, many of whom were illiterate
and needed them for access to written communication. Nor can this story be dis­
associated from the similar etiological tale of the origin of clay envelopes for letters,

5. The reading of this line follows Keetman 2010: 73 (“Die gesprochen Worte waren Pflöcke
waren (wie) eine zornig geruhzelte Stirn”). Mittermeyer 2009: 146 reads the first half of the line
as u 4 -ba du 11 -ga-ni (“Damals war [dies Enmerkaras] Forderung, es war eine wütende Willen-
säusserung”). This is not the place to discuss the difficult second half of the line.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 21

which, similar to the story recounted above, was embedded in a tale about another
pair of ancient kings, Ur-Zababa of Kish and the future ruler of Agade named Sargon
(Sargon and Ur-Zababa 53–56). 6
u4-bi-ta im-ma ⸢gub-bu hé-ál⸣ im ⸢si-si⸣-ge ba-ra-ál-la-àm
lugal ur-dza-ba4-ba4 I šar-ru-um-ki-in ⸢diir-re-e⸣-ne šu-du11-ga-ar
im-ma gub-bu ní ní ba-ug7-a-ta
ṭu-up-pa iš-ṭù-ur-šu ša šu-mu-ut ra-ma-ni-[šu]
unug ki-ga lugal-zà-ge4-e-si šu ba-ni-ib-tag4-tag4

In those days, writing on tablets already existed but the enveloping of tablets
did not exist,
So King Ur-Zababa, for Sargon, the creature of the gods,
Wrote a tablet that could cause his (i.e., Sargon’s) own death,
And dispatched it to Lugalzagesi in Uruk.
Here the envelope is invented in order to hide the contents of the epistle from the
eyes of the messenger, since the letter contained instructions for the recipient to
murder the carrier. Thus, a letter can kill, transgressing the separations imposed by
mimesis; écriture becomes potential deed, and fiction is subordinated to the mur-
derer’s dagger. It is important to observe that these two passages concerning the
origins of writing tablets and hiding their content with an envelope have to do with
letters and not any other form of written communication. We cannot determine
the date at which these two pieces of literature were first composed, but it seems
that it is not accidental we have them from the very same time that letters become
literature—that is, when the genre is extended and reformulated by inserting it into
the inscribed world in which focus is brought upon the very mechanisms of language
and discourse.
I will now move on to a brief survey of Sumerian literary correspondence. This
survey is limited in scope: it serves only as introduction to the main topic of this
book, the royal letters of the Ur III kings. The matter is dealt with in more detail by
Brisch (2007) and Kleinerman (2011).

The Number of Letters

At present, there are more than 73 texts that have been qualified as Sumerian
literary letters, although some of them are known only by name from “literary cata-
logs.” In the rather confusing modern classification currently in use, the largest num-
ber, 24, belong to the CKU, 17 to the SEpM (now fully edited in Kleinerman 2011),

6. There is a clear intertextual relationship between the Sargon story and the Enmerkar
passage, as the metaphor of applying a seal to the invented letter anticipates the discovery of the
envelope, which is the normal vehicle for such impressions; but this is a complex matter that lies
outside of the topic of this discussion.
22 Sumerian Literary Letters

as well as more-or-less 35 other miscellaneous private and royal letters, letters to

gods, and letters of petition, including four or more compositions from the Royal Cor-
respondence of Larsa (RCL; Brisch 2007: 75–89). 7 The imprecise figures given here
reflect the uncertainty about the attribution of fragments, redactional differences, as
well as other philological problems that cannot be addressed here. The SEpM was
formerly designated as Collection B (Ali 1964), but this is something of a misnomer,
because there is no “Collection A.” Three of the most-commonly-copied letters of
the CKU were included together by one Nippur scribe on a single tablet, but there
is no evidence that this constituted a regular “collection.” 8

Geographical and Temporal Distribution

Copies of letters have been found at almost all sites that have Old Babylonian
Sumerian-language instructional texts: at Nippur, Ur, Isin, Uruk, Kish, Sippar, Me-
turan, Mari, and Susa. The CKU letters are found in all of these places except Me-
turan and Mari. 9
With only a few exceptions, the Sumerian-language epistolary texts are known
from Old Babylonian copies that testify to their use in scribal instruction during this
period. As such, they were used at a somewhat advanced level of the curriculum. The
few examples of letter extracts used for elementary instruction come from Sippar and
Susa, where round tablets with Sumerian epistolary phraseology were found. 10 Only
a handful of these letters survived the Middle Babylonian revision of education. An
expanded bilingual version of letter SEpM 22 was widely copied during the second
and first millennia; it has been found in a Neo-Babylonian version from Babylon
and Ur, as well as on earlier tablets from Assur, Ugarit, Boghazköy, and Assur (Civil
2000: 109–16). A Middle Babylonian tablet found at Susa contains two CKU letters
in syllabic Sumerian with Akkadian translations. 11 Only one Sumerian literary letter

7. Kleinerman (2009: vii) refers to seventeen of these letters as the Ancillary Nippur, Ur,
and Uruk Correspondence (ACL, AukC, AUrC); she now uses the term Additional Nippur Letters
(ANL) in her revised publication (Kleinerman 2011, with editions). Brisch 2007: 87 is undoubt-
edly correct in her suspicions that RCL “is perhaps a misnomer;” the label is retained here only
for the sake of convenience.
8. 3 N-T 311, compilation tablet Nd (p. 54, below). See Michalowski 2006d: 152.
9. The only letter tablet found at Meturan is H 184 C, which had the Letter of Ninšatapada
to Rim-Sin on one side and the Letter of Sin-šamuḫ to Enki on the other (Brisch 2007: 82); a tablet
with part of SEpM was found at Mari, but nothing from the CKU has been identified up to the
present time. See Cavigneaux and Colonna d’Istria 2009: 52; the “extrait de la correspondence
littéraire” mentioned there contains SEpM (personal communication, Antoine Cavigneaux; now
included in the edition of Kleinerman [2011]).
10. Susa: MDP 27 87, 88; Sippar: USFS 134 (Si. 420). Currently, only two other round epis-
tolary exercises are known: BIN 2 53 (SEpM7), of unknown origin, and CBS 4078, from Nippur
(Letter of Sin-iddinam to Utu; Hallo 1982: 97, source N3 in Brisch 2007: 170).
11. MDP 57 no. 1 (compilation tablet Su1, pp. 56–56 below).
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 23

has been found in the Assurbanipal libraries, namely, the Letter of Sin-iddinam to Utu.
Finally, one should mention a curious Neo-Babylonian fragment that contains what
seems to have been a Šulgi letter, copied or forged in a script imitating an archaic Ur
III hand (Neumann 1992a). 12

Original Date of Composition

Letters by definition mention people by name and, thus, together with royal
hymns, are among the few Old Babylonian Sumerian literary texts that proclaim
their historical context, spurious or real. The royal letters and letters of petition
of the Ur III, Isin, and Larsa kings constitute a large percentage of the total. Many
of the private letters and letters of petition appear to have originated in the Ur III
period or were made to look as if they did. The letter SEpM 21 is addressed from
Inim-Inana to Enlil-massu. Toward the end of the missive there is an invocation to
the former professors for wisdom. They are named Lugal-šu, Nabi-Enlil, and Enlil-
alsa. 13 The latter appears as a witness in SEpM 14, which is not a letter at all but a
public announcement of the loss of a seal of a merchant by the name of Ur-dun. The
name of an Ur III governor of Nippur from the time of Amar-Sin is also mentioned
as a witness, providing a date and locale—spurious or real—for many of the letters in
SEpM. These names also gave opportunity for a form of intertextual bleeding and ge-
neric play. The schoolmaster of Nippur (um-mi-a nibru ki), Enlil-alsa, also appears
in these letters under the name Zuzu, a nickname that meant “teacher,” “wise one,”
perhaps even “know-it-all” (Hallo 1977: 57). One of the elementary schoolbooks
from this period was a list of simple personal names, verbs, and other elements, listed
in a form maximized for memorization, presently known as Silbenalphabet A. During
the late Old Babylonian period, a second and third column were added, providing
esoteric as well as playful etymological and other comments and games in the form
of explanations and simple associations. One section reads (Sollberger 1965: 23, ll.
39–41)
ì‑zu dub‑sar dalamuš

a‑zu šà‑tam daš‑n[a‑an]

zu‑zu um‑mi‑a dh[a‑ià]

The verbal forms derived from Sumerian zu, “to know,” are associated in the second
column with various professional names such as dub-sar, “scribe,” šà-tam, “admin-
istrator, auditor,” and um-mi-a, “scholar, schoolmaster.” The third column contains
divine names: I have no idea why the first is here; the goddess of grain, Ašnan would
presumably have something to do with the “auditor,” and Haja was the husband of
Nidaba, the patroness of writing, so there can be little mystery as to what he is do-

12. For general surveys of the literary letters, see Hallo 1968, 1981; and Michalowski 1981.
13. On some of these issues, see Hallo 1977.
24 Sumerian Literary Letters

ing here. The associations of this passage clearly hark back to the entries in SEpM,
which the author had to suffer through during his school days, leading up to the
association of zu-zu with um-mi-a, just as in the letters where the former is a nick-
name for Enlil-alsa. 14

Native Designation
The standard Old Babylonian Sumerian word for “letter” was ù-na-(a)-dug4 or
ù-ne-(e)-dug4, borrowed into Akkadian as unnedukkum, a frozen verbal form taken
literally from the opening formula of letters (Brisch 2007: 31). The word is used in
Sumerian to refer to all letters, even the simplest letter-orders, and is attested from
Ur III times on, although in texts from this period á-ág-gá was used as well (Sal-
laberger 2003). One occurrence of the word suggests that in the north, during Old
Babylonian times at least, it was also used as a designation for literary epistles; if not
as a Sumerian word, then at least as a logographic writing for Akkadian unnedukkum.
This usage is found only in an Akkadian language literary catalog of unknown pro-
venience, most probably from the north, which includes the line (M. Cohen 1976:
132, l. 25): 15
⸢u ù.ne⸣.e.dug4 ⸢ša⸣ dšul‑gi (= ešer unnedukki ša šulgi), “ten Šulgi letters”
A different term is encountered in the subscript on a large tablet of unknown pro-
venience that contains the four letters of the Ibbi-Sin and Išbi-Erra correspondence
(A 7475). These texts are summarized as limmu 4 lugal-u 10-ra, literally, “four
‘to‑my‑kings’.” Here a scribe took a different part of the salutation, the one from
letters addressed to kings and gods, and created a term for “royal letter.” In the Ebla
archives, the Semitic word for “letter,” whatever it may have been, remains hidden
behind the logogram ní.mul (Sallaberger 2003). In the CKU, two terms for “let-
ter” are used: im-sar-ra and ù-na-a-dug 4. 16
Letters are not present in the two lists of incipits that are thought to enumerate
the central texts of the Old Babylonian curriculum of Nippur (Kramer 1942). The
two Old Babylonian catalogs that do include letters have no known parallels. The
first has already been mentioned above (M. Cohen 1976: 131–33). This text, of
unknown origin, lists a variety of Sumerian and Akkadian compositions, including,
in lines 25–27: 17

14. A more detailed examination of the Nippur connections of SEpM is provided in Micha-
lowski 1976: 19–27 and more comprehensively in Kleinerman 2011: 102–3.
15. See n. 17 below. The term “literary catalog” must arouse some suspicion and, therefore,
I use it here only as a convenient label, fully aware that the lists of this type served a variety of
purposes: some simply recorded tablets at hand, but the purpose of most of them unknown; see, in
general, J. Krecher (1976–1980).
16. See the commentary to ŠAr1: 31 (2).
17. See above; I collated this text many years ago and was able to do so again on photo-
graphs kindly provided by Constance Gane of the Andrews University Archaeological Museum.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 25

⸢u ù.ne⸣.e.dug4 ⸢ša⸣ dšul‑gi (= ešer unnedukki ša šulgi)

[den].zu lugal ud‑sar mah ù‑na‑a‑dug4
[su‑mu‑l ]a‑el lugal‑u10‑ra ù‑na‑a‑dug4
If my restorations are correct, two otherwise unattested missives follow the uniden-
tifiable ten items of the Šulgi correspondence—namely, a letter of petition to the
moon god Nanna, and a letter to King Sumu-la-el of Babylon (1880–1845 b.c.). One
should note that this catalog also includes compositions that were part of the central
Nippur curriculum, such as Šulgi Hymn A, Lipit-Eštar Hymn A, Inana and Ebih, and
the Farmer’s Instructions.
More informative is a unique list of letter incipits discovered in the city of Uruk.
Unfortunately, it is difficult to reconstruct the complete list, which consists of letters
as well as two compositions, the Tumal Inscription and An Axe for Nergal (Behrens
1988), which were often included in various letter collections, including certain re-
dactions of the SEpM. Although this catalog has been edited twice (van Dijk 1989;
Cavigneaux 1996: 57–59), its importance for our discussion requires a full translit-
eration here, collated from photographs. 18 Note that of the 27 preserved entries,
only three cannot presently be identified (these are marked by an asterisk): 19
[1. lugal-u10-ra]
[2. árad-u10-ra]
[3. lugal-u10-ra]
4. šu‑den.zu ⸢šar‑ru‑um‑ba‑ni⸣-[ra]
5. šar‑ru‑um‑ba-⸢ni‑ra⸣
6. i‑bi‑den.zu lugal‑⸢u10⸣
7. i‑bi‑⸢den.zu⸣ [x x] x x [. . .]
8. puzur4‑d  šul‑g[i P]A.TE.⟨SI⟩ k[a-zal-lu  ki]
9. dnanna ⸢dumu sa den‑líl⸣‑lá

10. den-⸢ki en⸣ z[ag?-dib? x] x x [. . .]

11. lugal‑u10‑ra [x x x x] x [. . .]
12. ⸢pisa‑dub‑ba⸣ x x [. . .]
13. ⸢dutu⸣ lugal‑u10‑⸢úr?⸣ [d]i‑ku5 mah an ki
14. den‑išib‑bára‑ge ‑⸢si⸣
4
15. den‑líl‑mas‑⸢su‑ra⸣

16. ⸢šeš⸣‑u10‑⸢ne⸣‑ra

The tablet has deteriorated somewhat since Mark Cohen copied it. The readings offered here
differ somewhat from the original edition (see already Michalowski 1991).
18. Courtesy of Irmgard Wagner. The original is in Baghdad; a scan of the photograph is
included on the disk that accompanies this book.
19. The top of the tablet is broken, but the scribe marked every tenth line on the left side,
although this is not indicated in the published hand-copy. The first preserved notation is on line
7, so the first preserved line is actually line 4 of the tablet; the second notation is 20 on the left
edge before line 20. The scribe also marked lines 13′, 27′, and 28′ with a PAP sign on the left side;
such notations are attested on other tablets, but their meaning escapes us at present.
26 Sumerian Literary Letters

17. ⸢lú-di⸣ du ⸢ama‑u10-ra⸣ 20

18. Isu‑mi‑a‑tar

19. damurrum dumu an‑na

20. I nibruki‑ta‑lú

21. dinin‑an‑dùl‑du ‑ga‑ra

10
22. dnin‑tin‑ug -ga agrig zi é‑[kur‑ra]
5
23. I  ur-dnanna‑ra

24. I i‑la‑ak‑nu‑i‑id

25. Ibur‑den.zu lugal‑u

10
26. Iden‑líl‑mas‑su inim du ad‑gi s[a . . .]
10 4 6
27. lugal‑x-me‑ra
28. énsi saa‑ra
29. šakkana‑e‑ne
30. lugal‑nisa‑[á …]

[1. Aradmu to Šulgi 1 (CKU 1)] 21

[2. Šulgi to Aradmu 1 (CKU 2)]
[3. Aradmu to Šulgi 2 (CKU 3)]
4. Šarrum-bani to Šu-Sin 1 (CKU 18)
5. Šu-Sin to Šarrum-bani 1 (CKU 19)
6. Išbi-Erra to Ibbi-Sin 1 (CKU 21)
7. Puzur-Šulgi to Ibbi-Sin 1(CKU 23)
8. Ibbi-Sin to Puzur-Numušda (Puzur-Šulgi) (CKU 24)
9. Letter of Petition to Nanna (known only from Uruk; Cavigneaux 1996:
no. 113)
10. Letter of Sin-šamuḫ to Enki
11. Possibly CKU 4 or 7 22
12. Letter 23 *
13. Letter of Sin‑iddinam to Utu
14. SEpM 9
15. SEpM 21
16. SEpM 15
17. SEpM 16

20. This is what I see on the photographs, and it agrees with the reading of van Dijk (1989:
444, 445) and with his identification of this as the Letter of Monkey to Mother (SEpM 16); Cavi-
gneaux (1996: 58) prefers kur-⸢šè⸣ DU-⸢DU-u 10-ra⸣.
21. Attested at Uruk; see n. 23 below.
22. In view of the context, this should be the first item of SEpM, which could be either
AbŠ1 (4) or ArŠ3 (7); both begin lugal-u10-ra ù-na-a-dug4, and both can open the collection.
23. Without collation of the original, one cannot be sure of anything, but perhaps this is
a version of the letter ISET 1 121 [179] (Ni. 9710). This fragmentary tablet may perhaps be re-
stored as: [pisa-dub]-⸢ba⸣-a árza a-na-me-a-⸢aš⸣, [ù]-na-⸢dug 4⸣, [den.z]u-mu-ba-al-lí-⸢iṭ⸣
⸢na-ab-bé⸣-[a] (rest broken). Or, it might reference ŠuLuŠa1 (200; see p. 414 below).
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 27

18. Letter of Iddatum to Sumutara ANL 3

19. Letter of Etel-pi-Damu to Amurrum
20. SEpM 10
21. Letter of Lu-Ninurta to Inin‑andul-duga ANL 6
22. SEpM 19
23. Letter to Ur-Nanna *
24. SEpM 17
25. Letter to King Bur‑Sin *
26. SEpM 18
27. SEpM 13
28. SEpM 12
29. SEpM 11
30. SEpM 20
If the listing of these entries is any indication of the order in which they were used
in school, someone in Uruk had a repertoire that was similar to what was generally
used in Nippur, albeit with a few additions and perhaps some omissions. Only three
literary letter-tablets were actually found in Uruk: an otherwise unattested bilingual
letter of petition to Nanna, equivalent to line 9 of the catalog; two identical tablets
with the first eight lines of SEpM 6, which is not in the catalog; as well as a compila-
tion tablet that had at least one letter to Šulgi, which may have been the first entry of
this list, preceded by SEpM 2, which is not mentioned in the catalog. 24 Indeed, based
on the distribution of letters, as reconstructed below, it is more than likely that the
missing three lines contained incipits of the Šulgi correspondence—more precisely,
of the items ArŠ1 (1), ŠAr1 (2), and ArŠ2 (2); and the beginning of the text has
been restored—hypothetically, to be sure—in accordance with this assumption. It
is possible that all or most of SEpM and ANL were also utilized in Uruk education,
with the addition of Sin-šamuḫ to Enki, Etel-pi-Damu to Amurrum, Letter of Petition
to Nanna, as well as the two otherwise unknown items from the list addressed to Ur-
Nanna (23) and to the Isin ruler Bur-Sin (25). None of these letters are presently
attested in Nippur.
The inferences one can draw from these facts are sketchy at best. At least some
Old Babylonian schoolteachers appear to have thought of Sumerian letters as a sepa-
rate category and on occasion listed them together in catalogs in association with a
few other miscellaneous compositions. They do not appear to have been used at the
earliest levels of instruction, since they are not, as a rule, written on round tablets or
on other types of preliminary exercise tablets. They were clearly not models for prac-
tical letter-writing, since contemporary correspondence was conducted exclusively
in the Babylonian language. The authors of Sumerian literary epistles anticipated

24. Cavigneaux (1996: no. 143; compilation tablet Uka). This fragment is unidentified but
it contains at least SEpM 2, the Letter of Sin-tillati to Iddin-Dagan, and ŠAr1 (1, source Uk1). An-
other unidentified literary fragment in the volume is no. 148, which can now be identified as a
manuscript of Nidaba Hymn C (both tablets collated from photographs).
28 Sumerian Literary Letters

classical theorists and kept their narratives to one theme; Akkadian letters often in-
troduced second and even third issues, sometimes introduced by the adverb šanitam,
“on another matter.” Akkadian model school-letters do exist (Michalowski 1983a),
and one wonders if students studied equivalent Sumerian models in earlier times,
when the language was still used for practical epistolary exchanges.

Formal Structure
In a pioneering overview of Sumerian literary epistolography, W. W. Hallo
(1968) proposed a formal distinction between “letters” and “letter-prayers.” This
nomenclature has remained with us to this day. For formal reasons, to avoid ritual
connotations and in order to stress the generic similarity between the Sumerian and
the Akkadian examples, such as the much later elaborate pleas addressed by the
exorcist Urad-Gula to King Assurbanipal (Parpola 1987), it might be better to use
the term “letter of petition” rather than “letter-prayer.” There are specific formal
differences between these two types of epistle, but the major distinguishing feature
is the opposition between poetry and prose. Although literary letters are certainly
characterized by some use of poetic language, they were essentially prose texts, while
letter-prayers used all the devices of Sumerian “verse,” including construction by
means of written lines, figurative and marked literary language, as well as assonance
and parallelism. Letters shared certain formal and semantic features: they used a
limited set of opening and closure formulas; they were dialogic, and thus often came
in pairs; they named names; they purported to come from the past; and they were
written in prose. 25 The letter-prayers/letters of petition had similar features except
that they were unidirectional and written as poetry.
As a general rule, this distinction has much to recommend it—but the distinc-
tion is not so simple. Many years ago, I analyzed the poetic characteristics of one
poetic epistle, the Letter of Ursaga to a King (SEpM 6; Michalowski 1976: 12–16). I
will not repeat that exercise here but I will paraphrase something I wrote many years
later in a volume on Mesopotamian poetic language (Michalowski 1996: 148–49).
Synonymous parallelism is one of the defining characteristics of Sumerian po-
etry. It is therefore disturbing to encounter it in a letter that one would normally
consider to be prose. The opening lines of the first letter of CKU read (ArŠ1: 1–5):
lugal-u10-ra ù-na-a-dug4
Iárad-mu árad-zu na-ab-bé-a

kur su-bir4ki-šè har-ra-an kaskal si sá-sá-e-ra

gun ma-da-zu ge-en-ge-né-dè
a-rá ma-da zu-zu-dè

25. On the formal organization of letters and letter-prayers, as well as on the literary nature
of both, see Brisch 2007: 31–33.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 29

Speak to my king,
saying (the words) of Aradmu, your servant:
(You commanded me),
while I was on an expedition to Subir,
to firmly secure the taxes on the frontier territory,
to thoroughly investigate the state of (this) frontier . . .
Someone who is convinced of a strict distinction between poetry and prose
might not expect the synonymous word-pair in the third line. One could see in this
a lexicalization of the compound and leave it at that, were it not for the obvious
highlighting of syntagmatic elements in lines 3–5. These lines are organized as lines
of text; they are perceived as visually distinct and heard or recited in parallelistic
fashion. Line 3 includes a synonymous pair in which the first element har-ra-an is
a loan from Akkadian ḫarranum, while the second is the normal Sumerian word for
“road, highway.” Sumerian texts use both words independently, but the use of syn-
onymous parallelism appears to be a poetic device. This kind of pairing is not unique
to Sumerian: examples can be found in languages as diverse as Georgian, Tok Pisin,
Provençal, Middle English, Thai, or Hindi. Characteristically, such pairs, which are
often lexicalized in poetic contexts, always begin with the loan, followed by the na-
tive word (Boeder 1991).
The nonfinite verbal forms at the end of each line unite all three, and the redu-
plicated roots at the end of lines 4 and 5, as well as the repetition of ma-da, “land,
frontier,” a loan from Semitic and a partial synonym of kur in the previous line,
echo, in a sense, the relationship between har-ra-an and kaskal, loanword and na-
tive term, in line 3. All of this creates a complex system of parallelism and repetition
that is characteristic of Sumerian poetic language. One does not expect such things
in a prose letter. We perceive literature as a distinct form of language and action. In
the words of Peter Steiner (1982: 508):

But unlike other written forms, literary discourse is especially vulnerable because
it is impersonal. Personal written communication benefits from the mutual ac-
quaintance between the communicants since this helps in bringing their respec-
tive semantic contexts together. . . . But literary communication appears through
an institutionalized channel and undergoes editing, grammatical and typographical
standardization and commercial dissemination.

This is an enlightening perspective because we are dealing with epistolary commu-

nication, normally the opposite of “literary discourse,” and yet we appear to be in
the realm of poetic language. In our case the institutionalized channel is the school
environment, in which letters were no longer bounded by the immediate contexts of
communication. They became literary texts, no different contextually than hymns,
epics, and other literary poems inherited from earlier times. Thus, even documents
could become art, either by simple appropriation or by extensive reworking.
30 Sumerian Literary Letters

When Hallo (1968) distinguished letters from letter-prayers, his approach was
strictly evolutionary generic, and he considered the letter-prayer as an example of
a larger category of “individual prayer.” More important, the letter-prayer was for
him the precursor to the eršahunga, a form of prayer used in rituals down to the
first millennium. Subsequently, Old Babylonian eršahungas contemporary with the
most-developed examples of the letter of petition came to light (Michalowski 1987;
Maul 1988: 8–16), and therefore we can no longer posit any direct “evolutionary”
relationship between the two forms. The letters of petition and the eršahungas not
only overlap in time but also have more formal differences than similarities; they
also fulfilled different rhetorical functions. In the present context, one recalls the
oft-quoted statement by E. D. Hirsch (1967: 98) that “every disagreement about an
interpretation is usually a disagreement about genre.”
From a formal point of view, the main differences between the letter and the
letter prayer are prosodic and structural. The former was written in prose and the
latter in poetry. Moreover, the letter was usually organized in the following manner:
recipient-ra ù-na-a-dug4 To recipient speak:
adressor-e na-ab-bé-a saying (the words) of:
argument
salutation
closing formulas

In CKU, the closing formulas, which can sometimes be expanded with an additional
phrase (+), are:
A. Letters to kings conclude lugal-u 10 hé-en-zu, “now my king is informed
(about all this).” This is a calque from Akkadian (annītam) bēlī lu idī, which is
sometimes used as the last element in Old Babylonian letters to royalty. 26
B. Letters from kings conclude a-ma-ru-kam, “it is urgent,” “please.” This literally
means, “it is a flood”; M. Civil (1994: 179–80) explains this as having originated
from a shout of warning that was meant to alert those downstream of a coming
flood wave. This formula, which is already found many times in Ur III letter-
orders and in the letter presented above on pp. 15–16, is also used in SEpM
12, 15, 16, and 17, none of which is addressed to a royal.
C. Additionally, five letters addressed to Šulgi end with the formula ní lugal ab-
be-na-(u 10) (ga-ab-ak), “whatever my king orders me, I will do” (ArŠ2: 14:
14 [7], ArŠ5: 13 [9], ArŠ6: r 8′ [10], UdŠ1: 20 [11], AmŠ1: 12 [16]), another
calque from Akkadian ša bēlī iqabbū lūpuš. 27 In the first two of these letters, this
is included before formula A.

26. E.g., ARM 26 27: 46; ARM 27 1: 4; 72: 37.

27. On this Akkadian construction, see Buccellati 1972: 13. Note also ša qabē bēlīja lūpuš,
“whatever my king might decide, I will do,” e.g., ARM 28 129 r. 1′–2′; 138: 30 (also discussed by
Buccellati).
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 31

The typical letter of petition is structurally more complex: a string of poetic epi-
thets, sometimes covering many lines, anticipates the name of the recipient, whose
name may be followed by further epithets. Then comes the verb ù-na-a-dug 4,
“speak,” which can be followed by more epithets of the recipient and by the verb
ù-na-dè-dah, “and furthermore.” Then comes the argument of the letter—the very
petition itself—followed by a formulaic plea (Hallo 1968: 76–77; Brisch 2007: 32). 28
Sumerian letters are narratives embedded in a frame that consists of an intro-
ductory formula and a series of optional endings. The opening formula has been the
subject of some debate, and there are contradictory grammatical and pragmatic in-
terpretations of the evidence. The Old Babylonian literary letters use a formula that
begins to crystallize in Sargonic times but is formalized, with some variation, during
the Ur III period. The basic outline of this development was described by Sollberger
(1966: 2–3) and his outline remains valid to this day. In its classic form, the formula
reads:
recipient-ra ù-na-(a)-dug 4
addressor na-ab-bé-a
Most scholars have interpreted the first verb as formally “prospective” but function-
ally imperative, corresponding to Akkadian qibīma. Thus, the exhortation is to the
carrier or other reciter of the letter, who is to read it aloud to the recipient, who
would most probably be illiterate. Civil (2008a: 11–12) takes a different view; for
him, the “prospective” refers to the speech situation, that is, not to the letter or
message itself but to the traditional greetings and salutations that messenger must
offer before actually reading aloud the text of the letter. In his rendition, the open-
ing formula should be translated: “After you address PN1, (you will say) ‘this is what
PN2 says’.” This makes pragmatic sense, but there is evidence to support the older
interpretation, which links the formulas in the two languages.
The first argument is diachronic. The oldest Sumerian letters—the five from
Early Dynastic III Girsu and one of unknown origin—all use the formula PN1 na-e-
a, PN2-ra du 11-ga-na, “(This) is what PN1 says, speak it to PN2,” with the second
verb in the imperative (Kienast and Volk 1995: 25–36). In the Sargonic period, the
imperative is replaced with the prospective ù-na-dug 4. At the same time, some
letters have a new version of the formula in which the order of the constituents is
interchanged—that is, the classic order that will become standard in Ur III times
and later. Without listing minor variations, the development of all of this can be
summarized thus:

PN1 na-e-a, PN2-ra du 11-ga-na > PN1 na-e-a, PN2-ra ù-na-(a)-dug 4

§ PN2-ra ù-na-(a)-dug 4, PN1 na-ab-bé-a

28. Lexical texts preserve an invocation for a third part, ù-na-dè-peš, “say for the third
time,” but this is rare in actual letters (Brisch 2007: 32).
32 Sumerian Literary Letters

As I have already noted above, the Ur III letter-orders are functionally and structur-
ally different. The few texts that include the names of both correspondents have
varying orders of constituents:

PN1-ra ù-na-a-dug 4, PN2-e na-ab-bé-a: TCS 1 7; AOAT 274 246 4

PN2-e na-ab-bé-a, PN1-ra ù-na-a-dug 4: TCS 1 1; BiOr 15 78; BiOr 26
173; Michalowski, LEM, 182; AuOr 17–18 228 40

As a result, one can observe that the standardization of the opening formula of
Sumerian-language letters is first encountered in Old Babylonian literary epistles
but when this regularization actually took place is impossible to determine. In the
earliest examples, the name of the person who sends the letter is fronted, as this
is the new information that the recipient needs to hear first, but this requires an
awkward relative construction with a deleted head (na.[b].e.a, “which PN says”)
and eventually the order is reversed, most likely for aesthetic reasons but also under
the influence of the more familiar Akkadian epistles. Whatever the origins of the
formula may have been, by Old Babylonian times the prospective form ù-na-a-
dug 4 u.na.i.e.dug must have referred to the message of the letter and not to an
oral greeting recited by the messenger, as is clear from the poetic letters of petition,
which often have long bipartite introductions, the first headed by ù-na-a-dug 4 and
the second by ù-na-dè-dah, “say furthermore.”
The pragmatics as well as the interlingual relationship are similar to what one
finds in the instruction sections of certain kinds of incantations in which Sumerian
prospective forms are translated as imperatives in Akkadian. 29
These structural differences notwithstanding, there is no indication in the col-
lections or in the catalogs that letters and letters of petition were kept separate in
the native tradition. Nevertheless, we are undoubtedly justified in following Hallo
and considering the letter of petition as a specific category. The history of this form
can be well traced and is instructive for the history of Sumerian literature: while it
has its origins in the Ur III period, if not earlier, its floruit came in the middle of the
Old Babylonian period, long after Sumerian ceased to be a spoken language. Indeed,
one could argue that it is the only nonritual Sumerian genre that evolved and grew
in Old Babylonian times. 30 Royal hymns and various prayers were still composed at
this time, but most of the texts that were copied originated much earlier.
Royal letters of petition, unlike many other literary works, can be dated fairly
precisely and thus, together with royal hymns, they are the perfect objects of study
for literary historians. The earliest datable example of a letter of petition was written
to king Šulgi of Ur, written by a military officer by the name of Abaindasa who had
fallen upon hard times (AbŠ1 [4]). This short text, consisting of 27 lines in most
redactions, shows all the characteristics of the form: the formulas are all there, and it

29. On the pragmatics of Sumerian epistolary practice, see also now Michalowski 2011.
30. On the literary revival under the Larsa kings, see the analysis in Brisch (2007), with
special emphasis on the letter-prayers of the period.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 33

is laden with metaphor and poetic parallelism. Indeed, the text is so filled with meta-
phorical imagery that it is impossible to ascertain what actually caused Aba­indasa to
fall out of favor with his liege. Fortunately, unlike any other text of this genre, this
one has a larger epistolographic context, as there is an exchange of letters between
the Grand Vizier Aradmu and King Šulgi concerning this matter to the king. 31
The most recent known Sumerian archival letter (Sollberger 1966: 92) is dated
to the time of Lipit-Eštar (1934–1924 b.c.) but literary letters in Sumerian mention-
ing Isin kings continued to be composed and used for school purposes. The Sumerian
Epistolary Miscellany begins, after one transitional CKU letter, with pairs of letters
between the kings Iddin-Dagan (1974–1954 b.c.) and Lipit-Eštar and their military
officers (SEpM 2–5). The seventh king of the dynasty, Bur-Sin (1895–1874 b.c.), is
listed as the recipient of a letter in the Uruk catalog (line 23′) but no manuscripts of
this composition have been identified to date. A fragmentary ten-line letter to Enlil-
bani (1860–1837 b.c.) is known from a solitary manuscript from Nippur. 32 This ruler
was well known to Old Babylonian schoolchildren, who had to study a very simple
royal hymn to this king in the early days of their instruction (Enlil-bani Hymn A);
later generations knew of him from an ominous anecdote recounted in the Chronicle
of Early Kings (Grayson 1975: 155; Glassner 2004: 271). According to this story, he
was a gardener who was installed as a substitute king by King Erra-imitti (1868–1861
b.c.), but when the rightful ruler died after drinking a “hot porridge,” he remained
on the throne as the new sovereign. 33 It is possible that there was also a letter to
Sumu-la-el of Babylon (1880–1845 b.c.), a contemporary of Enlil-bani, according to
the Berrien Springs literary catalog cited above, but no copies of the text have been
recovered. 34
The last Isin king who figures in the curriculum is Iter-piša (1833–1831 b.c.),
whose four-year reign is otherwise only documented in the Sumerian King List and
in a handful of documents, but no other literary texts in his name were preserved
in the schools. A 24-line letter of petition to this king from a Nippur priest named
Nabi-Enlil is documented in the pre- and post-WW II school exercises from Nip-
pur, on a tablet from Ur, and from a tablet of unknown provenience. 35 The author
identifies himself as a scribe as well as a nu-èš priest. 36 This is the only letter of peti-
tion addressed to an Isin king, and it is formally much closer to the one addressed
by Abaindasa to Šulgi than to the elaborate, structurally more complex letters of
petition of the Larsa dynasty. There are at least two other Sumerian literary letters
written by individuals named Nabi-Enlil. One fragmentary missive is addressed to

31. Letters 5–9; see pp. 75–78 below.

32. Ni. 4326+9534; ISET 2 119, 9′–18′.
33. pappasu emmetu.
34. See p. 25 above.
35. 3 N-T 901, 48 (SLFN 23); 3 N-T 919, 455 (SLFN 23); 3 N-T 454 = UM 55-21-329; CBS
7857b; CBS 14041 + N 2740; UET 6/3 563 (*425); MS 2287, reconstructed by M. Civil.
36. Lines 7–8: Ina-bi-den-lí l dub-sar nu-è[š . . .] lú šùd-dè lugal dumu nib[ruki . . .].
34 Sumerian Literary Letters

his “colleagues,” 37 but little can be made out of the contents at present. Still another
letter of someone by that name deals with scribal education (ANL 9).
Ancient Greek, Arabic, Byzantine, Italian, Spanish Renaissance, as well as Brit-
ish and Continental eighteenth-century writings testify to the semiotic importance
of letters in the rise of generic consciousness, in debates about the nature of fiction
and in the development of one particular genre—the novel. Mesopotamian litera-
ture, focused on poetry more than on prose, never developed anything that we could
label as a novel but the closest relative of such a form of storytelling were letter col-
lections. Students in Old Babylonian schools studied these letters and often copied
them in groups on large tablets or on successive smaller ones. Like most Sumerian
literary exercises, the letters were no longer a part of the school curriculum after the
middle of the second millennium, so as a genre they had no effect on later tradition.
The internal history of the genre in the centuries before its abandonment cannot
be recovered, for many of the reasons outlined earlier in this chapter, although one
can see a definite elaboration of the letters of petition in the years between Šulgi
of Ur (2093–2046 b.c.), when the first preserved letter of petition may have been
composed, and the time of King Zimri-Lim of Mari (ca. 1770 b.c.), to whom the
last known epistle of this type was addressed. 38 In other traditions, generic growth
and innovation is often based on imitation and recovery of old examples, especially
in weakly developed genres (see e.g., Javitch 1998), but with our current state of
documentation, Sumerian literature in general defies such analysis. Letters are no
exception. Nevertheless, certain characteristics of the genre, if we may now use the
term with more confidence, are of interest for the general history of textuality and
écriture, and one may conclude with two simple observations. The first is formal
in nature: in many cultures, such as in the Arabic-language world, epistles played
a crucial role in the development of prose (see, e.g., Latham 1983). Prose never at-
tained any importance in Sumerian literature; indeed, the most substantial corpus of
literary prose consists of the very letters under discussion here. Moreover, this form
could not hold its own against the power of poetry and thus produced its own poetic
form: the letter-prayer. The second observation is more substantive. C. Brant (2000:
377), writing about the European epistolary novel, noted that, “in the novel of let-
ters, the author plays on the link between reality and fiction to sow seeds of doubt.”
There are reasons to believe that the Old Babylonian school masters used Sumerian
letters—above all, the epistles of the house of Ur—in just such a fashion, as I have
attempted to describe above. One may even go as far as to suggest that this question-
ing of received history, of royal power, of the role of writing, and of the scribal classes
in the structure of the state was deeply embedded in these cuneiform exercises.

37. Ni. 4491 (ISET 2 121) gi 4-me-a-aš-u 10-ne ù-[na-(a)-dug4].

38. Letter to Zimri-Lim, edited in Charpin 1992; a copy was subsequently published in Gui­
chard 1997, followed by a new translation by Durand (1997: 103–10).
 Chapter 3

The Royal Letters in

Their Literary Setting

The letters of the kings of Ur are the topic of this book. Because we only know
them from cuneiform tablets written during the eighteenth century b.c., approxi-
mately two-and-a-half centuries after the collapse of the Ur III state, they cannot
be considered direct witnesses to the events they profess to relate. The texts that
have survived are all exercises of young students, who studied these letters as they
learned Sumerian in cities such as Nippur, Ur, Uruk, and elsewhere, long after the
demise of the writers and recipients of these letters as well as of the language of their
correspondence. The core of this work is the edition of these letters but, because of
their double alterity and double reception, in Old Babylonian days as well as in our
own time, they must be situated in both of their environments, as participants in
the educational process and as purported historical documents from an earlier age.
In order to effect this analysis, I offer here an overview of the material that will be
discussed in the pages that follow.
The Correspondence of the Kings of Ur (CKU), as we know it today, consists of 24
Sumerian-language letters, reconstructed from 115 cuneiform tablets; most of these
epistles have survived in multiple copies, but some are known from only a single
source. Until now, this “corpus” has been known to modern scholars as “The Royal
Correspondence of Ur,” a title that was bestowed by W. W. Hallo in his pioneering
work on literary letters (1968) and that served as the title of my doctoral disserta-
tion, which included preliminary editions of most of these texts (Michalowski 1976).
Decades have passed since that thesis was completed: the editions offered here have
been constructed anew and the order of the items changed, raising the possibility of
confusion, because some scholars have cited the letters according to the number-
ing used in my now-obsolete edition. The clearest way to avoid mis­understandings
about these letters is to rename the corpus and to provide it with a new acronym—
hence CKU. The old designation RCU will be reserved for reference to the 1976
dissertation.
A list of these letters follows, with an abbreviation that helps to identify the text,
followed by the number assigned in Miguel Civil’s catalog of Sumerian literary com-
35
36 The Royal Letters in Their Literary Setting

positions and by the old RCU number. 1 A concordance between CKU and RCU is
provided on p. 246 below.

The Correspondence of the Kings of Ur (CKU)

1. Aradmu to Šulgi 1 (ArŠ1; 3.1.1, A1; RCU 1)
1a. Aradmu to Šulgi 1a (ArŠ1a)
2. Šulgi to Aradmu 1 (ŠAr1; 3.1.2, A2; RCU2)
3. Aradmu to Šulgi 2 (ArŠ2; 3.1.3+3.1.11, A2a; RCU 3+4)
4. Abaindasa to Šulgi 1 (AbŠ1; 3.1.21, B1)
5. Šulgi to Aradmu 2 (ŠAr2; 3.1.61;+RCU 16)
6. Šulgi to Aradmu 3 (ŠAr3; 3.1.13.1; RCU 8)
7. Aradmu to Šulgi 3 (ArŠ3; 3.1.5; RCU 7)
8. Aradmu to Šulgi 4 (ArŠ4)
9. Aradmu to Šulgi 5 (ArŠ5; 3.1.6; RCU 6)
10. Aradmu to Šulgi 6 (ArŠ6; 3.1.4; RCU 5)
11. Urdun to Šulgi 1 (UrŠ1; 3.1.11.1; RCU 14)
12. Aradmu? to Šulgi? 7 (ArŠ7)
13. Puzur-Šulgi to Šulgi 1 (PuŠ1; 3.1.7; RCU 11)
14. Šulgi to Puzur-Šulgi 1 (ŠPu1; 3.1.8; RCU 9+10)
15. Šulgi to Išbi-Erra 1 (ŠIš1; 3.1.13.2; RCU 15)
16. Amar-Sin to Šulgi 1 (AmŠ1; 3.1.12; RCU 12)
17. Šulgi to Amar-Sin (ŠAm1; 3.1.13; RCU 13)
18. Šarrum-bani to Šu-Sin (ŠaŠu1; 3.1.15; RCU 17)
19. Šu-Sin to Šarrum-bani 1 (ŠuŠa1; 3.1.16; RCU 18)
20. Šu-Sin to Lu-Nanna and Šarrum-bani 1 (ŠuLuŠa1; 3.3.31)
21. Išbi-Erra to Ibbi-Sin 1 (IšIb1; 3.1.17; RCU 19)
22. Ibbi-Sin to Išbi-Erra 1 (IbIš1; 3.1.18; RCU 20)
23. Puzur-Numušda to Ibbi-Sin 1 (PuIb1; 3.1.19, A3; RCU 21)
24. Ibbi-Sin to Puzur-Numušda 1 (IbPu1; 3.1.20; RCU 22)

Origin and Date of the CKU Manuscripts

Origin
As noted above, the CKU is preserved on 115 clay tablets, all of them from the
Old Babylonian period, with the exception of a Middle Babylonian manuscript from

1. The catalog remains unpublished, but some of the information has been used in the Ox-
ford University online editions of Sumerian literary texts. That edition was for the most part
done without collations and without utilization of unpublished materials and will therefore not
be referenced here. Letters 1, 3, and 23 were once known as Collection A, hence the A numbers;
see above, p. 22.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 37

Susa. These tablets derive from Nippur, Ur, Isin, Kish, Susa, Sippar, and elsewhere.
The exact breakdown is as follows: 2

As is evident from the chart, the majority of the tablets—just over half—are
from Nippur. The rest of the provenienced texts are available in much smaller num-
bers: eight texts from Ur, six from Susa, three from Sippar, and one each from Isin
and Uruk. In terms of percentages, this may be represented as:

2. Well after the completion of this manuscript, I became aware of four unpublished tablets
with CKU letters; they are not included here. Moreover, Niek Veldhuis identified a new duplicate
to letter PuIb1 (23), which was posted on CDLI (P342755) when this book was already in press.
It is included in the edition as source X4. It is not included in the counts in the charts on this
page.
38 The Royal Letters in Their Literary Setting

Few of the manuscripts were found in the course of controlled excavations, and
even fewer have reliable, well-described information about the exact location and
context of their discovery. A synopsis of what is currently known about the origin of
these tablets follows.

Nippur
Ten of the tablets from the site are from the third post-World War II season of
excavations at the site, and they are the only tablets that have well-established find
spots (McCown and Haines 1967; Civil and Sjöberg 1979; Civil 1979a: 7–8). 3

Excavation Number Location CKU Number/Source

3 N-T 8 4 (N1)
3 N-T 80 7 (N1), SEpM 2
3 N-T 306 21 (N1)
3 N-T 309 4 (N2)
3 N-T 311 1 (N1), 2 (N1), 23 (N1)
3 N-T 900,25 TA 205 level XI floor 1 1 (N2)
3 N-T 903,102 TA 205 level XI floor 2 2 (N3)
3 N-T 918,440 + 3 N-T 919,486 TA 191 level XI floor 1 1 (N3)
3 N-T 919,459 TA 191 level XI floor 1 23 (N1)
3 N-T 927,516 TA general area, sub 1 (N4)
X1

With the exception of 3 N-T 80, all of these were discovered in House F, which was
a private house used for scribal instruction in the first decade of the reign of Samsu-
iluna of Babylon. The house provided archaeologists with almost 1,500 exercise tab-
lets (Stone 1987: 56–59; Robson 2001). 4
The other 47 Nippur CKU tablets derive from the excavations conducted by the
University of Pennsylvania in the last four years of the nineteenth century. For all
practical purposes, there is no reliable information on their original location. The
literary tablets apparently were mostly found on “Tablet Hill,” that is, in the same
residential section in which the later trenches TA, TB, and TC were sunk. Although
the early excavators at Nippur recovered tens of thousands of school texts, it is likely
that most of them come from only a handful of private houses that were used for
teaching, probably similar in style and layout to House F. Here is a description of the
discovery of one such house, on Hill X, Site F (this has nothing to do with the post-
WW II “House F”; Peters 1897, 2: 210–11):

3. On Nippur tablets, see also Wilcke 2000: 17–22.

4. 3 N-T 80 was found in the adjacent House I.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 39

Here, in one room of a house of unbaked brick, about ten metres long by five me-
tres broad, there had evidently been a depository of tablets; these had been placed
around the walls of the room on wooden shelves, the ashes of which we found mixed
with the tablets on the floor. We took out of this room thousands of tablets, and frag-
ments of tablets, of unbaked clay. For four days eight gangs were taking out tablets
from this room, as fast as they could work, and for four days the tablets were brought
into camp by boxfuls, faster than we could handle them. These tablets were of later
date than the ones found at E, as might be conjectured from the difference of level.
Other rooms of this group contained tablets in fair numbers, but in no other had
they been stored in the same way in which they had been stored in F. Close to F, to
the northeastward, was a brick structure, on which tablets were found half-imbedded
in bitumen. Between the two was a brick well, the bricks laid in bitumen. The débris
in this well, like all the débris in that immediate neighborhood, was full of unbaked
tablets, with occasional baked ones intermixed. We excavated the well to a depth of
14.5 metres, at which point, 4.5 metres below plain level, we struck water, finding
for over thirteen metres, fragments of tablets, most of which were badly injured by
water. Neither in this series of rooms, nor at E, did we find any pottery or household
utensils.

This description, and similar descriptions embedded in the unpublished papers from
the Pennsylvania expedition stored at the University Museum, provide ample proof
that the majority of the Nippur literary texts were found in teaching establishments
in the well-to-do parts of the city, in places similar to House F, as already noted
above, as well as comparable locations at Sippar, Ur, and elsewhere. Note that the
nineteenth-century excavators had undoubtedly discovered a house with a water ba-
sin used for recycling student exercise tablets of the kind found in other houses used
for learning writing (Faivre 1995).

Ur
The eight CKU tablets from Ur were all discovered during Sir Leonard Woolley’s
1922–1934 excavations at the site. Most of the Old Babylonian literary texts were
found in three houses, No. 1 Broad St. and at 5 and 7 Quiet St.; they are currently
housed in the British Museum and in the Iraq Museum. Some stray tablets of a simi-
lar type are registered as having come from elsewhere in the city or are without any
find-spot information, but most of these were undoubtedly excavated at No. 1 Broad
St. These houses, and the texts they contained, have been analyzed extensively by
Charpin (1986: 419–86), Diakonoff (1990: 126–54), and, most recently, by Brusasco
(1999–2000: 152–54, 159–61), Wilcke (2000: 11–13), Delnero (2006: 44–46), and
Ludwig (2009: 4–8).
The following list provides the known findspots of the CKU tablets from Ur: 5

5. I wish to thank Christopher Walker for his help in this matter; he provided the explana-
tory comments in the footnotes to this list.
40 The Royal Letters in Their Literary Setting

Publication/Excavation Number Location CKU Number/Source

UET 6/2 173 (U. 7741) No. 7 Quiet St. 4, Ur1
UET 6/2 174 (U. 16853) No. 1 Broad St. 1, Ur1; 2, Ur1; 23, Ur1
UET 6/2 178 (U. 16857) No. 1 Broad St. 4, Ur2
UET 6/2 179 (U. 16894B) No. 1 Broad St. 4, Ur3
UET 6/2 181 (U. 17900V) ?5 2, Ur2
UET 6/2 183 (U. 16885) No. 1 Broad St. 18, Ur1
UET 6/3 558 ? 23, Ur2
UET 6/3 561 ? 12, Ur1

Other literary letters known from Ur have similar contexts: 67

Publication/Excavation Number Location Letter

UET 6/2 175 (U. 16272) ? 6
SEpM 16
UET 6/2 176 (U. 16894A) No. 1 Broad St. SEpM 16
UET 6/2 177 (U. 16849) No. 1 Broad St. SEpM 6
UET 6/2 180 (U. 16900G) No. 1 Broad St. SEpM 17
UET 6/2 182 (U. 7707) ? (“EM loose in soil”) Letter to Utu

As is evident from this list, the majority of the Ur tablets were found at No. 1 Broad
St., a house that contained tablets brought together from a variety of places and
which was probably destroyed around the tenth year of Samsu-iluna. Only one of the
letter tablets—the epistolary collection UET 6/2 173—was found at No. 7 Quiet St.,
in a level that most likely dates from the time of the Rim-Sin rebellion. It is interest-
ing that this compilation tablet is different in content from anything we know from
Ur, or from elsewhere, for that matter.

Sippar
The three tablets excavated from this site are in the Sippar (Si) collection of the
Istanbul Archaeological Museums and almost certainly derive from the excavations
conducted in 1894 by Vincent Scheil (1902) at the site of Abu Habbah—that is, the
site of the city that was called Sippar Yaḫrurum in Old Babylonian times.

6. According to C. Walker, “The only item in the dig register is a cylinder seal; therefore
the entire tablet group U.17900 represents a duplicate numbering, therefore with no recorded
provenance.”
7. “The item recorded in the dig register is a mace-head of Shu-Sin; so the tablet has a
wrong number and therefore no provenance.”
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 41

Si. 420 (USFS 134) = letter 3 (Si1)

Si. 524 = letter 23 (Si1)
Si. 557 = letter 24 (Si1)

Scheil found most of the Old Babylonian school-texts in one house (1902: 30–54;
Lion and Robson 2005: 47–48). It is clear from Scheil’s description that he discov-
ered a teaching establishment similar to those excavated at Nippur and Tell ed-Der,
and that many of the school exercises were found abandoned in an enclosure used to
preserve wet clay and to recycle old tablets. Unfortunately, it is impossible to discern
precisely which tablets were actually found in this house and which came from other
work on the mound during the same excavations. All the finds were deposited in
what is now the Istanbul Archeological Museum and cataloged with Si(ppar) num-
bers. There has been some suspicion that some of the tablets in the Si collection are
actually Nippur pieces that were mixed in with them in the museum, but personal
inspection of a number of the Si literary tablets in Istanbul convinces me that most
of them are not from Nippur at all. My recollection is that the ones I saw were physi-
cally different from tablets uncovered in the southern city, and I am fairly confident
that they were indeed found at Sippar. Thus, although some tablets from the Nippur
excavations may have made their way into this collection, none of the three CKU
tablets with Si numbers are from Nippur.
There are seven other tablets that may possibly have originated from Sippar;
these are discussed in the section on provenienced sources below.

Kish
The two Kish sources derive from the 1912 excavations on the mound of Uhai-
mir and Inghara directed by Henri de Genouillac (1924 = PRAK).
AO 10630 (PRAK II C10) = letter 24 (Ki1)
AO 10819 (PRAK I D60) = letter 13 (Ki1)
The published reports of the excavations are less than informative, and almost noth-
ing is known about the findspots of tablets, except that the Old Babylonian school
texts were mainly found on the mound of Uhaimir. A number of tablets were pub-
lished by de Genouillac (1924), arranged as series A through D, but these designa-
tions have nothing to do with their original locations. It is possible that the French
excavators found some of the Old Babylonian school-texts in one large house, but
it is impossible to confirm this conjecture (de Genouillac 1924: 23; Delnero 2006:
51–53; see now Ohgama and Robson 2010: 208).

Susa
The six Susa manuscripts come from two different contexts. Five are Old Baby-
lonian practice texts on round tablets, and nothing is known about their findspots;
the sixth is a Middle Babylonian two-column compilation tablet (see Susa below).
42 The Royal Letters in Their Literary Setting

There is only one other CKU round tablet. 8 Only two other such “lentils” with lines
from literary letters are currently known. 9 It therefore appears that in Mesopotamia
proper letters were not used very early in the school curriculum.
MDP 18 51 = letter 4, Su1
MDP 27 87 = letter 2, Su1
MDP 27 88 = letter 2, Su1
MDP 27 207 = letter 4, Su2
MDP 27 212 = letter 23, Su1

The Old Babylonian Susa exercise tablets have unique characteristics and deserve a
full treatment, but that lies beyond the scope of this study. Most of the round tablets
are inscribed with elementary exercises such as lexical excerpts, divine and personal
names, as well as proverbs, but also with lines from literary compositions such as
Message of Ludiira (MDP 27 107) or Gilgameš and Huwawa A (MDP 18 49; MDP 27
93, 217). It seems that three of the most-commonly encountered core CKU letters
were also used: ArŠ1 (2), AbŠ1 (3), and PuIb1 (23), but no other literary letters. 10
On a Mesopotamian text of this type, one would expect the reverse to contain
the student’s version of what the teacher wrote on the obverse. At Susa, the reverse
often contains an Akkadian translation, a syllabic transcription, or both, sometimes
contained within a rectangular border that seems to imitate the shape of a portrait-
or landscape-oriented imgida.
The date of the Old Babylonian school-texts from Susa is not precisely es-
tablished; in the introduction to MDP 18, Scheil wrote that “ils s’étendent chro-
nologiquement du temps d’Agade à celui du prince Pala iššan, c’est-à-dire assez avant
dans la période correspondant à la première dynastie de Babylone” (Dossin 1927: i).
The other Susa tablet is the multicolumn text. 11 The format of this text is un-
usual: it is bilingual, in syllabic Sumerian and in Akkadian, and the two languages
are not written in separate lines but run one into the other. The precise date of this
tablet is difficult to establish. There are very few internal criteria to go by, because we
do not have usable comparable material. It was found at Susa during the 1962–1963
campaign together with ten Akkadian-language omen texts in a pot in a cache that
was hidden in a prepared pit in level AXII, locus 14, in the sector that the excava-
tors named “Chantier A.” There has been some controversy concerning the dating
of the level and the ascription of the tablets to a particular stratigraphic context.
The original editor of the literary texts, R. Labat (1974: 2), could only state that the
tablets were undoubtedly later than the Old Babylonian period but had to be writ-
ten prior to the time of the great Assyrian libraries. The proper placement of these
finds had to be postponed until the archaeological sequences of the Ville Royale at

8. Si. 420 (Si1 of ArŠ2 [3]).

9. BIN 2 53 (SEpM 7) and CBS 4078 (Brisch 2007: 170, Letter of Sin-iddinam to Utu).
10. Unless MDP 27 104 contains a version of line 10 of Letter of Gudea to His God 10. The
text reads: diir-u 10 lú kur-zu nu-me-en / ba-ar-mi-en-tar-re.
11. Compilation tablet Sua; see pp. 56–56 below.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 43

Susa were analyzed in full; this began with the publication of H. Gasche’s (1973)
exhaustive analysis of the pottery. In a review article of that book, E. Carter (1979:
121) presented her own scheme for the dating of levels in the Ville Royale and pro-
posed that level AXII should be assigned to approximately 1400 b.c. Steve, Gasche,
and de Mayer (1980) subsequently published a long rejoinder to Carter’s review in
which they provided more-precise information on the context of the literary texts
from Chantier A. The matter is complicated by the fact that, although the tablets
were found in level XII, they were in an intrusive feature and undoubtedly belonged
to a later time, although one can only surmise as to the date and purpose of this pit
(Steve, Gasche, and de Meyer 1980: 123, 125). On the basis of their reanalysis of
the stratigraphy of Chantier A, the three scholars proposed that the pit had to have
been dug from a later level and ascribed it to the period of abandonment of the area
between levels XI and X–IX. Then R. D. Biggs and M. Stolper (1983) published an
omen text from the Iranian site of Choga Pan West that shared many features with
the unusual texts of the same type that were found in Susa together with the CKU
tablet and presented persuasive arguments for dating all of them some time late in
the fifteenth or early in the fourteenth century b.c. 12
Whatever the exact date, it is clear that the tablet was written by someone who
was using language and writing conventions that were different from those known
to us from the OB Susa school-texts. While maintaining writings such as šà for the
Akkadian pronoun ša, a convention that goes back at least as far back as the Ur III
documents from that city, the CKU tablet does not seem to represent the type of
Sumerian syllabic orthography that is characteristic of the older Sumerian school-
texts from the city. Similar to other texts from the jar found at Susa, it represents a
unique literary world whose contours are not well known, that was current in Iran in
Middle Babylonian times and made its way to Mesopotamia as well (Rutz 2006: 64).

Uruk
Only one CKU tablet was found at Uruk, the compilation Uka containing ŠAr1
(1), SEpM 2, and possibly other SEpM items. The tablet was found together with
179 other OB tablets that were discarded in antiquity in a Scherbenloch, or sherd pit,
located near the ceremonial complex in the center of the city (Cavigneaux 1996:
2–5). Although none of these literary tablets bears any date, the nonliterary tablets
that were discarded together with them all date from Rim-Sin 31–42. The Uruk col-
lection consists, for the most part, of standard school texts very similar in content to
those found in Nippur. However, only four other literary letters were found in this
group: SEpM, found on the compilation tablet, as well as two copies of SEpM 6 and
a bilingual letter of petition to Nanna (Cavigneaux 1996: 59–61, nos. 113–15). This
stands in contrast to the unique catalog of letter incipits from the sherd pit, which

12. See also Daneshmand 2004 for a similar omen tablet from Haft Tepe and Rutz 2006 for
an astronomical omen in the same style from Nippur, copied from an original from Susa. See also
Michalowski 2006f.
44 The Royal Letters in Their Literary Setting

was discussed above (pp. 25–27). The catalog is broken and does not have the
full listing of the royal letters, but what is preserved indicates that the Šu-Sin and
Ibbi-Sin correspondence was known to someone in OB Uruk.

Isin
The one CKU source from Isin is a landscape-oriented practice tablet. 13 It was
found in “Grabungsabschnitt NIIn, Bauteil 5: Raum 335N 35E 8: 332,15N.34,60E
+7,24.” 14 This tablet was found in the house at this locus; the house, as well as the
street outside, contained numerous literary and administrative tablets, seemingly
from the time of Samsu-iluna. It seems fairly certain that whatever else may have
been going on in this building, instruction in cuneiform was part of the picture. For
more detail and bibliography, see Wilcke 2000: 15–16 and Delnero 2006: 49–50.

Tutub
Two tablets in Berkeley are said to have come from Tutub ( Khafadje), in the
Diyala region (Foxvog 1976: 101). In reality, the provenience of these tablets is
difficult to establish. Niek Veldhuis was kind enough to investigate the matter at
the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology of the University of Califormia,
Berkeley, on my behalf and informs me that many of the tablets that are reportedly
from Khafadje were actually purchased by Henry F. Lutz in New York in May/June of
1930 from Alfred Kohlberg, while others were brought back by Lutz from Baghdad
in 1929. Since controlled digging at the site began in 1930, these cannot come from
the official excavations. It is therefore impossible to know if these two tablets actu-
ally came from Tutub or not.

Tablets of Unknown Origin

Little can be said about the 37 tablets of unknown provenience. The eight Yale
Babylonian Collection tablets are said to have come from Larsa. Dyckhoff (1998;
1999: 108–13) has suggested that they are part of a large group of literary texts that
come from a “library of the Enki temple in Larsa” that were subsequently scattered
in a variety of European and American collections. 15 Until a full investigation of
these tablets is undertaken, this remains an unsubstantiated hypothesis (Brisch 2007:
33–34). It is certainly possible that some of these tablets were found in an estate be-
longing to a family that was closely related to an Enki temple in Larsa, but this by no
means suggests that they belonged to a temple library; more probably, this is another
example of home-schooling by temple officials. Certainly, Enki/Ea is prominent in
some of the Yale texts. There is an unpublished myth concerning this deity in the
collection; three of the CKU letters were copied in Samsu-iluna year 1 by the stu-

13. IB 733 = IM 766444, ŠAm1 [17] Is1.

14. I am grateful to Claus Wilcke for this information.
15. Dyckhoff (1999: 110) suggests that the Yale tablets in the range from YBC 4000 through
10,000 came from this “library” in Larsa. All the texts used here fall between these two numbers.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 45

dent Qišti-Ea, whose other exercises are also to be found among unpublished tablets
at Yale, as noted below. It is perhaps relevant that, on the Yale tablet YBC 7149, the
name of Lu-Nanna, governor of Zimudar, is written as Lu-Enki. 16
One tablet in the Abbey of Montserrat in Catalonia is said to come from Baby-
lon, but this ascription is shaky at best. Even less reliable is the annotation “said to
be from Warka” that accompanies the publication of AN1930-581 (OECT 5 28
[p. 54]). 17
Very little can be said about the majority of the unprovenienced sources of RCU
that are scattered in museums and private collections. The first list contains tablets
that are in the British Museum:
1. BM 54327 (82-5-22,479) + 82993 (83-1-21,156)
2. BM 54894 (82-5-22,1224)
3. BM 108869 = 1914-4-7, 35
4. BM 108870 = 1914-4-7, 36
5. BM 16897+22617 (92-7-9 13 + 94-1-15 419)
Texts 3 and 4 are from purchase, and nothing instructive can be said about them
at present. The first two tablets are likely to be from Sippar, although it cannot be
said which mound, Abu Habbah or Tell ed Der, is the probable source. The 82-5-22
collections also included tablets from a late archive from Babylon (van Driel 1989:
114–15), but there is no information on any possible Old Babylonian texts from that
site in the mix.
Here one must refer to CBS 346 (PBS 10/4 8, ArŠ5 [9]), from the “Khabaza col-
lection” of the University Museum in Philadelphia. The Sippar provenience of this
tablet, while hardly certain, is most probable. The “Khabaza” tablets were purchased
in London in 1888 and 1895 (Civil 1979b), and because most of the administra-
tive texts in these lots are from Sippar, it is assumed that many of the literary texts
from these acquisitions come from there as well. The CBS text is quite different in
appearance, ductus, and format than the excavated tablets from Abu Habbah but is
similar to some others in the Khabaza collection at the University Museum and to a
few in the “Sippar Collections” of the British Museum. These texts are all bilingual,
with the interlinear Akkadian lines written in smaller script; some passages are fully
translated, while others are only partially glossed or omitted altogether in the Ak-
kadian version. For examples of similar tablets, one might compare the three sources
for the apocryphal Lugalanemundu Inscription, 18 all in Philadelphia, and CT 58 5
from the British Museum, but there are other texts of this type in both collections.
The Khabaza collections in the University Museum of the University of Pennsyl-
vania were acquired at about the same time as the Bu 82-5-12 group in the British

16. See the commentary to ŠaŠu1: 27 (18).

17. Inventory numbers in the Ashmolean Museum were formerly marked as Ashm.; this has
been changed to AN.
18. On the sources, see Civil 1979b.
46 The Royal Letters in Their Literary Setting

Museum and similarly seem to have been found at Abu Habbah or Tell ed Der (van
Driel 1989: 112).
Finally, one should note that collective tablet Xa, which has all four letters of
the Ibbi-Sin correspondence, may also have been written in Sippar. If one looks
at the matrix of the letter PuIb1 (23), in lines 6–16 and 35–46 there is an overlap
of text with source Si1, excavated in Sippar, and the number of unique variants
shared between the two tablets strongly suggests that they belong to the same textual
tradition.
Date
All the sources, as noted above, are Old Babylonian in date, with the excep-
tion of the Middle Babylonian Susa tablet (compilation tablet Su1), and possibly
compilation tablet Xf (Ni. 3083 [ISET 2 115]). More precision is difficult to come
by, since so few of the CKU tablets bear year-names. Fifteen of the manuscripts have
colophons. 19 One has only “day 26” (F), and eight have only the month and day (A,
B, C, D, G, J, M, N). Five tablets have the month and day, followed or preceded by
the name of the scribe (A: Sin-išmeanni; B: Qišti-Ea; D: Ali-banišu; G: Zababa-[. . .];
J: Ibni-ilum).
Year-names are used to date five unprovenienced tablets, ranging from the 1st
(1749 b.c.) to the 28th year of King Samsu-iluna of Babylon (1722 b.c.). Source X2
of letter 18 (ŠaŠu1, col. C) was written on the third day of the eleventh month of
Si1. Three other tablets, all written by one Qišti-Ea, were written that same year:
manuscript X5 of letter 2 (viii.7) has no year-name but must belong to that year,
as the same young man copied letter 13 (PuŠ1) on two consecutive tablets on the
20th and 25th days of month nine of Samsu-iluna’s accession year (X4, X5). Three
months later, he worked on YBC 4705, which contains the Letter of Sin-iddinam to
Nininsina (Si1.xii.16; Brisch 2007: 76).
The last two dated tablets are compilation tablet Xa (col. O), a two-column
tablet of unknown origin that contained the non-Nippur versions of the whole Ibbi-
Sin correspondence, that is, letters 20–24, written by someone whose name ends in
-ia-a, son of Kubulum, on Si27.v.17; and one by Šamaš-mušallim, written on Si28.
ix.5 (ArŠ4 [8], X1, col. E).
The earliest-known manuscript of CKU may be a tablet from Uruk, since the
sherd pit in which it was found contained tablets dated RS 31–42 (1822–1763
b.c.). 20 The tablets from No. 7 Quiet St. in Ur and House F in Nippur were written
at some time before Si11 (1739 b.c.). The tablets from No. 1 Broad St. also date from

19. The colophons/subscripts are collected on pp. 247–248 below, listed by letters of the
alphabet.
20. ArŠ1 source Uk1. Huber (2001: 205) claims that the earliest source of CKU goes back
to the nineteenth year of Sumu-la-el of Babylon (1880–1845 b.c.). She notes that the Kish tablet
PRAK II, D 60 (PuŠ1 [13], source Ki1) belongs to the archives of the Zababa temple restored
in that year by the Babylonian king. But Zababa in the colophon is simply the beginning of the
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 47

before this year, but because they may have been brought there, from one or more
other houses, their date is uncertain. The Nippur tablets, which make up the largest
percentage of the sources, bear no dates, but archaeological information, although
not unambiguous, suggests that many of them come from around Si10 (1740 b.c.)
and at the latest from Si29 (1721 b.c.), or from the first two years of Iluma-ilu of the
Sea­land Dynasty (Civil 1979a: 8). 21

The Royal Correspondence as School Literature

The literary letters, including those of CKU, are almost exclusively Old Babylo-
nian school exercises written by young boys and perhaps occasionally by young girls
in Sippar (Lion and Robson 2005, Lion 2009). The curricular approach to Sumerian
literature has become fashionable of late, and the elements of this instruction have
been recounted so many times that it makes little sense to go over it all in detail
once again; therefore, I will only provide a brief description of the issues involved to
provide the proper background for further analysis.
A few decades ago, a statement such as “all Sumerian literature was school lit-
erature” would have been greeted with some skepticism; but now, due to the exem-
plary detailed research of Hermann Vanstiphout (1978, 1979), Niek Veldhuis (1996,
1997), and Steve Tinney (1998, 1999), the core curriculum of the Old Babylonian
schools in Nippur and places that used a similar syllabus is well known, at least as
far the early phases of instruction are concerned. 22 As originally reconstructed by
Veldhuis (1997: 63), “Phase 1” of instruction consisted of four graded sets of texts,
beginning with sign‑ and personal-name lists, moving on to thematic lexical texts
such as the tree‑ and wood-list, and then to more complex sign-lists such as Proto-
Ea, Proto-Diri, and mathematical tables. Then students studied their first connected
Sumerian sentences, as found in model contracts and proverb collections. Having
mastered the elements of cuneiform writing, the young adepts were ushered into the
world of Sumerian poetry. According to Tinney (1999: 162), the initial part of this
phase involved learning a quartet of short hymns to kings and deities (“the tetrad”);
this in turn was followed by “the Decad,” a set of ten compositions of various kinds,
hymns to the kings Šulgi and Lipit-Eštar, to the goddess Nungal, the temple of Nin­
hursanga at Keš, as well as myths (Inana and Ebih, Enki’s Journey to Nippur), and
a Gilgameš tale (Gilgameš and Huwawa A). 23 After this, the curriculum was filled

personal name of the student and has nothing to do with a temple, and thus this dating must be
abandoned.
21. The commonly-held opinion that Nippur and other southern cities were completely
abandoned toward the end of Samsu-iluna’s reign may have to be revised in light of the new evi-
dence marshaled by S. Dalley 2009: 7–8.
22. See also, among others, Robson 2001; Volk 1996, 2000; and Wilcke 2000. For a recent
survey, with some new perspectives, see Delnero 2006: 27–147.
23. Full matrixes of all the Decad texts are now available in Delnero 2006: 1857–2473.
48 The Royal Letters in Their Literary Setting

with other literary compositions, but it is unclear if there was any specific order that
was generally followed or if teachers chose whatever they liked at this point. Thus,
E. Robson (2001: 54) has identified a group of fourteen poems that seem to follow at
some point after the Decad in House F at Nippur.
One of the primary criteria for assigning texts to specific phases of the curriculum
is the physical character of the cuneiform tablets inscribed with school compositions.
These were first defined by M. Civil (1979a: 5) in a study of lexical texts and refined
by S. Tinney (1999: 160–61). They are:

Type I Large tablets, cylinders or prisms

Type II The obverse contains a two-column calligraphic exercise: the left
side is written by the instructor, the right-hand side is the work
of the student; the reverse contains a multicolumn excerpt from a
longer list.
Type III Small, one-column tablets that contain material extracted from a
longer text.
Type IV Small lentil-shaped tablets: these have one or more lines of text
written by the teacher on one side and copied by the student on
the other.

Tinney adjusted this typology, which was developed for lexical compositions, adding
the following categories for school literary exercises:

Type S One-column rectangular tablets containing between ten and forty

or even more lines of text. At Nippur and Ur they are almost
exclusively oriented in portrait fashion; at some other places, such
as Isin and Uruk, landscape-oriented tablets of this type were also
used. The Sumerian term for these is im-gíd-da. These correspond
to Civil’s Type III.
Type M Larger tablets with two or more columns on each side.
Type P Prisms that have from four to nine sides. Type M and P are sub-
sumed by Civil’s Type I.

Texts from the elementary phases of instruction, through the Tetrad, are usually
found on tablets of the II and IV variety; beginning with the Decad, Types I and III
predominate.
Eighty-four of the 114 Old Babylonian CKU tablets are one-column daily prac-
tice tablets (Type III). About a sixth sizable—19 tablets—are compilations that con-
tain more than one letter; most of these have more than one column per side (these
are usually referred to as Type M) but there are some that have only one column and,
though they are technically Type S, in practice some of them are functionally more
like Type M items, containing many more lines than the usual im-gíd-da. Three
compilation tablets is a prism (P). Type IV round tablets (“lentils”) are likewise rare;
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 49

the single example from Sippar and the five Susa items are the only indicators that
excerpts from CKU were used somewhere at the earlier level of learning.

Statistically, the proportion of tablet-types is similar to the distribution established

by Kleinerman (2009: 82; 2011: 81) for the SEpM and by Delnero (2006: 99–100)
for the Decad:

CKU SEpM Decad

Type I 17% 16.5% 24%
Type II 0% 0 less than 1%
Type III 75% 75.5% 72%
Type IV 5% 1.3% less than 1%
P 3% 4% 4%

The Type III Practice Tablets

Because the majority of preserved CKU texts are preserved on single-column
tablets, it is useful to take a brief look at the number of lines that these exercises
contain. For obvious reasons, this analysis only takes into account exemplars from
Nippur and Ur.

Type III CKU Tablets from Nippur Type III CKU Tablets from Nippur
ArŠ1 (1) 36 lines ŠAr1 (2) 34 lines
N2 20?–36 N2 1–34(?)
N3 1–20 N3 21–34
N4 1/20–36 N4 1–34
N5 1–13 N5 17–26
N6 20–36 N7 ?
N8 1–? N9 1–34
N10 1–20 N11 21–34
50 The Royal Letters in Their Literary Setting

Type III CKU Tablets from Nippur Type III CKU Tablets from Nippur
ArŠ2 (3) 22+ lines AmŠ1 (16) 12 lines
N2 1–22 N1 1–12
N3 1–? IšIb (21) 30 lines
N4 2′–20′ (short version)
N6 1′–20′ N1 1–14
N7 1′–20′(+) N2 1–14
AbŠ1 (4)24 N3 1–30
N1 PuIb1 (23) 51 lines
N2 N2 23–51
N3 N3 23?–51
N4 N4 1–51 (two column
N7 tablet)
N8 N6 1–51
N9 N7 ?–51
N10 N8 1–22
ArŠ3 (7) 15 lines N9 1–23
N1 1–15 IbPu1 (24) 36 lines
N3 1–15 N1 19–36 25
N4 1–15 N2 1–19
PuŠ1 (13) 34 lines N3 1–36
N1 1–34
N4 1–34
24 25

Type III CKU Tablets from Ur

ŠAr1 (33 lines)
Ur2 1–33
AbŠ1
Ur2
Ur3
ArŠ7 (20+ lines)
Ur1 1–20+
ŠaŠu1 (18) 42 lines
Ur1 1–23
PuIb1 (23)
Ur2 1–36

24. All these tablets appear to contain complete versions of the composition, but because
the number of lines differs in each case, it is difficult to gauge the exact count for each exemplar.
The same holds true for the two Ur practice tablets. See the commentary to the edition.
25. N1 and N2 were written by the same scribe.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 51

As a rule, the CKU daily exercises consist either of a complete letter or, in the case of
longer epistles, only half the composition. Thus, each day a Nippur student learned
anywhere from 14 to 36 lines of epistolary Sumerian. The much more limited Ur
documentation suggests a similar practice in some school or schools in that city. This
compares well with the figures established for the Decad, the ten elementary Sume-
rian literary compositions used at Nippur. According to Delnero (2006: 103–4), the
average shortest number of lines on Type III exercises belonging to this group is 15,
and the general average runs in the range between 28 and 37 lines. This type of evi-
dence is not in itself conclusive, but it does suggest that at Nippur and Ur the CKU
was studied at a relatively early level of instruction, in conjunction with, or perhaps
even before or right after, the Decad.
If we look beyond Nippur, another indication for the way the CKU letters were
used in school instruction comes from a set of tablets in the Yale Babylonian Collec-
tion that were written during the reign of Samsu-iluna by a student named Qišti-Ea.
Wherever these texts may come from, the only other scribe by this name known to
me is the “royal scribe” (dub-sar lugal) who inscribed a Louvre tablet containing
the Tale of the Three Ox Drivers from Adab, dated to year 8 of Ammiṣaduqa—that is,
110 years later than the Qišti-Ea who wrote the Yale tablets—and thus he cannot be
the same person. 26 The Yale tablets written by someone by this name are:
YBC 4185: ŠAr1 (2): Si1.viii.7
YBC 4654: PuŠ1 (13) Si1.ix.20
YBC 4606: PuŠ1 (13) Si1.ix.25
YBC 4705: Letter of Sin-iddinam to Nininsina: Si1.xii.16
YBC 6713: Two Scribes, Si11.i.8
YBC 7176: Supervisor and Scribe, Si11.iv.7!
If we assume that Qišti-Ea did not spend ten years in school, someone else by the
same name must have written the last two. It took more than a month for Qišti-Ea
to progress from CKU 1 to 13. Moreover, he waited four days before finishing the
latter, because the two tablets from the ninth month contain two halves of the com-
position but are not dated on consecutive days. He then labored for another three
months, perhaps working through a version of SEpM, before he tackled one of the
Larsa letter-prayers (Brisch 2007: 34).
What of the tablets themselves and the manner in which they were used in the
schools? Though the consensus is that Type III tablets represent daily exercises, there
is no agreement on the function of the large Type I exemplars. Some years ago, Jer-
rold Cooper (1983: 46) famously observed that the larger tablets often do not have
the best text and can contain more than the usual level of errors, but he did not offer
any explanation as to why this might be the case. Nevertheless, his remarks remain
important, as some modern redactors tend to give more credence to variants from

26. Cavigneaux (1987: 12) notes that, from the paleographic point of view, the tablet may
have been copied in the Kassite period; see also Alster 1991–1993: 27.
52 The Royal Letters in Their Literary Setting

the larger texts in their editions. Recently, Eleanor Robson (2001: 49), writing about
mathematical exercises, stated:
The short extracts on Type II/1 and Type III tablets were deployed in a student’s
first encounters with a composition, as he memorized it section by section. The
longer passages on Types I, II/2, and P tablets, on the other hand, seem to be written
in order to revise earlier work, consolidating individually memorized sections into
lengthier segments.
Delnero (2006: 105–6) investigated the relationship between Type I and Type III
tablets of the Decad and concluded that compositions were generally divided into
four sections, each on a separate Type III tablet, to aid memorization, after which the
student was required to write out the whole poem from memory. While working on a
very different project that involves the reconstruction of the Old Babylonian “fore-
runners” of the first two tablets of the canonical version of the lexical series HAR-ra
= ḫubullu, I came to a similar conclusion that the best explanation for the longer
tablets is that they are the ancient equivalents of exam texts. There are problems
with this proposal, to be sure; for example, what are we to do with a composition
such as Nidaba Hymn C, which is attested almost exclusively on Type I tablets? But as
it stands, Delnero’s proposition serves to explain the wide range of competence evi-
denced in these bigger formats, as well as the fact that on some such texts the level of
accuracy deteriorates within the text, because some students did better than others.
If one accepts this proposal as a working hypothesis, then the order and content of
the compilation tablets provides some evidence for the reconstruction of the man-
ner in which CKU letters were studied in Old Babylonian schools. I will investigate
this matter below, but first I would like to end this section with comments about the
nature of early school instruction.
It is now generally assumed that school children memorized texts from dicta-
tion and/or from model written exemplars and then wrote them down for teachers
to check (Delnero 2006: 81). The problem is that none of the model tablets have
survived, and therefore one suspects that most of the instruction was done by dicta-
tion. Nevertheless, certain features of school exercises, some of them present in CKU
tablets, can only be explained by some form of recourse to a written original. There is
a remarkable unity, for the most part, in the way that each text is divided into lines.
The reasons for this may be purely syntactic, but the variations in the way lines are
laid out are most often explained by the size of tablets or columns and not by scribal
whim. One remarkable example of a feature that is best examined by redactional
activity that leads to a common written manuscript, at least in the hands of some
group of scribes or teachers, is an instance of crasis found in ŠAr1: 24 ([2]; see top of
p. 53). Basic, commonly accepted rules of Sumerian morphology, as well as writing
practices, require that the line be read as *lú igi-bar-ra-ka-ni lú li-bí-(ib)-diri,
and indeed, this is what one finds in only two texts from different origins: N1, from
House F in Nippur, and X2, from the Sippar Collection in the British Museum. 27 It

27. N1 is a compilation tablet (Na), and it does not often have the best text. It may even
be that what to us is the correct writing here was actually a mistake or a hypercorrection as far as
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 53

lú igi-bar-ra-ka-ni lú-al-li-bí-ib-diri
N1 + + + + + + + - + - + .
N2 o . + + + . . + + + - .
N3 + + + + + . + + o o o o
N5 . . o o o o o o o o o o
N7 o o o o o o . . o o o o
N8 o o o o o o + + + - . +
N11 . + + + + + + . . + - +
Ur2 o o o o o + + ùlu al-diri-ge
X1 + + + + + + . ⸢a⸣ + . o o
X2 + + + + + + + - + + in +
X4 + o + + +a + + ⸢a⸣ . . ⸢in⸣ o
X6 + + + + + + + a + + in +

is impossible to know what N5 had at this point, but five Nippur duplicates have the
crasis form lú-al-li-bí-(ib)-diri. It is always possible, of course, that all of these
tablets came from the same house or from a group of related teaching establishments,
but the fact that three of the four unprovenienced items (X1, X4, X6) have a different
form of crasis (lú-a-li-bí-in/ib-diri) suggests that the eliding of lú with the verbal
form in this line had at some point become a traditional part of the text, and it is
hard to explain this without recourse to a written example for students to copy. After
all, we know that schoolmasters sometimes sent texts to one another (Civil 1979a:
8), and this could be one form of dissemination of certain redactional features. This
is not to say that all school texts were copied from actual physical examples, only
to suggest that, although memorization from oral dictation may generally have been
used at certain levels of instruction, at some point in their study students may have
had recourse to sample tablets as well.
To get a better grasp on the curricular function of the CKU, it is useful to survey
the distribution of the CKU letters on compilation tablets, their order as evidenced
by catch-lines, as well as the geographical distribution of the sources.
Compilation Tablets
Here follows a brief description of all the compilation tablets, some of which
actually belong to SEpM but begin or end with elements of CKU. The main reason
for this listing is to help establish the order of the letters in the curriculum. Nineteen
of these are Type M, three are prisms, one is an oval-shaped tablet with extracts from
two letters, and two are of Type III (S) but contains two letters each.

the school tradition was concerned. This would work well with my hypothesis that many Type 1
tablets are examination pieces written from memory.
54 The Royal Letters in Their Literary Setting

Nippur
A. Prisms (P)
Na CBS 7848+7856 (SL xxxviii). A fragment containing the first three sides of what
was once a large prism that most probably contained all of SEpM (2–8 are pre-
served), beginning with ArŠ3 (7) = SEpM 1a.
Nb Ni. 9702 (ISET 2 122). Fragment of the bottom part of a prism; what remains of the
first preserved side is blank, suggesting that it is the final side. Therefore, the other
face must be the first side; it contains the last part of ŠAr3 (6) and the first three
lines of ArŠ3 (7) = SEpM 1a.
Nc Ni. 9703 (ISET 2 120). This is a broken part of a prism that probably contained all
of SEpM; the third preserved column, which was probably the last, has the end of a
letter, followed by the only known manuscript of the beginning of ŠAr2 (5), but the
face breaks off before the end and therefore there are no clues as to what followed.
For a discussion of this prism, see Kleinerman (2011: 14).

B. Multiple Column Tablets (M)

Nd 3 N-T 311 (SL xxii–xxiii). This two-column tablet, from House F, was the basis for
the reconstruction of the phantom Collection A. It contained ArŠ1 (1), ŠAr1 (2),
and PuIb1 (23).
Ne CBS 7787 + N 1200 + N 1203 + N 1204 + N 1208 + N 1210-27a + N 1210-27b
+ N 1210-27d + N 1210-27e + N 1212 + N 1214 + N 1218 (+?) Ni. 4061 + Ni.
4188 (ISET 2 118). A two-column tablet that contained ArŠ2 (3), IbPu1 (23), and
PuIb1 (24). The reconstruction of this tablet is almost, but not completely certain.
It consists of two pieces, one in Philadelphia and one in Istanbul. The assumption
that these two sections are probably part of the same tablet was crucial for the proper
reconstruction of ArŠ3 (3). Soon after I made this discovery, Steve Tinney and then
Jeremiah Peterson were able to join many small fragments to the larger CBS tablet
in Philadelphia and kindly shared their discoveries with me. A hypothetical photo-
graphic join between the two sections is presented on the accompanying disc.
Nf Ni. 4149 (ISET 2 122). Two or more columns per side. In the original publication,
the one inscribed side is marked “Obv.,” but the order of the columns, which read
from right to left, indicates that it is the reverse. However, the other side appears to
be uninscribed, which is not what one expects of the obverse. The first preserved col-
umn has lines 1–9 of ArŠ1 (1); after the break, the text resumes in the next column
with line 32 of the composition; from this one infers that the tablet had approxi-
mately 31 lines per column. The order of the surviving letters is ArŠ1 (1), followed
by ŠAr1 (2).
Ng Ni. 4164 (ISET 2 117). This is a fragment of a multicolumn tablet with official let-
ters and related texts. There are four compositions of this type in the preserved parts,
including the otherwise unduplicated ŠuLuŠa1 (20), and the tablet undoubtedly
contained more. The other three fragmentarily preserved letters on this tablet can-
not be identified at the present time.
Nh Ni. 9706 (ISET 2 112). This is a sizable fragment of what was a very large tablet that
had at least five columns on each side, as evidenced from the reverse. The remains of
two columns on the obverse indicate that the tablet originally began with SEpM: the
remnants of the text on col. i′ are impossible to identify but may be SEpM 8, and col
ii′ has SEpM 9 (the Tumal Inscription). Only traces are preserved of the first column
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 55

of the reverse, which must have contained SEpM letters. Column ii′ contains almost
the entire last letter from that collection (SEpM 22: 2–12), followed by ArŠ1 (1).
Judging by the reconstructed outline, it does not seem likely that any other CKU
letters were included on this tablet. I therefore assume that the tablet contained the
whole of SEpM, followed by ArŠ1 (1), ŠAr1 (2), ArŠ2 (3), and PuŠ1 (13).
Ni Ni. 9854 (ISET 1 189). The remains of the obverse of a multicolumn tablet. One
column has ŠA1 (1), and the next side has PuŠ1 (13). It is impossible to estimate if
ArŠ1 (2) and perhaps another text was included between them.
Nj UM 29-13-20 + UM 29-13-24 (both SL liii). Probably a three-column tablet that
had SEpM 1–9, beginning with AbŠ1 (4) = SEpM 1.
Nk UM 29-16-13 + N 3264 + N 3266 + N 3294 + N 3301 + N 3303 + N 3308 +
N 3310 (all SL xxiv–xxv) + Ni. 9701 (ISET 2 114). Multicolumn tablet with the
complete SEpM, beginning with AbŠ1 (4) = SEpM 1.

C. Single Column Tablet (S)

Nl 3 N-T 80 (A 30135, SL xxxi). One column tablet with ArŠ3 (7) = SEpM 1a, fol-
lowed by SEpM 2. From house I.

Ur
A. Multiple Column Tablets (M)
Ura U 7741 (UET 6/2 173). This two-column tablet from No. 7 Quiet St. had a medley
of letters different from any other collection. The preserved section contains SEpM
19, an otherwise unattested Inim-Enlila Letter; AbŠ1 (4), SEpM 4, an otherwise
unidentified letter; and SEpM 8.
Urb U 16853 (UET 6/2 174) + UET 6/3 *537. A three- (or more) column tablet, this
one from No. 1 Broad St, sandwiched the three most commonly attested CKU letters
in between SEpM letters. The preserved order is (x), SEpM 7, ArŠ1 (1), ŠAr1 (2),
PuIb1 (23), SEpM 17, and possibly more letters. Even if the tablet only had three
columns per side, there is room for at least thirty lines before SEpM 7 in col i′.

B. Single Column Tablet (S)

Urc UET 6/3 561 (*187). One-column tablet that contained ArŠ7 (12), preceded by
another unidentified letter. See the commentary to letter 12.

Uruk
Uka W 16743 gb (Cavigneaux, Uruk 143). This is a lower right-hand fragment of a tablet
that contained parts of SEpM, followed by some parts of CKU. The original is in
Baghdad and could not be inspected, and therefore it is difficult to determine the
possible dimensions of the piece, but I suspect that it was a two-column tablet. From
photographs, I was able to establish that the end of the last-preserved column on the
obverse has traces of the first four lines of Letter of Sin-tillati to Iddin-Dagan (SEpM
2), and the final column has lines of ArŠ1: 25–28 (1), which continues on the first
column of the reverse with lines 29–32, and then it breaks off. It is impossible to
know what preceded SEpM 2 and how many more of the Isin letters were in the last
column of the obverse. The remains of the top of the second column of the reverse
are blank, and therefore the tablet ended with ArŠ1 (1) or perhaps with ŠAr1 (2).
56 The Royal Letters in Their Literary Setting

Susa
Sua Susa A XX/1 1962/3 (MDAI 57 1). This Middle Babylonian two-column tablet
contains ŠPu1 (14) and ŠIš1 (15). On the date, see pp. 42–43 above.
This tablet is unique: it is bilingual, with the Sumerian text running on into the
Akkadian, separated, when the language changes within a line, by an U sign, but
otherwise continuous, so that it does not respect lines as such, with words continu-
ing from line to line. It also turns like the pages of a modern book rather than on
the bottom axis. There are examples of Old Babylonian tablets with lexical texts
that read in this manner, but I know of no standard literary exercises of this kind.
Indeed, the only other example of a literary tablet that turns in this manner is Xf
(see below).

Origin Unknown
A. Multiple Column Tablets (M)
Xa A7475. This two-column tablet has all four letters of the Ibbi-Sin correspondence,
including the long versions: IšIb (21), IbIŠ1 (22), PuIb1 (23), and IbPu (24). There
is no information on its origins—only that it was purchased in Iraq by Henri Frank-
fort. The tablet is possibly from Sippar.
Xb A w/n. This two-column tablet contains ArŠ1 (1), ŠAr1 (2), ArŠ2 (3), PuŠ1 (13),
ŠPuOBa1 (14a), and ŠPuOBb1 (14b).
Xc BM 54327. This is a fragment of what must have been a two-column tablet, judging
by the curvature. When complete, it had ArŠ1 (1), ŠAr1 (2), a gap of around 70
lines, ŠuŠa1 (19), and PuIb1 (23). The scribe misjudged the size required and began
to run out of space in the last column, so that lines of PuIb1 (23) had to be skipped,
and eventually the composition remained uncompleted. The gap may have been
filled by either ArŠ2 (3) or PuŠ1 (13) and, most probably, by ŠaŠu1 (18).
Xd BM 54894. This is a small left-hand fragment from the middle of what must have
been a rather large tablet that contained a version of SEpM, followed by CKU let-
ters, similar to Nd. The obverse had a number of letters, of which only a few lines
(2–10) of SEpM 4 remain. The remains of the final column of the reverse have the
beginning of PuŠ1 (13); it is likely that this was the last CKU text on this tablet.
Xe Crozer 206a. This is a two-column tablet that contained the first eight letters of
SEpM, beginning with AbŠ1 (4). Nothing is known about its origins, and its pres-
ent location is likewise a mystery: the Crozier Seminary collection, last held by the
Rochester Theological Seminary in Rochester, NY, was sold at auction to anony-
mous purchasers.
Xf Ni. 3083 (ISET 2 115). This tablet is housed in the Nippur collection in Istanbul,
but there are reasons to be cautious about its provenience. My doubts about the
origin of this tablet begin with paleography: the tablet simply does not look like an
Old Babylonian Nippur text; it may be either late OB or even MB in date. I am fully
aware of the subjective nature of such an assessment, but this is based on decades of
work with Nippur tablets in Philadelphia and Istanbul. Be that as it may, there are
more precise reasons for doubting the Nippur origin of this tablet.
There is another feature that sets this tablet apart from most OB, and certainly
from most Nippur school texts of this format, namely, that it turns like a modern
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 57

book: the columns on the reverse have to be read from left to right rather than from
right to left. Thus the marking of obverse and reverse on the published copy has to
be reversed. On this kind of tablet, see the comments on tablet Sua above.
Assuming that each column contained approximately 51 lines, Xf preserves the
remains of five letters: PuŠ1 (13), ŠPu1 (14), AmŠ1 (16), ŠAm1 (17), ŠaŠu1 (18),
and IšIb1 (21). Two of these—letters 17 and 18— are otherwise not attested at Nip-
pur and one (AmŠ1) is documented by only one other Nippur duplicate.
Xg YBC 7149. This is a two-column tablet containing the Šu-Sin correspondence,
ŠaŠu1 (18) and ŠuŠa1 (19).

B. Single Column Tablet (S)

Xh YBC 4596. This is a one-column tablet with ArŠ1 (1) and ŠAr1 (2).

C. Oval Exercise Tablet

Xi LB 2543 (TLB 3 172). This is an almost complete oval-shaped exercise tablet that
has excerpts from AŠ1 (1) and ŠrA1 (2).

A survey of the documentation reveals that, from the curricular point of view,
AbŠ1 (4) and ArŠ3 (7) belong to SEpM, although they are treated here as part of
CKU on thematic grounds. Usually, Ur III royal letters were studied before SEpM, al-
though there are at least two compilation tablets on which the order is reversed (Nf,
Xd, possibly Xc). The Abaindasa letter of petition was edited by F. Ali (1964: 53–62)
as the first item of his “Collection B”—that is, SEpM—and as a result it has been
considered to be the “canonical” B1, with ArŠ3 (7) = SEpM1a as an alternative.
But there is no reason to privilege one over the other, and the alteration between
them seems quite free, in Nippur at least, since the latter is only documented in four
tablets from that city. For example, one AbŠ1 source from House F has a catchline
to SEpM2 , 28 but in a house next door (I) someone copied ArŠ3 and SEpM on the
same tablet. 29 If we tabulate the order of items on the compilation tablets, without
including those that belong strictly to SEpM, adding the sequence in the Uruk Letter
Catalog (ULC, lines 1–8; ( ) = restored), we obtain the results shown in the table on
p. 58: This correlates well with the information derived from catchlines, which are
only present on tablets from Nippur:
Letter Sources Letter Sources
2§3 N3, N4, N11 30 7§SEpM2 N3, N4
3§13 N6 16§17 N1
§23 N4 23§24 N3
4§SEpM2 N2 31

28. 3 N-T 309 = AbŠ1 (4), N2.

29. 3 N-T 80 = ArŠ3 (7), N1.
30. The catchlines are all lugal-u 10-ra ù-na-a-dug 4, and while this could refer to some
other Aradmu-Šulgi letter, it is most likely a reference to ArŠ2 (3).
31. The catchlines on letters 4 and 7 all read lugal-á ù-na-dug 4; the use of á for the
pronoun is a way of indicating that this is SEpM 2 rather than one of the CKU letters.
58 The Royal Letters in Their Literary Setting

ULC
Urb
Nh
Nb

Nd

Ne

Xh
Xb
Nf

Xa

Xc

Xg
Ni

Xf

Xi
1 x x x x x x x x x (x)
2 x x x x x x x x (x)
(x)
3 x x x (x)
6 x
7 x
13 x x x x
14a x x
14b x
16 x
17 x
18 (x) x x x
19 x x x
21 x x x
22 x
23 x x x x x x32
24 x x x

32

The order of items on the compilation tablets and the catchlines is our best source
for the reconstruction of the native ordering of the CKU letters. There are some
other lines of evidence that may offer supporting documentation. First, there is the
evidence from House F, which had the following (Robson 2001: 58, revised):
Letter Number of Sources
ŠAr1 (1) 4
ArŠ1 (2) 2
AbŠ1 (4) 2 (one has catchline to SEpM 2)
IŠIb1 (21) 1
PuIb1(23) 2
This must be compared to the small collection of tablets found in House I (Robson
2001: 59), which had one tablet with ArŠ3 (7, followed by SEpM 2). This house
had only a few literary tablets; aside from this tablet that had the first two items of
SEpM, it had one with SEpM 9, 33 a tablet with one of the three surviving Nippur
manuscripts of Nidaba Hymn C, 34 as well as one unidentified literary exercise.

32. See p. 429 below.

33. 3 N-T 109 (A 30146).
34. 3 N-T 213 (A 30179, AOAT 25 pl. XVI*).
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 59

Unknown
Uruk35
Nippur

Sippar

Total
Kish

Susa
Isin
Ur
1 (ArŠ1) 10 1 1(x) 8 20
1a (ArŠ2) 1 1
2 (ŠAr1) 11 2 (x) 2 6 21
3 (ArŠ2) 7 1 2 10
4 (AbŠ1) 10 3 2 3 18
5 (ŠAr2) 1 1
6 (ŠAr3) 1 1 2
7 (ArŠ3) 5 5
8 (ArŠ4) 1 1
9 (ArŠ5) 1 1
10 (ArŠ6) 1 1
11 (UrŠ) 1 1
12 (ArŠ7) 1 1
13 (PŠ1) 4 1 5 9
14 (ŠPu1OBa) 2 2
(ŠPu1OBb) 2 2
(ŠPu1MB) 1 1
15 (ŠIš) 136 1
16 (AmŠ1) 2 1 3
17 (ŠAm1) 1 1 2
18 (ŠbŠ1) 1 x 3 4
19 (ŠŠb1) x 2 2
20 (LuŠŠ1) 1 x? 1
21 (IšI1) 3 5 8
22 (IIŠ1) 2 2
23 (PI1) 9 2 x 1 1 5 17
24 (IP1) 4 x 1 1 2 8
35 36

Finally, there is the matter of the number of sources for each letter and their
provenience, which are correlated in the table above. The existing data, which are
hardly abundant, lead to the conclusion that the main body of Ur III letters that
35. Entries from ULC are entered as x.
36. Middle Babylonian.
60 The Royal Letters in Their Literary Setting

schoolteachers drew upon in Nippur at the time of Samsu-iluna consisted of the

Aradmu/Šulgi correspondence about the officer Apilaša (letters 1–3), one letter from
general Puzur-Šulgi to Šulgi (13), as well as a missive from Puzur-Šulgi, the general of
Kazallu to King Ibbi-Sin (23). Then, depending on criteria that are simply unknown
to us, they chose either the petition letter of the captain Abaindasa to Šulgi (4) or a
letter from Aradmu to the king about this officer and then moved on into the SEpM
collection (7). Only two other letters have some presence at Nippur, augmenting
this core batch of six or seven items: a letter from Išbi-Erra to Ibbi-Sin (21) and Let-
ter 24, a reply from Ibbi-Sin to the general Puzur-Numušda (23). This expands the
Nippur CKU core to eight or nine letters, but there are also single exemplars of four
more (5, 6, 15, 20).
At the same time, compilation tablets demonstrate that at least two school-
teachers, one at Nippur and one elsewhere, utilized an even smaller set consisting
only of the three Apilaša letters (1–3) and the Puzur-Šulgi missive (13) and that
these were taught after SEpM (Nd, Xd). If one takes into account all of this informa-
tion, it is apparent that the core of CKU in Nippur consists of letters 1, 2, 3, 13, 23,
to which must be added the two alternating SEpM 1 letters, AbŠ1 (4) and ArŠ3 (5),
and no 21. The Sippar Yaḫrurum (Abu Habbah) documentation points in a similar
direction, since the only CKU tablets actually found in the OB “schoolhouse” in the
city are part of letters 3, 23, and 24. The only Kish witness of CKU is also part of the
core, namely, letter 13. Finally, at OB Susa, the existing evidence also represents the
same small subgrouping (2, 4, 23).
The evidence appears as scattered, fragmentary, statistically unrepresentative,
and heterogeneous, because the recovery situation at each of these cities is quite dif-
ferent; all of this only bolsters the hypothesis that there was a basic core set of fewer
than ten CKU letters that were used in Old Babylonian schools in Nippur, Sippar,
Kish, and Susa, and possibly elsewhere. The number of manuscripts from these sites
supports this assumption; given the small percentages of the manuscripts from Sip-
par, Kish, and Susa in the overall number of CKU witnesses, the relatively uniform
choice of core letters seems representative after all.
This north–south curricular harmony is disturbed by the evidence from Uruk,
which provides only one actual CKU source, part of the ubiquitous letter ArŠ1 (1),
but the catalog from the city includes the Šu-Sin correspondence, which is not part of
the Nippur core. The main evidence for this reconstruction is found in the first pre-
served lines of the Uruk Letter Catalog, which was presented in full on pp. 25–27
above. The first legible lines have the two Šu-Sin letters (18 and 19), followed by
IšIb1 (21), IbPu1 (24), PuIb1 (23), and then, after a letter prayer to Nanna that is
only known from Uruk, by what is possibly AbŠ1 (4). It is impossible to know how
the list began, but it probably had ŠAr1 (1) and ŠAr1 (2) and possibly ArŠ2 (3).
One would like to know if PuŠ1 (13) was included or not, because it is quite possible
that it was replaced by the Šu-Sin letters, as at Ur. 37

37. Note, however, that compilation tablet Xf had both letter 13 and 18.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 61

At Ur, the list is similar but not quite the same: ŠAr1 (1), ŠAr1 (2), 12, 18, 23,
as well as AbŠ1 (4). The unduplicated no. 12 aside, Ur used the Nippur core (albeit
thus far letter 13 does not show up there) but with the addition of the Šu-Sin cor-
respondence (letter 18), as in Uruk. It may be only a matter of chance of discovery,
but letter 13, the Puzur-Šulgi letter that describes the work on the fortifications at
Bad-Igihursaa, is missing at both Ur and Uruk, and in its place teachers seem to
have used the Šarrum-bani correspondence that concerns the construction of an-
other line of forts, Muriq-Tidnim. This trio of epistles (18–20) will be discussed in
detail in chap. 6.

Hypothetical CKU Core38

N, Si, Ki 1 2 3 13 (21) 23 (24) 4/7
Ur 1 2 18 [19] 21 4
Uruk 1 [2 3] 18 19 23 24 4

Finally, a word must be said about the tablets of undetermined origin that consti-
tute 32% of the total CKU documentation. As already noted, anecdotal information
and guesswork aside, there are few clues to where they were discovered, and though
some of them may come from major sites such as Larsa or Sippar, it is equally pos-
sible that some proportion of these tablets may have been found in peripheral sites
and may have been written decades after the majority of the provenienced tablets. 38
The rest of the letters, outside of the core, are poorly attested and widely dis-
tributed, and this has important implications for the analysis of the Old Babylonian
versions of Ur III royal correspondence. The quantity of extant sources tells a story.
While 114 tablets may seem to be a large number, one has to keep in mind that
this total covers 24 different, if related, compositions from various places of origin
and that, core texts aside, most CKU letters are very poorly documented. In many
ways, the general statistics presented above are in concert with the situation found
in House F in Nippur. As observed by Robson (2001: 58), this locus produced only
one or two manuscripts of letters and related texts, from CKU as well as from SEpM.
The only exception to this is, as can be expected, ArŠ1 (1), which is represented
by four exemplars. This contrasts markedly with the number of tablets from the so-
called Decad and of some other examples of school literature found in the house,
which are documented by up to thirty or more manuscripts, although there are also
other hymns, “law codes,” debates, etc., that are represented by single exemplars
(Robson 2001: 53–56). Taking together all the evidence adduced above, it seems
most probable that selections from the available corpora of CKU, SEpM, as well as
sundry literary letters, not to mention ad hoc epistolary creations by teachers as well
as by students, constituted a regular but relatively marginal part of the instructional

38. In this chart ( ) mark the “extended core” and [ ] denote reconstructed items.
62 The Royal Letters in Their Literary Setting

materials utilized in Old Babylonian schools and that the choice of items very much
depended on the preferences of individual instructors.

Beyond the Core

I have indentified the core of CKU on purely distributional grounds, without any
consideration of the contents of the letters. Moving further, but taking into consid-
eration only the general thematics of these items, it seems that Old Babylonian edu-
cators and their wards most often became familiar with the problems that the grand
vizier Aradmu and his king Šulgi had with an officer by the name of Apilaša, with
difficulties that the general Puzur-Šulgi encountered when he was repairing sections
of large fortifications, and with elements in the early history of Išbi-Erra’s usurpation
of power at the time of King Ibbi-Sin, as related by Puzur-Numušda, governor of the
city of Kazallu. In addition, they knew something about a lower-level Ur III officer,
Abaindasa, who had been demoted and perhaps even imprisoned by Aradmu. Those
who explored more of the Ur III royal correspondence learned about Išbi-Erra when
he was still working for the state and studied Ibbi-Sin’s answer to the governor of
Kazallu. As already asserted, this appears to be the situation at Nippur, Ur, Sippar,
and Susa, but it only pertains to 9 of the extant 24 CKU letters, and it still leaves us
with 15 items of this correspondence that need to be accounted for.
Letters ŠAr2 (5), ŠAr3 (6), and ArŠ4 (8) belong to the Aradmu/Šulgi corre-
spondence concerning Abaindasa. The first two may be variant recensions of one
another, but because only the beginning section ŠAr2 (6) is preserved, this cannot
be firmly established. Letters 5 and 6 are found in sequence on a Nippur prism (Nc),
but this does not necessarily undermine the hypothesis that they are variants of one
another, because there is another example of this kind of sequence in the case of
ŠPu1 (14), which is found in two recensions on the same tablet. 39 The letter ŠAr2
(5) was also known outside of Nippur, as documented by a manuscript of unknown
origin (X1), but ŠAr3 (6) is unduplicated at present.
Letters ArŠ1a (1a) and ArŠ6 (10) are represented by unique manuscripts and
may all be one-off exercises, possibly by students rather than teachers. This is cer-
tainly the case with 1a, which is simply a muddled attempt at combining letters 1 and
2 to create a new letter. The only OB bilingual CKU letter, ArŠ5 (9), is duplicated
by an unpublished text and therefore is no longer represented by a solitary manu-
script. Item 15 of CKU (ŠIš1), purportedly written to Išbi-Erra by King Šulgi two
decades after his death, known only from a bilingual MB manuscript from Susa, is a
late concoction, perhaps written in late OB times or later.
Three letters may be secondary creations designed for curricular symmetry in
order to provide epistolary pairs expanding the core: ŠPu1 (14) as an answer to PuŠ1
(13), IbŠ1 (22) as a reply to IšIb1 (21), and IbPu1 (24) in response to PuIb1 (23).

39. A w/n (compilation tablet Xb).

 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 63

All of this accounts, more or less, for the curricular status of 17 of the 24 CKU
letters. The situation is less clear when it comes to the two letters concerning a
merchant by the name of Ur-dun (letters 11 and 12), and to an exchange of missives
between Šulgi and his successor-to-be Amar-Sin (letters 16 and 17). The first two
are, in all likelihood, one-off creations that utilized literary materials from various
sources, including lexical texts and the SEpM, but the Amar-Sin correspondence,
which has wider distribution but is still badly documented, is more difficult to evalu-
ate. The fact that tablets with these letters were found at Nippur and Isin as well as
on a tablet of unknown origin suggests that they had a more secure presence in school
study than one might assume from the bad state of the preserved documentation.
In conclusion, the CKU, unlike SEpM, is not an established, mostly set group
of texts utilized in a systematic manner in school instruction. Instead, it consists of
a general, sometimes shifting core group of texts, with occasional additions, some of
which are clearly ad hoc creations made by teachers or students, while others belong
to a peripheral collection of materials that instructors could call upon to round out
their teaching materials. The exact contours of this phenomenon are somewhat fuzzy
due to the aleatoric manner in which the Old Babylonian literary sources have been
recovered, but the general outline of the problem is clear: the CKU is not a native
category but only a modern construct assembled for heuristic purposes, for ease of
publication and citation. The CKU was not a fixed “corpus;” instead, it is better
understood as an expandable set of epistles, purportedly between the kings of Ur and
their subordinates, that were, by and large, studied together before, after, or alongside
the SEpM and other literary letters.
 Chapter 4

The Royal Letters in

Their Historical Setting 1
The Affairs of King Šulgi (Letters 1–12, 15–18)

Of the 24 CKU letters, 17 are written to and from Šulgi. These can be divided,
on thematic grounds, into groups: the Apilaša affair (letters 1–3), the Abaindasa
affair (4–8), miscellaneous Aradmu letters (9–10), the Ur-dun affair (11–12), the
Puzur-Šulgi correspondence (13–14), the letter from Išbi-Erra to Šulgi (15), and the
Amar-Sin correspondence (16–17). Here I survey these letters, with only a cursory
discussion of items 13 and 14, because these will be analyzed in chap. 6, which deals
with fortifications—that is, with the major topic of the Puzur-Šulgi/Šulgi epistles as
well as of the correspondence of King Šu-Sin (letters 18–20).

The Apilaša Affair (Letters 1–3)

The most commonly attested epistolary exchange in Sumerian consists of three
letters between the grand vizier Aradmu and King Šulgi concerning a military officer
by the name of Apilaša (letters 1–3). Aradmu, the powerful grand vizier of the Ur III
state, is the only correspondent who figures in more than two CKU letters; indeed,
he is either the author or recipient of 10 or 11 of the 24 items in this set (1–10 and
possibly 12), but only the Apilaša letters and missive 7 are part of the core group.
The lives of Aradmu and Apilaša are well documented, and nothing in the Ur III
record contradicts the information contained in CKU. I begin the discussion of the
first part of the literary royal correspondence with a brief look at the biographies of
the main protagonists.
Aradmu
The information pertaining to this individual has been collected in other places
and need not be reiterated here in full. 1 It is usually agreed that Aradmu is a form
1. Sollberger 1954–1956: 37; Goetze 1963: 9–12; Scharaschenidze 1976; Sallaberger 1999:
188–90; Dahl 2007: 22–24. Here I use the conventional traditional rendering, although some
scholars prefer other forms such as u r d u / Ì R -  u 1 0 ; on the reading of the name, see Appendix B.

64
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 65

of the name Arad-Nanna, well known as the highest military and political official
of the Ur III state from some time late in Šulgi’s reign into the reign of Ibbi-Sin. His
primary title was sukkal-mah, “grand vizier,” and under Amar-Sin he also took over
direct rule of the Girsu province: at least from AS7 on he carries the title énsi Girsu,
“governor of Girsu (province).” 2 From ŠS1 he was also designated as sukkal-mah
énsi, “grand vizier and governor of Girsu (province),” but only in documents from
Girsu (Sallaberger 1999: 192). 3 In the long inscription dedicated to Šu-Sin, he is
described as sukkal-mah énsi lagašaki (Frayne 1997: 324, lines 11–13). In CKU,
as in most Ur III references to his name, he never carries any title.
There is some confusion concerning the early parts of Aradmu’s career: it is
generally assumed that he rose to the status of grand vizier with the accession of
Amar-Sin (AS3, according to Huber 2001: 196 and Sallaberger 1999: 189), and this
has been used as evidence of the fictitious nature of his correspondence with Šulgi
(Huber 2001: 195–97). A reevaluation of the beginning of his long tenure at the side
of the Ur III kings is therefore necessary here.
The office of the sukkal-mah appears to have its roots in Girsu, where it is first
attested in documents from the Early Dynastic period in archival texts as well as in
the Reforms of Urukagina, where it comes right after the ruler (énsi), but the title is
also attested at Nippur and Uruk. 4 References to such an official continue through-
out the Old Akkadian period in texts from Girsu and Adab. 5 The same tradition was
maintained at Girsu when the city was once again independent, during the time that
is usually referred to as the “Gutian period,” when the so-called Second Dynasty of
Lagaš ruled the city and its environs. We know that a certain Bazi was the sukkal-
mah in the second year of the reign of Ur-Ningirsu I (MVN 7 512:6). An unnamed
individual held this position in the twentieth year of Gudea (MVN 7 399:8), and
the grand vizier of the last independent king of Girsu, Nammahani, was named Ur-
aba (Edzard 1997: 202–3). If the tradition documented at the time of Urukagina is
any measure, these officials were the “Grand Viziers” of the kings of the Lagaš polity.
This hierarchical relationship was carried over when Lagaš was incorporated into
Ur-Namma’s state, but now the sukkal-mah answered to the king in Ur. In the
immediate aftermath of the collapse of Ur, the title continues to be attested in Isin

2. First attested in the last month of AS7 (PDT 2 1161:2). The title sukkal-mah is the only
one he uses in his seal dedicated to Šu-Sin (Frayne 1997: 347, line 6).
3. First documented in the basket tag ITT 2 810 (ŠS1.-.-), probably from the latter part of
the year. Curiously, this combination of titles is attested only in “court protocols” (di til-la) or
basket tags for collections of such documents, with one exception only (TCTI 620 t. iv 11–12).
4. See, for example, VS 14 159: ii 4; VS 14 171: vii 1; VS 14 173: ii 15; VS 14 179: vi 6; DP
132: iii 4; TSA 2 iv 9. For Urukagina, see Wilcke 2007: 32. Note also at Nippur OSP 1 137:1 and
possibly BibMes 3 30: iii 2. See also the dedication of šu-na-mu-gi4 [sukkal-m]ah-e for the life
of Enšakušana of Uruk (Frayne 2008: 432; E1.14.17.3:2–3), and Lugalzagesi’s title sukkal-mah
d
en.zu (Frayne 2008: 435; E1.14.20.1:21–22).
5. See, for example, ITT 1 1282:6; Donbaz-Foster, OPBF 5 53:3; 128:14, MCS 9 276:6; Nip-
pur: OSP 1 137; Adab: OIP 14 144: 5, 7 (= PPAC 1 A 795).
66 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 1

and Ešnunna, although little is known about the role of this official in post–Ur III
times. 6 As is well known, in post–Ur III times the title sukkal-mah was borne by
the rulers of Elam, in vague memory of their earlier overlords and of Aradmu’s func-
tions. In an inscription of Idaddu II, one of the last rulers of the “Šimaški Dynasty,” it
denoted the status of a secondary ruler of Elam, subject to the king (lugal) of Anšan,
Šimaški, and Elam (Steinkeller 2007a: 222), and therefore was not that far removed
from its Ur III meaning. Soon after, during the first half of the second millennium,
the nomenclature used by the sovereigns of Elam changed, and sukkal-mah usually
described the supreme ruler at Anšan, while his sons were addressed as sukkal when
they administered the various parts of the state: Elam, Šimaški, and Susa. The un-
derstanding of these titles is somewhat complicated by the fact that at various times
the former may have been used to designate both the concept of “supreme ruler” as
well as that of “regent,” according to Vallat (1994: 9). 7
I should note that, in my estimation, the term “Gutian period” is a misnomer and
should be avoided in discussions of early Mesopotamian history. It follows a tradition
sanctioned by the Old Babylonian redaction of the Sumerian King List, a history-
creating composition that illustrates an ideology that supports and justifies large,
centralized statehood, as opposed to regional autonomy and city-states. The period
between the collapse of the Akkad kingdom and the rise of the territorial Ur III
state was a time when Sumer and Akkad were ruled in various ways from different
cities. The area west and northwest of Nippur, around Kazallu and Marad, was oc-
cupied at least for some of this time by the forces of Puzur-Inšušinak from the Iranian
highlands; in the south, Adab, Umma, and possibly a few other cities acknowledged
some form of domination by Gutians from the eastern highlands, while others, such
as Girsu, Uruk, and Ur, thrived independently. The native historiography, emblem-
atically represented by the Sumerian King List, is very murky on the subject of this
period, and every manuscript of the text that preserves this section has a different set
of Gutian rulers, many of whom may be fictitious (Michalowski 1983b). The modern
historian is by no means bound by such native views of history. Piotr Steinkeller
(forthcoming) is preparing a more expansive criticism of received ideas about this
period, and I am in agreement with most of his views on the matter.
I have raised this issue here to underscore the fact that, prior to the reign of
Ur-Namma, Girsu stood at the head of a powerful independent polity, and nothing
in our documentation sheds any light on the mechanisms—military, political, or
economic—that the founder of the Ur III kingdom utilized to bring Lagaš into his
territorial state. In the introduction to his so-called “Law Code,” Ur-Namma claims

6. For Ešnunna see Whiting 1987: 83. In early Isin texts, the sukkal-mah functioned as
maškim for transactions concerning diplomacy and war, just as Aradmu did in Drehem texts,
such as, e.g. BIN 9 383, 388, BIN 10 149, TLB 5 8, etc.
7. The title may have had an afterlife farther north, in Georgia; according to Krebernik
(2006: 91): “Falls das Wort im Onomastikon der georgischen Mythologie weiterlebt—Suḳalmaḫi
heißt dort der Vater des Helden Amirani—müßste es durch Elamische vermittelt worden sein.”
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 67

to have done something to King Nammahani of Girsu, but the verbal root is difficult
to read at this point and scholars have variously seen this as a violent overthrow
(“he killed”) or the instillation of a vassal/governor (“he elevated/installed,” Civil in
press). It is possible that one of the ways in which the king of Ur compelled Girsu to
become a part of his kingdom was to appeal to the self-interest of the ruling elites in
the city. The documentation for the early part of the Ur III period is scant indeed,
but we know that the governor of Girsu, between the second and twelfth years of Ur-
Namma’s reign (at least) was named Ur-aba, and it is possible that this was the same
person who had been the grand vizier under Nammahani. 8 This kind of continuity
may indicate that other elite families were co-opted and acquired additional prestige
and wealth under the new masters of the land. It may very well be that the “dynasty”
of sukkal-mahs of Ur III times came from one of the most important lineages in
Girsu and that the office of grand vizier was instituted by the government at Ur as
part of that province’s acquiescence to membership in the new state; this could also
serve to explain why the title seems to have been kept in one family for much of the
duration of the state founded by Ur-Namma.
The office of sukkal-mah is first attested, for Ur III times, in Š25 (OBTR 141:4;
TÉL 250: r. i 5), but the name of the holder of the office is unknown. The first identi-
fiable grand vizier of the state was Lani, who is known only from four impressions of a
seal of one of his underlings, named Iddi-Erra. The earliest dates from Š29.12.- (TCL
2 5537) and the latest from Š32.12.- (TCL 2 5538; see also Ontario 1 166 [Š30.4.-]
and PDT 1 374 [Š31.12.-]). 9 The latter does not mean very much, because the seal
may have been in use for some time after Lani no longer held that position. The next
grand vizier was Ur-Šulpae, son of Lani, who is known only from four references:
AnOr 7 2 (Š36.9.-), from the impression of his seal on an undated bulla (NFT, 185),
and on an envelope fragment (NATN 388), and in an unpublished document with
a broken Šulgi year-name. 10 Therefore, unless someone else came in between, Ur-
Šulpae’s son Aradmu must have become sukkal-mah at some time after the last two
months of Š36, not during the reign of Amar-Sin. Indeed, two texts provide direct
evidence for his tenure in this high office under Šulgi.
First, he is indisputably already grand vizier in Š45, as documented in BaM 16
(1985) 217 no. 2, which contains the imprint of his seal, which reads:
šul-gi, nita kala-ga, lugal uri5ki-ma, lugal an ub-da limmu2-ba, árad-[dnanna], dumu
d  

ur-[d  šul]-pa-⸢è⸣, sukkal-[mah], árad-[zu]

O Šulgi, mighty male, king of Ur, king of the four corners (of the universe), Arad-
Nanna, son of Ur-Šulpae, grand vizier, is your servant!

8. RTC 261, (UN2.-.-) to RTC 265: r. i′ 8, iii′ 5 (UN12).

9. The reading of the second sign in the name, NI, is uncertain.
10. Newark Public Library 27:14 mentions dam ur- d  šul-pa-è sukkal-mah (courtesy of
Marcel Sigrist).
68 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 1

Second, he continues in this role a year later, as evidenced by TIM 6 36:7, dated
Š46.3.-, which must be read árad-d  nanna sukkal-⟨mah⟩ maškim.
Other information allows us to move this accession to high office back a few
more years, to Š42 and perhaps even a year earlier. The basis for this is the career of
a person named Ahuni, who is described as dumu sukkal-mah, “son of the grand
vizier.” If we assume that this refers to the current holder of that position—and all
evidence suggests that there was only one such dignitary at any one time—then
the dates of these documents tell a story, because he is attested in the following
documents:
CT 10 44: 16 Š 42.-.-
MVN 13 641: 17 Š 47.5.-
NYPL 27: 4 AS 4.-.-
Nebraska 1: 26 AS 5.9.-

This line of reasoning is bolstered by the fact that, beginning with the last month
of Š41 (TCL 2 5502+5503, Š41.12.-), Aradmu (as maškim) authorized Drehem
disbursements connected with the royal family, their closest retainers, including the
royal bodyguard, as well as foreign dignitaries and their entourages. There are at least
130 such texts from the remainder of Šulgi’s reign; indeed, this would remain one of
his official responsibilities for three decades—that is, for the rest of the duration of
the Puzriš-Dagan depot. 11 Of course, Aradmu did not reside there; he also presided
over the province of Girsu and at least one other administrative center, a place that
was located not far from Nippur and housed the prisoners of war brought back from
Šu-Sin’s campaign against Simanum. 12 Officials acting under his authority ascribed
documents and transactions to his name, but state officers of the highest ranks did
not always have to be present for operations conducted under their authority.
In conclusion, it is fairly certain that Aradmu succeeded his father and grand­
father as grand vizier at some point between the years Š36 and Š41 (he is undoubt-
edly sukkal-mah by Š45) and retained that position throughout the rest of Šulgi’s
reign, those of his two successors, and into the first years of the last ruler of the dy-
nasty, King Ibbi-Sin. 13 He is last attested in IS3 but may have held the position for
up to a decade after that. 14 The next grand vizier is not documented until a decade
later, when Ninlil-amau was in this position (UET 3 45 seal, IS14.9.-). Eight years
later, he had been replaced by Libur-Sin (UET 3 826 seal, IS22.6.-); we know next
to nothing about either of these men and therefore cannot establish if either one of

11. He is last documented in this role in IS2.12.12 (MVN 8 207:7).

12. This archive is being prepared for publication by Benjamin Studevent-Hickman.
13. This sequence is apparently interrupted by the evidence provided by MCS 6 106 =
MVN 37 (Š48.10.-), which carries a seal that read, according to the copy, ur-dnin-mug, dub-sar,
dumu lú-dba-ba6, sukkal-⸢mah⸣. Collation, courtesy of Piotr Steinkeller, definitely excludes
this reading of the final line.
14. He is last attested in two Girsu documents, both dated IS3.-.-: TCTI 1 897: r. v 15 and
Zinbun 18 (1982) 96 1: r. ii′ 6′.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 69

them belonged to the same lineage as Aradmu, but by then the office would have had
a different scope, because Girsu was no longer part of the kingdom. 15
In light of these facts, one must also set aside the prosopographic arguments pre-
sented by Huber (2001: 196–97), who thought that Arad-Nanna/Aradmu was still a
junior military officer in the last years of Šulgi. There are a number of other people
named Aradmu and/or Arad-Nanna in documents from Šulgi’s reign, but at present
there is no reason to identify any of them with the person of the grand vizier. 16
This was an extraordinary career; throughout the reigns of four kings, he was in
charge of diplomacy, the military, and some of the border regions of the state during
almost three decades of constantly shifting foreign alliances and continuous warfare.
He was married to a princess of the house of Ur, and one of his daughters in turn
married a prince of the realm. 17 His ceremonial, military, and diplomatic functions
in the state are best observed in the Puzriš-Dagan texts, where he carries the respon-
sibilities (maškim) for transactions involving the royal family, foreign dignitaries,
and high members of the military. As already noted, in the latter part of Amar-Sin’s
reign, he was put in charge of the Girsu province, officially returning to the place
that was most likely his ancestral home, thus obviating any tensions between his
high rank and the role of the city governor. It may only be the lack of sources that
leads us to this conclusion, but it does appear that his status increased as the years
went on, and late in the reign of Šu-Sin, he took charge of the military administra-
tion over much of the eastern frontier, which he would have controlled from Girsu.
The evidence for this comes from a dedicatory text inscribed on door sockets from a
temple of Šu-Sin in Girsu (Frayne 1997: 323–24) that was built by Aradmu. In addi-
tion to his standard titles, the grand vizier is now also a temple administrator (saa)
of the god Enki, as well as the general in charge of Uṣar-Garšana, Bašime, Sabum
and the territory of Gutium, Dimat-Enlila, Al-Šu-Sin, Urbilum, Hamazi, Karhar,
Nihi, Šimaški, and Karda. 18 The multiple responsibilities parallel those given by Šu-
Sin to his own uncle Babati, as we shall shortly see; the list of place-names suggests

15. Ninlil-amau occurs once before, in IS2.3.- (SET 168: 5). There are no other references
to Libur-Sin.
16. If we limit ourselves to Girsu, among these are Arad-Nanna; lú-kaš4 (ITT 7690: 4,
Š33.1.-); àga-ús (ITT 4 8089: 3, Š4.-.-); àga-ús lugal (ITT 4 7306: i 5, Š30.-.-); nar (Princeton
1 570: 1, Š35.1.-); and engar (CT 1 2 ii 12, Š37.-.-). There is one text that definitely refers to
the person we are dealing with: Nisaba 7 3:10 (Š42.-.-, Girsu), kišib 3 igi-lam-lam dumu ur-
d  
šul-pa-è ki árad-mu-ta. It is clear that both Igilamlam and Aradmu were brothers, sons of
Ur-Šulpae, the sukkal-mah.
17. His wife, nin-hé-du 7 appears as dam sukkal-mah in the undated Girsu tablet ASJ
9 (1987) 126 57: iii 13 (otherwise she is listed only as dam sukkal-mah, without a name).
His daughter-in-law, géme-é-an-na, appears as é-gi4-a árad-mu sukkal-mah (OIP 121 9:7;
AS2.12.10); she was still alive, albeit ill, in AS6.4.5 ([géme]-⸢é⸣-an-na é-gi4-a ⸢árad?-mu?
u4⸣ tu-ra ì-⸢me-a⸣, MVN 13 635:11). Both women are listed among princesses (dumu-munus
lugal) in CTMMA 1 17: I 28 and ii 1 (AS6.7.-).
18. On all of these places, see Steinkeller 2010. For Bašime, 66 km north of Amarah, see
now Hussein et al. 2010; on the location of Hamazi, see Appendix D below.
70 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 1

that this new status was connected to war with the lands of Zabšali that took place in
Šu-Sin’s sixth year and that it was bestowed upon Aradmu either during the prepa-
rations for, or in the immediate aftermath of this military effort. We should bear in
mind, however, that many of these titles may have been more honorary than real,
since the grand vizier already shouldered many responsibilities; indeed, a survey of
administrative and legal texts in which his name appears makes it clear that he could
not have been physically present at every transaction that he officially sanctioned.
Therefore, there must have been officers to whom he delegated authority to act in
his name, and we must assume that reference to his name is often institutional rather
than personal.
Aradmu also carries the title énsi lagašaki in his inscription, and this has created
some confusion in the modern literature (see below). Thus, Dahl (2007: 24) cites
this as evidence that the man “was able to add the governorship of Lagash to his im-
pressive array of titles” and also states that this title was only used in his monumental
inscription. This is only partly true: the title is also used in a dispute resolution from
Girsu, which, unfortunately, has a broken date (ITT 2 1034 = TCTI 1 1034). The
matter is more complex, however, and has to do with the terminology used to de-
scribe what was probably the largest province of the Ur III state (de Maaijer 1998).
In documents from Girsu and from other parts of the realm, the governors ap-
pointed to rule this area are always—other than the two instances cited above—des-
ignated as énsi ír-suki. But on the seal inscriptions of local officials, the governor
is always, without exception, referred to as énsi lagaša ki, “governor of Lagaš (terri-
tory).” These governors, and following them the Grand Vizier as well, are using the
traditional local terminology, which is explicitly explained by the goddess Nanše as
she addresses King Gudea (Cyl. A6.15): ír-suki é-sa ki lagašaki-šè ìri-zu ki ì-
bí-ús, “after you direct your feet to the city of Girsu, storehouse of Lagaš-land . . . .”
The significance of this is difficult to gauge; perhaps there is an element of op-
positional fervor, which may also be seen, for example, in the use of a seal dedicated
to the famous ruler Gudea during the time of Šu-Sin, but it is also possible that this
is simply a local custom, with few ideological overtones. 19 Thus, Aradmu did not ac-
quire a new title; in his own inscription and in one legal dispute he utilized the local
terminology, while on documents from the governor’s office his scribes continued to
use the official title énsi gír-suki, just like his predecessors.

Apilaša 20
Apilaša appears only in the Šulgi correspondence. In the letters, his only title is
gal-zu unken-na, conventionally rendered here as “prefect,” which is unattested

19. Aradzu seal of Ur-Šarura, ITT 2 4216 (ŠS6.11.0).

20. Kutscher 1968–69; Huber 2001: 202–5. On the name, see Hilgert 2002: 240. In Ur III
documents, it is written a /á-pi/pi5-la-ša; in CKU, it is consistently rendered a-pi-il-la-ša in
Nippur sources and a-pi-la-ša in texts from other places.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 71

in Ur III sources, and in CKU it is borne by only one other official, Šarrum-bani, the
man sent by Šu-Sin to rebuild the Muriq-Tidnim fortifications. 21
Apilaša’s military career is documented in more than 60 documents from Dre-
hem, Umma, Girsu, and Nippur, covering at least 22 years, from Š44 to ŠS9. By the
time he first makes an appearance in the documentary record, he had obviously risen
though the ranks to a top military position. In the 44th year of Šulgi, he delivers part
of the booty from a highland place called Šuruthum (MVN 20 193: 5, Š44.4.‑). In
the following year, he is mentioned as one of the collectors of grain alongside gen-
erals such as Hubaʾa (HLC 52: r. 33, Š45.-.-, Girsu). This is also the case in many
texts mentioning Apilaša from the time of Šulgi and Amar-Sin. He is first designated
as šakkana, “general, commander,” in the last year of Amar-Sin’s reign (TCTI 2
3315:3, AS9.9.-), but by then he had already been appointed governor of a major
city; it is probable that he held the rank much earlier. 22
The references from the last years of Šulgi indicate that he belonged to the high-
est military echelons at the time; texts in which he is mentioned in the company of
high military officials are marked by /m/.
45.-.- HLC 52: 28 (Girsu) m
46.1.24 AfO 24 pl. 15 S 213:3 m
4.5 PDT 1 168:17 m
5.13 OIP 115 203:17 m 23
9.7 PDT 1 408:12 m
12.29 PDT 1 678:6
47.12.8 TRU 109:9
12.12 OIP 115 268:5 m
Sometime between the 15th and 30th day of the fourth month of AS7, Apilaša as-
sumed the governorship of Kazallu, an important city in the frontier military zone
in the area west and northwest of Nippur and south of Kish. 24 It is rare that we can
pinpoint an official appointment with this degree of precision in this period, but in
this case we have a document that records both the contributions of the previous
governor, Šu-Mama, on the fifteenth day, and those of Apilaša, with his new title,
on the last day of the month ( JCS 14 [1960] no. 9). 25 This last text refers to him as
governor, but his own seal inscription, impressed on the tablet, gives his title as “gen-
eral of Kazallu.” He continued to hold this post at least until ŠS3 (  JCS 22 [1968/9]

21. On this title, see Appendix B.

22. He holds this title in three other Girsu texts, but two of them are undated: RTC 317:
r. 38 (ŠS1.10.-); DAS 77:13; and DAS 329:4.
23. He delivers Šimaškian animals, undoubtedly from the booty garnered in the campaign
against Simurum and Lullubum in the previous year.
24. On this zone (“mada”), see pp. 125–129 below.
25. Kazallu was governed first by Ititi (Š28.5- [PDT 1 516: 9]), then by Issariq (Š31.4.- [YOS
4 75: rev. 2′  ]; Š33.3.- [AnOr 7 92:7–8]), then by Kallamu (Š43.2.- [PDT1 509:3]; Š46.8.- [Nisaba
8 App. 4+A: 4]), who was transferred to Ešnunna (Hallo 1953: 76), then by Šu-Mama from
Š47.10.- (TRU 116: 4), until Apilaša took over.
72 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 1

63); a recently published tablet provides no title but places him in Kazallu in the
first month of ŠS5, and we would assume that he was still in charge of the city. 26
He seems to have remained there for some time, but the lack of evidence makes it
difficult to trace his residency in Kazallu, because no subsequent governor of Kazallu
is attested in Ur III sources, if we exclude the CKU. Apilaša is last mentioned in
the last years of Šu-Sin’s reign, when he seems to have once again been involved in
frontier matters. 27
His tenure at Kazallu was interrupted once in AS8, and Apilaša must have been
seconded to other duties, because just after his appointment a certain Ititi is men-
tioned as governor of Kazallu. How long this lasted is unknown, but less than two
years later, in ŠS1, Apilaša was back at his post in charge of the city. 28
The Aradmu–Šulgi letters concerning Apilaša provide unique perspectives on
power relationships in an early Mesopotamian state. While most of the school lit-
erature presents King Šulgi as a superhuman figure of unlimited charismatic author-
ity—political, intellectual, and martial—the CKU compositions offer a portrait of a
realistic and canny ruler who is cognizant of the limits of his authority. In ArŠ1 (1),
the grand vizier writes to his master, reporting that he has been sent on a royal mis-
sion to the eastern frontier to check on the situation in the territory controlled by
the officer Apilaša, to assure the flow of taxes back to the homeland and to bring
new instructions to the locals. There are three issues in the opening lines that require
comment: the exact location of Apilaša’s camp, the taxes imposed on the area, and
his official title.
The general area that Aradmu has traveled to is referred to by the name Subir
(ArŠ1: 3 [1]). The same term occurs twice more in CKU: in Aradmu’s subsequent
answer to Šulgi’s reply and in the letter of Puzur-Numušda to Ibbi-Sin, where we
encounter a certain Zinnum, who is a governor of/in Subir. 29 Much has been written
about this geographical term, which changes reference over time and space; in third‑
and early-second-millennium sources, it refers to an area east of the Tigris in the
mountains of Iran (Michalowski 1986, 1999a; Steinkeller 1998). In Old Babylonian
literary texts, it is often coupled with Elam, and the division between seems to lie in
the Diyala region (Michalowski 2008). The example of ArŠ2: 6 [3], where Simurum
lies in the territory of Subir, is in harmony with this literary usage. 30 It is important

26. A Drehem tablet from a private collection mentions sheep given to Lamassatum, the
bride/daughter-in-law (é-gi4-a) of Apilaša, “when she went to Kazallu” (Hallo 2008: 114 lines
21–22).
27. Trouvaille 50:6 (ŠS9.-.-), where he is responsible for the undelivered dues from troops
of Arman in the Diyala, and ASJ 16 107 7:8 (ŠS9.9.3). He is also responsible for deliveries of
one ab-ba lú NE-da-DUNki in BPOA 7 2340:25–26, an undated Drehem account that probably
comes from some time after ŠS6.
28. Ititi is listed in PDT 1 561:9 (AS8.5.-). Apilaša is mentioned next as governor of Kazallu
in SAT 3 1219:3 (ŠS1.11.-).
29. ArŠ2: 6 (3) and PuIb1: 34 (23).
30. The text reads: zag si-mu-ur4-ru-um ma-da su-bir4ki-šè.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 73

to note, however, that the term Subir does not appear to have been included in the
geographical language of the Ur III bureaucracy: there is not a single mention of the
word in any text from the period.
The taxes that Aradmu is sent to regulate are designated as gun mada (ArŠ1: 4
[1]). In administrative texts from Ur III times, this is a technical term that desig-
nates a specific kind of obligation imposed on military outposts in frontier areas, as
described in detail by Piotr Steinkeller (1987). However, as Pascal Attinger already
observed (apud Huber 2001: 204 n. 153), the exact phrase gun mada never occurs
in texts from the time of Šulgi; indeed, it only makes an appearance from the year
ŠS3 on, although the actual tax is no different from what is earlier designated sim-
ply as gun. For some, this is proof of the spurious nature of this letter, but we must
keep in mind that the difference between gun and gun mada only applies in the
accounting terminology used at Drehem, and the change takes place at a time when
various other reforms of the administration and technical language were introduced
at this redistribution depot (Sallaberger 2003–4). There is no reason to associate
the language of the letter so closely with the technical jargon of one administrative
center, and therefore the meaning of these words in the letter may be more general—
that is, it may refer to all forms of frontier taxation. 31
Apilaša is referred to by the unusual title galzu unkena, which may signify that
he was not a regular general of the region but a special emissary, involved with some
unspecified task. 32 But the welcome accorded Aradmu was offensive to some degree,
and, what is more, the insults were aimed not at him personally but at the king
himself, since he was acting as a royal representative. When the grand vizier arrived
at the gate of Apilaša’s establishment, most probably an elaborate military camp, no
one inquired, as etiquette required, about the king’s well-being; those sitting did not
rise in his presence and did not prostrate themselves before him. As argued in the
commentary to ArŠ1: 10 (1), the expression of concern about the king’s health was
apparently a formalized greeting that was considered proper in such circumstances.
Refusal to rise before a royal messenger was a serious offense in the ancient world,
as is well illustrated in the much later myth of Nergal and Ereškigal (Foster 2005: 55)
in which this is the main narrative trigger that opens up the entire drama. When a
messenger arrives in the heavens from the queen of the Netherworld, all the gods
and goddesses rise except one, and this creates a major diplomatic row between the
two realms.
In the Aradmu letter, these offenses lead to further denunciations by the grand
vizier. Not only is Apilaša acting in a high-handed fashion—in essence rejecting the
ceremonial symbols of his subservient status—but he has also apparently usurped
the very trappings of royal power and, by implication, is acting as if he were an inde-
pendent ruler. He receives visitors on a dais—a symbolic object usually reserved for

31. It is this kind of general usage that most likely led to the inclusion of the expression in
the lexical tradition. See gun ma-da = MIN (bi-lat) ma-a-tu4 (Hh II 371 [MSL 5 80]); also pos-
sibly in Nigga 469 (MSL 13 109).
32. See Appendix B.
74 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 1

deities and kings—in an elaborate enclosure made of carded animal skins and filled
with treasure. To underscore Apilaša’s alleged arrogant attitude, Aradmu calls his
camp é-gal, the same word that is usually applied to the royal seat of power. 33 The
vizier expresses his apprehension early on in his letter; but when Apilaša serves him
a feast fit for a whole army and then has his bodyguards turn over the table before
Aradmu can enjoy his meal, the situation becomes more than just tense. The vizier
writes to the king that he is afraid that Apilaša’s rebellious stance will end in real
violence. Aradmu’s rhetoric is carefully chosen and covers much ground, damning
Apilaša in the eyes of the king.
Šulgi’s reply comes as something of a surprise. Rather than support the most
powerful member of his court and express indignation at the reported actions of his
officer who was on assignment in the east, he turns the rhetorical game back against
the grand vizier and defends Apilaša’s actions. Briefly stated, the ruler of Ur expresses
his own outrage at Aradmu’s accusations; how could he have been so foolish to mis-
understand the situation he had observed? Apilaša, stationed in a dangerous territory
far from Ur, had no choice but to take matters into his own hands and to resort to
ruthless methods; indeed, his actions were in fact the proper way of executing the
king’s own orders. Having cleverly chastised the grand vizier, he then turns around
and asks both Aradmu and Apilaša to cease their feud and to arrive at a mutually sat-
isfactory agreement. The discourse of the letter is designed to reveal both the wisdom
of the king—who understands the limits of his power in frontier regions—as well as
his clever manipulation of the people on whom he must rely as he rules his kingdom.
The epistolary exchange continues, however, and in the only extant answer to a
royal reply in the whole of CKU (ArŠ2 [3]), Aradmu takes cues from his master and
utilizes his own rhetoric of subordination to diffuse the situation and to maintain
his own high position. The letter is difficult to understand, but the general outlines
of the grand vizier’s discourse strategy are clear. He begins by reporting the general
state of the entire Ur III state, which is, by implication, in magnificent shape due to
his personal efforts. He then reports on brigands who have settled in the area outside
the cities, where royal control is weak; but this passage is simply a defense of his own
actions. He then turns to the main topic of his epistle, an explanation of his relation-
ship with Apilaša, whom he has known from childhood. In this manner, he alludes to
the intimate, close-knit nature of the elite groups that were close to the Crown and
to his own status with them; Aradmu has nothing but praise for the wise king who
recognized the other man’s abilities and promoted him to his high rank. How could
Aradmu ever be set against such a faithful servant of the Crown? The sycophantic
language of the grand vizier reaffirms the hierarchical relationship between the king
and his most powerful subordinate. He appeals to the patronage of the king, while at
the same time implying a similar relationship between himself and Apilaša. 34

33. See the commentary to ArŠ1: 9 (1).

34. I am using the term “patronage” in the limited sense that has been investigated by Ray-
mond Westbrook (2005).
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 75

The opening lines of Aradmu’s reply include an interesting geographical per-

spective on the borders of Šulgi’s state (ArŠ2: 4–6 [3]):
4
(The entire kingdom), from the sea of Dilmun land 5to the brackish waters at the
foot of the Amorite Highlands 6to the borders of Simurum in the land of Subir.

Here the Persian Gulf is referred to as “the sea of Dilmun land” (a-ab-ba kur dil-
mun ki) but later in CKU, in a letter addressed to Ibbi-Sin at the very end of his
reign, this body of water is designated as “the sea of Magan” (a-ab-ba má-gan-na ki ,
PuIb1: 9 [23]). The former refers to the island of Falaika and its vicinity, while the
latter is now thought to designate roughly the area of the United Arab Emirates/
Northern Oman (Zarins 2008: 215). References to Magan, although hardly abun-
dant, occur from Šulgi’s time into the reign of Ibbi-Sin, 35 but the rare occurrences of
Dilmun begin only with Amar-Sin’s second year. Indeed, Dilmun is only mentioned
three times in the Ur III record, in a cluster of texts concerning a group of “Amorite”
maš-maš practitioners who arrived from there (AS2.6.3–4), 36 in a record of a boat
loaded for a trip to Dilmun in IS1.6.14 (UET 3 1507), and in an enigmatic undated
Girsu record that documents a group of royal bodyguards (àga-ús lugal), who had
arrived from Dilmun but were ill (RTC 337).
To summarize: the three letters concerning the Apilaša affair provide a perspec-
tive on the image of Mesopotamian kings that is complementary to the overpower-
ing poetic self-representation of the royal hymns and related literature. In the letters,
King Šulgi is portrayed as a wise and judicious ruler who understands the limits of
his own power and knows how to balance the various claims to authority among
his subordinates, siding with a provincial governor against the grand vizier, but also
controlling Aradmu without losing his loyalty.

The Abaindasa Affair (Letters 4–9)

The epistolary material concerning an officer by the name of Abaindasa is het-
erogeneous and badly documented. Five of the six letters belong to the Aradmu dos-
sier and the sixth is a letter of petition from Abaindasa himself to Šulgi (AbŠ1 (4)=
SEpM1). The latter is the only poetic letter of petition in the CKU, although some
of the SEpM poetic epistles of this type were undoubtedly addressed to Ur III rulers
or were later composed as such (Kleinerman 2011). Moreover, this composition, al-
though preserved in 15 sources from Nippur, Ur, and Susa, as well as on three tablets
of unknown origin, is extremely unstable, with a level of textual variation that is
unmatched by any other CKU item. Indeed, in my experience, the textual variation
in this text is unique in the standard OB literary corpus. Not only is the text open

35. The references to Magan are discussed in Englund 1990: 132–34 and now in Zarins
2008: 271.
36. mu amurrum maš-maš dilmun-ta e-ra-ne-šè: Owen, Ebla 1975–1985 287 A: 3
(AS2.6.-), CST 254: 2 (AS2.6.3), TRU 305:3 (AS2.6.4).
76 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 1

to manipulation by teachers and perhaps even students, but its place in the Nippur
curriculum is also unfixed: on some tablets, it opened SEpM, while on others, it is
replaced in this role by the prose letter ArŠ2 (7) = SEpM1a, which deals with Aba­
indasa but was sent from Aradmu to Šulgi.
Even though Abaindasa was the subject of more letters than anyone else in
CKU, the whole affair is murky, and it is difficult to establish anything more than the
broadest outline of the problems that beset him. Of the five prose letters (nos. 5–9),
two are attested only at Nippur (ŠAr3 [6]; ArŠ3 [7]) but are documented only on a
single prism that seems to have a unique, expanded version of SEpM. One is known
only from a single manuscript from that city and from a somewhat different manu-
script of unknown provenance (ŠAr2 [5]), another is documented by a unique tab-
let of unknown origins that is difficult to read in places (ArŠ4 [8]), and the final
manuscript, possibly from Sippar, is definitely a spurious later scribal creation that
only mentions Abaindasa in passing in broken context (ArŠ5 [9]). None of these
compositions can be fully reconstructed at present.
One is tempted to create a single narrative from all of these letters, but the
dossier is essentially a modern fiction, created from sources that were never read
together in antiquity. From the Nippur perspective, the affair appears to have been
documented primarily by the letter of petition of Abaindasa (AbŠ1 [4]) or by ArŠ3
[7], which alternated as the first item of the SEpM; that is, it is quite possible that
students only knew one or the other, depending on the tradition that their teachers
followed.
Abaindasa’s letter of petition (AbŠ1 [4]), which is the most intelligible of the
whole group, describes his lot in metaphorical terms and provides no information
on the details of his experiences. All one gathers from the entire dossier is that he
was an officer stationed in Zimudar and that he was dismissed from his position and
imprisoned. The Zimudar reference (ArŠ3: 5 [6]) is somewhat suspect and may point
to the Šu-Sin correspondence as the source of this contamination or perhaps as the
inspiration for a complete fabrication. Aradmu investigated his case on behalf of the
king, and it may be that Abaindasa was returned to his post. As matters now stand,
the only full description of an episode in the ongoing Abaindasa drama is contained
on a tablet of unknown provenance that is almost complete but extremely difficult
to understand (ArŠ8 [8]).
Although partly impenetrable, this letter is critical for understanding the Aba­
indasa affair. It seems that Aradmu reports that the officer, cashiered from the ranks
and thrown into prison, had been let free and reinstated as a result of royal interven-
tion, perhaps due to the effectiveness of his letter of petition to Šulgi (AbŠ1 [4]).
The second half of ArŠ4 (8) is extremely difficult to make out, but we may discern
that Aradmu, unhappy with the king’s ruling, is accusing Abaindasa of further mis-
chief and insubordination. The “authenticity” of the missive is suspect, to be sure;
furthermore, it may link the position of Abaindasa with the bad mada fortifications
that are the likely subject of the Puzur-Šulgi correspondence, if the reconstruction
and interpretation of a crucial line is correct (ArŠ4: 16 [8]):
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 77

[kí] lugal-u10 mu-un-šub bàd im-mi-in-dù

(Abaindasa) abandoned the task (assigned by) my king and applied himself to work
on building the fortifications.

None of this makes very good sense, because we would think that the king would
want Abaindasa to work on fortifications, but since the actual task (kí) that is the
subject of all of this correspondence is never specified, it may have concerned other
matters altogether. Either the person who composed this had no idea about these af-
fairs and knew them only from existing letters or the word bàd here does not allude
to the bad mada and this letter has nothing to do with the Puzur-Šulgi works.
This letter contains at least one line that is somewhat suspect (line 5):
ra-bi sí-ik-ka-tum ugula nu-banda3 érin dag̃al-⸢la lugal-g̃á⸣-ke4

The military rank rabi sikkatum is not attested in Ur III times. 37

The impression one gets is that, at some points in the transmission of CKU, new
letters concerning Abaindasa were added and some of the already existing letters
were modified along the way, but which epistles or motifs may have originated in
Ur III times and which ones were later elaborations is impossible to discern at pres-
ent. It is also important to note that the name Abaindasa is unattested as such in any
Ur III text; it is documented only once in the form a-ba-an-da-sá (UDT 58 r. iii
15, Š43.-.-, Girsu). 38 This form of the name is also known from Old Akkadian times
(MAD 4 70:11, ECTJ 29: rev. iii 11). In the letters, his title is ugula éren zú-kešda
(lugal), which is likewise unattested in Ur III.
Origins and transmission aside, the letters of the Abaindasa affair, much like the
Apilaša correspondence, reaffirm the statecraft of King Šulgi, who knows when to
defend junior officeholders against higher ranking officers and who is willing to over-
turn local verdicts. How this relates to actual Ur III practice is unknown, because we
have no information on the role of the Crown—if indeed there was any—in control-
ling and affirming local decisions of this type, including judicial proceedings on the
frontier, although we must assume that mechanisms for complaints by local officials
existed. In light of the fact that at least some of the Old Babylonian students who
were learning these texts were children of local officials and would eventually assume
the roles of officials themselves, we can see the Ur III disputes between Aradmu and
his master as distanced examples of relationships between the Crown and its officers.
As W. F. Leemans (1968) noted some years ago, in Hammurabi’s time, the king was
personally invested in various provincial issues, arbitrating disputes on his own, but
as N. Yoffee (1988: 104) has observed, “these decisions do not represent resolutions

37. See Pientka-Hinz 2006 and the commentary to the edition below.
38. This is an entry in a long list of workers, perhaps connected with àga-ús, assigned to
various shrines in the temple complex of Nanše. This particular fellow is marked as deceased. See
also NATN 955 I 17 a-ba-an-x-[x] (Nippur; the text is in Baghdad; collated on a cast in the
University Museum, Philadelphia).
78 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 1

between disputants but were, rather, political acts of a king either supporting or occa-
sionally restraining his own bureaucrats against complaints about their behavior.” At
some level, at least, the CKU exemplifies relationships of this kind but depoliticizes
them to some degree by projecting them into the past.

Miscellaneous Aradmu-Šulgi Letters (Letters 9–10)

The correspondence between the grand vizier and his king also includes two
solitary items that are without duplicates and without an answer; both are undoubt-
edly OB concoctions.
Letter 9 (ArŠ5) combines elements of the Puzur-Šulgi correspondence, namely,
the construction of fortifications at Igihursaa, with the mention of Abaindasa. The
text is bilingual, but the Akkadian version does not always match the original very
precisely, and it appears that the scribe who wrote this version had a somewhat idio­
syncratic knowledge of Sumerian compared with what we are accustomed to, at least
from Nippur. It is also clear, however, that the author of this exercise, or perhaps of
an earlier version, had other sources to draw on, even if some of it became garbled
at some point in the making of the letter or in the process of transmission. The last
preserved line of the obverse mentions the Ur III princess Kunši-matum, who was
married off to the ruler of the highland principality of Simanum, only to be ousted,
together with her husband, in some form of coup at the beginning of the reign of
Šu-Sin (Michalowski 1975; Sallaberger 2007: 442). The king of Ur led a punitive
expedition against Simanum and reinstated Kunši-matum on the throne of the allied
state. The name seems to have survived in this letter but was misunderstood as an
Akkadian intrusion and was therefore translated into Sumerian, creating additional
confusion.
The last Aradmu missive of this “dossier” (ArŠ6 [10]) resembles the beginning of
letter 3 in tone if not in wording, offering praise for the king and apparently moving
on to report the grand vizier’s achievements, but the fragmentary state of the only
existing manuscript hinders any fuller analysis. The language of this section is more
reminiscent of royal hymns than of the epistolary literature, very much suggesting a
late date of composition. This supposition is further bolstered by the mention of the
place names Gutium, Mari, and Rapiqum, because the first and last really have no
place in a letter from Ur III times. 39

The Ur-dun Affair (Letters 11–12)

The two letters concerning a merchant by the name of Ur-dun are known to us
only in single manuscripts. 40 The first (UdŠ1 [11]), which was sent by this man to

39. Lines 5′–6′; see the commentary to the edition.

40. The reading of the second element of the name is uncertain; the reading Ur-dun is con-
ventional (see the commentary to UrŠ1: 2 [11]).
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 79

a king, who must be Šulgi, is clearly a post–Ur III fabrication, written by someone
who knew the Apilaša-affair letters as well as the Šu-Sin correspondence. Following
the example of Aradmu, the merchant reminds the king that he had been sent on a
royal mission, in this case to purchase juniper resin in the eastern mountains. But the
high-handed Apilaša had sent for him and had his men confiscate Ur-dun’s goods.
In words that echo Aradmu’s denunciations of the very same officer, the merchant
describes how no one bothered to hear his complaint when he appeared at the pre-
fect’s palace. He then explains that Aradmu and Babati—the latter borrowed from
Šu-Sin’s letter to Šarrum-bani (ŠuŠa1: 35 [19])—were not available to help him, be-
cause they had gone on a mission from Zimudar to Simurum; notably, the only other
letter in which these toponyms are both mentioned is the missive from Šarrum-bani
to Šu-Sin (ŠaŠu1: 9, 14 [18]). The rest of the text is imperfectly preserved, but it
appears that Ur-dun warns Šulgi that he fears the affair can only end in violence. As
noted in the commentary to the edition of UrŠ1 (11), the borrowings from other
letters as well as the questionable grammar of the letter strongly suggest that this is
an Old Babylonian creation.
Letter 12 (ArŠ7) seems to have little in common with no. 11 except for the
mention of the same merchant, Ur-dun. The solitary manuscript from Ur is incom-
plete, and we are missing the beginning and end of the letter. The contents indicate
that the addressee must have been royalty, and therefore we suspect that once again
Šulgi is involved. The identity of the writer remains unidentified for now, and it is
only conjecture that Aradmu is involved. No juniper resin is mentioned; instead, it
appears that precious stones of various kind are the subject of the narrative; perhaps
the acquisition of precious materials from the highlands is the thematic link between
the two letters. As noted in the commentary to the composition, it is filled with rare
words and utilizes vocabulary taken from the lexical and school epistolary traditions,
strongly suggesting that this composition, like the one that precedes it, is an Old
Babylonian fabrication.
Hans Neumann (1992b, 2006) cautiously tried to connect this Ur-dun, known
at the time only from UrdŠ1, with a merchant by that name who was active in Ur III
times, although he was well aware of the problems involved. In view of the fabricated
nature of these missives, I would argue that this fictitious character had nothing to
do with his Ur III namesake; instead, he was lifted, for the purposes of fiction, from
another Old Babylonian school text, one that was studied together with texts of an
epistolary nature, namely, the Announcement of a Lost Seal that was part of the SEpM
(text 14). This composition will be edited and commented upon by A. Kleinerman,
so here I only offer a composite text and a translation of the main part of the text:

1. kišib3 mu-sar-ra ur-dun dam-gàr-ra ú-gu ba-an-dé

2. inim pu-úh-ru-um-ma-ta
3. niir-e sila-sila-e si gù ba-ni-in-ra
4. lú-na-me ní-na-me ugu-na li-bí-in-tuku
80 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 1

An inscribed cylinder seal of the merchant Ur-dun has been lost. By order of the
assembly, a herald (announced this by) blowing the horn throughout the streets.
(From this day forward) he will not owe anyone any obligation.

Whatever the genealogy of letters 11 and 12 might have been, they are missing at
Nippur and are clearly marginal within CKU.

The Puzur-Šulgi Correspondence (Letters 13–14)

In the CKU, Puzur-Šulgi is the general of a location named Bad-Igihursaa, a
place-name that is unknown outside of the literary tradition. It is probably intended
to be understood as the fortress that anchored the fortifications built by Šulgi that
was celebrated in the names of his 37th and 38th regnal years; the historical circum-
stances of this entire construction are discussed in chap. 5.

The Letter from Išbi-Erra to Šulgi (Letter 15)

This fascinating epistle is obviously a late creation, attested only in a single
bilingual Middle Babylonian version from Susa. What makes this text so interesting
is that it was composed by someone who had imagination—possibly even a sense of
humor—but also knowledge of the Sumerian literary and lexical tradition; moreover,
this person knew well many of the other parts of the Ur III royal correspondence.
There are absurdities, including the very synchronism between Šulgi and Išbi-Erra,
as well as the amounts of silver and gold mentioned, which are excessive, to say the
least. While technically not impossible, it is improbable that these two individuals,
the second Ur III monarch and someone who came from Mari but is first attested a
generation later, would have had any contact, epistolary or otherwise. Indeed, as we
shall presently see, Išbi-Erra is mentioned only once in the extensive Ur III archival
documentation, and by that time he was already the independent ruler of Isin.
The amount of gold that Babati is said to have received from the crown for Išbi-
Erra—600 talents of silver and an equal amount of gold—is preposterous even by
imperial Mesopotamian standards and in a sense anticipates the absurd amounts of
treasure contained in a much later literary epistle, the first-millennium Akkadian-
language Letter of Gilgameš. 41
The derivative nature of this text is impossible to miss: the mention of the high
commissioner Babati, with his title pisa-dub-ba, is derived from the Šu-Sin cor-
respondence, the subject of gold and silver for purchasing grain, as well as the very
figure of Išbi-Erra was taken from the Ibbi-Sin letters, and a passage about the nature
of punishments available to royal officers (lines 24–26) is lifted almost verbatim

41. This composition, thus far attested only in the late–seventh-century Assyrian literary
collection at Sultantepe (ancient Huzirina), was first edited by Gurney 1957; see Foster 2005:
1017–19, with further literature.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 81

from letter 2 (ŠAr1). Thus, although the linguistic features of both the Sumerian
and Akkadian versions suggest a post-Old Babylonian date of composition, the in-
tertextual gestures to much of CKU leads us to believe that perhaps this letter was
already pieced together in Old Babylonian times, when all of the other epistles would
have been available, and that the text we have shows marks of later redaction. Al-
ternatively, we have to posit that the knowledge of some parts of CKU lasted longer
than can presently be documented and that other Middle Babylonian manuscripts
may ultimately surface. This is not completely unexpected, since we know that the
second-millennium purge of the majority of Old Babylonian Sumerian-language lit-
erature was a complex affair that may have proceeded in stages, as can be observed
from the material collected by N. Veldhuis (2000).
The late Old Babylonian/early Middle Babylonian literary tradition that was
transmitted to the west, known from places such as Bogazköy, Ugarit, Amarna, and
Emar, preserves very little memory of the Ur III kings, but this might have been dif-
ferent at Susa and elsewhere in the east. At present, however, we know little about
the complex cuneiform traditions of second-millennium Iran, which appear, judging
from the modest remains recovered to date, to have been quite different from what
was preserved in the west. 42

The Amar-Sin Correspondence (Letters 16–17)

The letters from Amar-Sin to Šulgi and the king’s answer offer the biggest chal-
lenges to any editor of the CKU material. The state of preservation of the existing
manuscripts, described in full in the commentaries to the editions, simply does not
allow for reliable reconstructions. The fragmentary remains testify to the distribu-
tion of these letters in Nippur, Isin, and elsewhere, but the contents are difficult to
evaluate. The subject seems to be much more prosaic than the usual CKU topics:
it appears that Amar-Sin, who seems to have military responsibilities, is writing to
the king about fields and irrigation work. If I understand the oblique reference to
the area around Apiak correctly, the prince may have been stationed in the military
zone discussed in the next chapter—perhaps even at the fortifications built by his
father that are the main focus of the Puzur-Šulgi correspondence. Nothing can be
said about the genealogy of either of these two letters; it may be that they are not
derivative, because the main topic is not generic and is not borrowed from elsewhere,
but at the same time it is possible that its atypical character may also indicate later
composition.

42. On this Iranian tradition, see pp. 43, above.

 Chapter 5

The Amorites in Ur III Times

The “Amorite question” has been one of the most debated and contested issues
in the historiography of ancient Near Eastern studies for more than a century. It
has occasioned such publications as The Empire of the Amorites (Clay 1919), with
its pan-Amorite hypothesis, as well as its refutation by T. Bauer (1926, 1929), not
to mention others such as Who Were the Amorites (Haldar 1971), or other more
modern studies by D. O. Edzard (1957: 30–45), H. B. Huffmon (1965), G. Buccel-
lati (1966), C. Wilcke (1969), and M. Streck (2000). The conversation changed
radically as a result of the discovery, in the 1930s, of the archives in the palace of
the kings of the city of Mari on the Euphrates River. French excavators discovered
thousands of eighteenth-century-b.c. cuneiform tablets in the ruins of Tell Hariri
(the modern name of the mound), written in the Babylonian language, contain-
ing hundreds of Amorite personal names, and many of these texts are available for
study. The ongoing reexamination of these texts by Jean-Marie Durand, Dominique
Charpin, and their collaborators has changed the way we view social, ethnic, and
political relationships in northern Mesopotamia and Syria in the first centuries of the
second millennium—so much so that they have insisted on renaming the Old Baby-
lonian period (quite incorrectly, I think) the “Amorite Epoch” (e.g., Charpin and
Ziegler 2003; Charpin 2004a, 2004b; Durand 2004). The dynastic lines in most of
the principalities of the time may have had Amorite roots, but this is not necessarily
an aspect that should be chosen to essentialize a historical moment. We really do not
know how important this “ethnic” factor was in society and how deeply it was rooted
in very different states and social groups. Although the documentation is extensive,
our most abundant and informative source of information, the Mari archives, covers
no more than 50 years, and the main body of the texts—primarily letters—spans no
more than two decades or so (Charpin and Ziegler 2003: 1). As important as these
texts are—and some have dedicated their entire lives to the study of the Mari mate-
rials—they provide us with a small and idiosyncratic entry into this ancient society;
this is but a peephole, and our field of vision has definite boundaries.
The scribes of Mari wrote in Semitic Babylonian—more specifically, in one
scribal dialect of Babylonian used in Ešnunna—but in all probability many of the in-
habitants of Syria and northern Mesopotamia at this time spoke a variety of Amorite
82
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 83

dialects. Amorite, although also a member of the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic
language family, was definitely distinct from Babylonian, and the two languages,
related though they were, would not have been mutually understandable. 1 It is im-
portant to note that not a single sentence has been preserved in Amorite and that we
know the language almost exclusively from personal names and loanwords. Amorites
may be defined as Amorite speakers, but to us they are known only through their
writings in Babylonian—that is, Akkadian. 2
Defined in traditional Assyriological terms, the Amorite dialects were relatively
new to Syria. In the Ebla archives of 700 or 800 years earlier, there is not a trace of
the Amorite language, and the personal names of Syrians appear to have belonged
to a different Semitic language group or, perhaps, even groups. 3 In the Sumerian re-
cords pertaining to Syria from around 2000 b.c., few if any people from the West have
Amorite names, and in the small number of published Mari tablets that predate the
period of the main archives, there is likewise no evidence for Amorite. Whatever so-
cial and historical forces underlie this situation, there can be little doubt that we are
witness here to the replacement of one dialect continuum by another. These Amorite
speakers lived not only in Syria; many of the urban centers of Babylonia were ruled
by dynasts with Amorite names and lineages, and Amorite personal names are found
in western Iran as well as in areas of the Persian Gulf. These peoples—and it is not at
all clear who was new and who was old—utilized Mesopotamian cuneiform and the
Babylonian language for communication, and only a limited repertoire of their own
cultural traits can be detected behind the veneer of adopted written conventions. At
the time of Yasmaḫ-Addu, and even more so during the time when Zimri-Lim occu-
pied the throne of Mari, central and eastern Syria was host to a number of Amorite
ethnic groups, or tribes, that had come to live in both the cities and on the steppe.
Some of their members lived in permanent residences in villages, towns, and cities,
while others, designated in the local texts by the term ḫanûm/ha.na, were more
mobile, moving along the pasture and water areas with their flocks (Gelb 1961: 37;
Durand 1998: 417). The complex relationships between the settled people and their
more mobile relatives are still being analyzed and debated.
The general portrait I have just sketched is one that describes matters on which
there is much consensus. The picture becomes more difficult when we attempt to
look more closely at the early history of these “Amorites” and try to ascertain the
denotation of the term in the native sources.

1. This can be inferred from the words of Samsi-Addu, addressed to his son Yasmah-Addu at
Mari: “You can’t (even) speak Amorite with them!” (a-mu-ur-re-e it-ti-šu-nu da-ba-ba-am ú-ul te-
le-i) referring to the local pastoral tribesmen (ḫanûm) [Ziegler and Charpin 2007: 61, lines 6″–7″].
Presumably, Yasmah-Addu spoke Akkadian. Amorite is also listed as a separate language that has
to be translated in Šulgi Hymn B 213 and Šulgi Hymn C 119–124; see Rubio 2006: 167–70.
2. On the general background of these matters, see Heimpel 2003: 13–36 and Durand 2004.
3. The Ebla texts do, however, contain references to a MAR.TUki as well as to daggers made
in the “Amorite manner”; see Archi 1985. For possible local language variation in Syria as re-
flected in Ebla onomastics, see Bonechi 1991.
84 The Amorites in Ur III Times

The high Old Babylonian period may be a time of “Amorite Dynasties,” but, in
Babylonia at least, youngsters studying the ancient Sumerian tongue were exposed
to an ideology that was less than kind to outsiders, including “Amorites.” In the
older Sumerian texts, there are literary depictions of “the other” that are predictably
less than flattering (Cooper 1983: 30–36). In this semantic universe, Sumer was the
“homeland” (kalam) and others were depicted in terms of negations of what was
perceived of as markers of civilization, much as outsiders were defined in the classi-
cal world. And so in Sumerian primary curriculum texts, such as The Curse of Agade,
Enki and the World Order, or Lugalbanda II, these people are described as ignorant of
agriculture and of the finer points of civilization, with neither permanent abode nor
burial places, or as fools who live in the mountains (Cooper 1983: 31–33). It should
be noted, however, that most of these negative depictions of Amorites are in fact
Old Babylonian and shed little light on earlier ways of thinking about these matters.
The only securely dated Ur III depiction of these people, which is found in a later
copy of a royal inscription, is highly negative to be sure, but it is impossible to know
how pervasive prejudices might have been at the time (Šu-Sin E3/2.1.4.1 v 24–29;
Frayne 1997: 299):
u4-bi-ta MAR.TU lú ha-lam-ma 4
dím-ma ur-ra-gin7
ur-bar-ra-gin7
tùr x [x] x
lú [še nu]-zu
Then, the Amorites, who are evil, with minds like beasts, like wolves, who . . . sheep-
stalls, who are ignorant of agriculture. . . . 5

Any proper understanding of who was designated by the term MAR.TU in Ur III
texts requires some discussion of how one understands the issues associated with
ethnicity and tribalism in the context of early ancient Near Eastern history. Tradi-
tionally, the study of this history has focused on a succession of “peoples”: Sumerians,
Akkadians, Amorites, Kassites, Arameans, and many others. The identification of
these groups comes from a mixture of ancient labels and linguistic classification, so
that historically divergent peoples are directly associated with specific languages or
dialect groupings. This approach made sense decades ago, but after a half-century of
cross-cultural studies on ethnicity and social identity, it is truly wanting. Although
Kamp and Yoffee (1980), Emberling (1997), and Emberling and Yoffee (1999) have
attempted to steer the discussion of ethnic issues into a more theoretically and com-
paratively informed arena, their efforts have apparently had little effect on the way

4. This word seems to mean “evil (destroyers)”; see OB Lu A 36 = B 39 (MSL 12 158, 178
= ša li-mu-ut-tim); Limet compares the term “vandals.” The same term is used to describe Šimaški
and Elam (Ur Lament 244, Eridu Lament 4:10) and Gutium (Lamentation over the Destruction of
Sumer and Ur 230).
5. The passage is broken, and what follows cannot be restored with confidence.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 85

in which these matters have been considered, and this is evident when one surveys
the subsequent literature that deals with the topic of the Amorites.
Most current discussion of the “Amorite problem” distorts the issue by creating
a unitary semantic concept that combines notions of common origin, ethnic and
linguistic identity, tribalism, and nomadism as a way of life. As I see it, this way of
essentialist thinking about terms such as MAR.TU leads to convenient historical
fictions. We take all of the references to the word from all periods and throw them
all in the same basket, implying that they all denote the same loosely defined notion
of an Amorite people. A handful of Early Dynastic references; two Old Akkadian
military encounters at the Jebel Bishri in Syria; a few hundred Ur III designations
of individuals as MAR.TU; not to mention the famous wall built to exclude them,
are all seen through the lens of a much more abundant Old Babylonian document
set, some of it from one or two generations of scribes from Mari in Syria. Seen in
this manner, a master narrative emerges in which nomads or pastoralists move across
Syria and Mesopotamia, from the desert to the sown; first raiding and harassing, then
transgressing and finally dominating the urban areas of the Near East, from tent to
city after city.
Underlying all of this is the assumption that the appearance of an Amorite lan-
guage or dialect continuum in Syria and Mesopotamia, as documented in personal
and tribal names, must be considered as evidence for intensive population spread—
in other words, it is a symptom of an influx of new people from the west, sometimes
imagined as great invasions. The ancient sources are silent about these issues, and
therefore all historical and sociolinguistic reconstruction can only be based on theo-
retical principles and presuppositions. But comparative studies of language spread
suggest that such phenomena are rarely the result of massive population shifts or
replacement. Thus, for example, one influential archaeologist and linguist, Colin
Renfrew (1992), has proposed that the spread of Indo-European must be explained
as an example of an “elite-dominance” replacement process, whereby a small number
of Indo-European speakers supplanted local elites, eventually leading to linguistic
change. Johanna Nichols describes three known mechanisms of such change: lan-
guage shift, demographic expansion, and migration:

There are probably no pure cases: Language shift is normally in response to the pres-
ence of at least a few influential immigrants; demographic expansion involves some
absorption of previous population rather than extermination; and migration leads to
language shift (either to or from the immigrants’ language). The terms language shift,
demographic expansion, and migration refer to the predominant contributor with no
claim that it is exclusive. Almost all literature on language spreads assumes, at least
implicitly, either demographic expansion or migration as the basic mechanism, but
in fact language shift is the most conservative assumption and should be the default
assumption (1997: 372).

Nichols’s “shift” is similar to, if less precise than, Renfrew’s “elite-dominance” model.
A recent study of genetic diversity in a linguistically complex area, the Caucasus,
86 The Amorites in Ur III Times

where many languages, some unrelated, are found in proximity to one another in
a relatively small area, has demonstrated that linguistic diversity is not reflected in
the distribution of genetic features (in this case, DNA), which led the researchers to
Renfrew’s model as the most probable explanation for language spread in the Cauca-
sus (Nasidze and Stoneking 2001: 1205). More recent work on genetic analysis and
language groupings has not solved the problem, and linguists such as Lyle Campbell
(2006) have drawn attention to the errors that are often found in this type of analy-
sis. Indeed, comparative work has revealed the complexities and many variables in-
volved in large-scale language shift, with competing models in different disciplines
favoring or avoiding the issue of broad population replacement as an explanation for
such phenomena (e.g., Bellwood 2001).
These alternative models for the spread of language undermine the idea that
the appearance of various languages or dialect groups in the Near East—such as, for
example Sumerian, Akkadian, Hurrian, Amorite, Kassite, or Aramaic—can only be
explained as a symptom of concentrated and substantial population movements and
that the appearance of linguistically distinct personal and geographical names signals
the arrival of new peoples moving in from the West or from the North. Some popula-
tion movement certainly took place, but the relative numbers of peoples involved
and the manner in which languages spread throughout the existing population are
matters that need to be modeled and analyzed in each individual case; we cannot
simply assume in each instance that waves of people overran large areas and brought
new languages—and new cultures—with them.
In the case of Amorites, it is unlikely that the presence of speakers of this lan-
guage continuum arrived in Mesopotamia in one fell swoop or that all aspects of
Amorite self-definition can be ascribed to the same set of ideological constructs. We
cannot dispute that evidence exists for native notions of Amorite identity in Old
Babylonian times or at least for ideological constructs at state levels that utilize these
ideas for social control, but it is important to analyze them in their historical context
and to recognize the fluid nature of such ideas. This is not the place for a full analysis
of these matters, and one example will have to suffice. I leave out the later genealo-
gies found in the famous funeral ritual text from the time of Ammiṣaduqa, as well as
the Assyrian King List, because they come from a different time and may appeal to
ideas that stem from another era (Michalowski 1983b). An oft-cited example of the
recognition of common ethnic identity comes from a letter of Anam, king of Uruk,
written to the Babylonian ruler Sin-muballiṭ, in which Anam appeals for military
assistance to his fellow monarch, reminding him that the two cities were “of one
house” (bītum ištēnma; Falkenstein 1963: 58 iii 25). Many scholars, including Kamp
and Yoffee (1980: 90) and A. Goddeeris (2002: 324), see this as evidence of a sense
of common Amorite ethnic ties as members of the Amnanum tribe, but it is more
likely that this refers, in a much more limited manner, to the dynastic marriage that
had bound the two ruling families a generation earlier, when Šallurtum, the daughter
of the Babylonian king Sumu-la-el—the founder of the dynasty—had married King
Sin-kašid of Uruk (Röllig 1972–1975: 283). In other words, kinship alliance by mar-
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 87

riage may be the issue here, rather than ethnicity, although quite obviously one does
not exclude the other.
I have stressed the relatively recent arrival of the Amorite language on the can-
vas that we are scanning. There are also other developments that accompany these
linguistic phenomena—tribalism and transhumance—but they also do not necessar-
ily imply that a completely new population had moved into the area. There can be
no doubt that, at the time of the Mari archives, native categorizations included no-
tions of identity that were linked to Amorite tribal units and that these notions oper-
ated on local as well as state levels in Syria and to some degree in Babylonia as well
(Michalowski 1983b). But tribal nomenclature was fluid, and there were a variety
of forms in which rulers appealed to the population, pronouncing their legitimacy,
claiming allegiance, and facing reminders of the tensions within their kingdoms. I
suggest that the genealogies, far from being primordial, were recent in origin and may
have been secondary at best. Taken further, we can see in these genealogies and tribal
names invented realities that resulted from and reflected the complex relationships
between city and countryside, settled and mobile, old and new. The shifting and
peripatetic family relationships of the rulers of often-ephemeral polities, centered on
old urban centers, required new legitimizing mechanisms, and the written evidence
at our disposal was of negligible importance in the search for identity and power that
must have been of paramount significance in those politically volatile ancient times.
There can be no doubt that part of this reality was infused into a variety of identity
labels and that there was a definite hierarchy of such terms in which the notion
“Amorite” played a significant but variable role in various times and various places.
What these roles may have been we are only beginning to understand.
This is, briefly stated, a summary of the Old Babylonian situation that often
serves as a model for understanding earlier issues concerning Amorites. All current
work on the Ur III Amorites is still based on the only substantial collection and
analysis of this material in the standard work on the subject, Giorgio Buccellati’s
pioneering 1966 work, The Amorites of the Ur III Period. It was an excellent book for
its time, but it was published almost 50 years ago; many texts have been published
since then, and our historical and historiographic perspectives have changed in the
intervening years. Lists of newly discovered Ur III Amorite names have been pro-
vided subsequently (Wilcke 1969; Edzard and Farber 1974; Owen 1981: 256–57), but
a full reexamination of all the material is clearly overdue.
In modern works on the Amorites and Ur III times, there are six propositions
that crop up over and over, perhaps best illustrated by three of the most recent
publications on the matter—those by Michael Streck (2000), Brit Jahn (2007), and
Walther Sallaberger (2007). These propositions are:

1. The Amorites Mesopotamian encountered in Ur III times were nomads.

2. Amorites came at Mesopotamia from the west.
3. Some Amorites underwent a process of sedentarization that can be traced in
texts.
88 The Amorites in Ur III Times

4. Amorites infiltrated the Ur III state in large numbers.

5. Hostile Amorites played a significant role in the collapse of the Ur III state.
6. Amorites took over power in Mesopotamian cities after the Ur III collapse.
Most authorities, particularly those cited above, would affirm these propositions as
correct. Here I wish to demonstrate that not a single one of them can be substantiated
on the basis of currently available information. Furthermore, I will argue strongly,
on empirical as well as comparative and theoretical grounds, that these propositions
are simply false. First, however, it is important to remember that there are essentially
two kinds of Amorites in the Ur III archival records: (1) outsiders who are visiting,
primarily for diplomatic reasons, and (2) those who live in Mesopotamia, either per-
manently or in passing. The few references in literary texts and inscriptions written
during the period refer only to hostile Amorites on the eastern frontier. Most of the
comments below concern those living within the borders of the Ur III state proper.
Let us take up these issues one by one.

1. Were the Amorites Whom Mesopotamians Encountered

in Ur III Times Nomads?
Although it is said that the Amorites were nomads, there is not a single piece
of evidence from Ur III times to support this assertion. Once again, it is worth men-
tioning that the issue is undermined by a number of underlying problems. First and
foremost, we have often essentialized the notion of “the Amorites,” treating it as
unitary by projecting historically determined information into the past. The matter
is further complicated by confusion in Assyriological literature over if and how to
distinguish the concepts of nomadism, pastoralism, transhumance, and tribalism. 6
Not all pastoralists are transhumant or fully nomadic, and while tribal organization
is common among nomads and trans­humant pastoralists, it is not a defining char-
acteristic of either. Most important, there is good reason to question whether there
ever were any nomads, in the classic sense, in the early history of the ancient Near
East—although this depends on a subtle definitional matter. Anatoly Khazanov is
quite adamant, stating that, “despite the opinion of certain scholars, there are no
grounds for thinking that pastoralists of the third and even the second millennium
b.c. were real nomads” (Khazanov 1984: 91). Though Brian Spooner (1986: 184),
who has more research experience in Western Asia, has criticized this formulation,
Khazanov’s statement reflects the recognition that ethnographic information on no-
madism in the area cannot be used uncritically to model historical situations prior
to the domestication of the camel and the spread of Islam. Glenn Schwartz (1995:
240) likewise calls attention to the importance of the camel for the development of
mobile forms of lifestyle.

6. See now the essays published in Szuchman 2009.

 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 89

The development of pastoralism in the western Zagros region is important for

our discussion, because this is one of the places where sheep and goats were origi-
nally domesticated. Kamyar Abdi (2003) has studied the archaeological evidence
for this development with an eye on nuanced definitions of the terms. If Abdi is cor-
rect, by Uruk times, pastoral modes of life fully complemented agricultural forms of
production in the western Zagros. Therefore, any hypothetical arrival of a nomadic
Amorite population may have had an impact in cultural terms but would not have
by any means introduced any new mode of life. It is more probable, if we are to for-
mulate hypotheses, that the Amorite groupings documented in Ur III times in the
Zagros constituted new sociopolitical units that resulted from a form of ethnogenesis
in which new and old populations adjusted to one another. Among these groups,
herding strategies were more determined by geography and climate than by ethnic
tradition.
Because some Amorites at Mari in the time of Zimri-Lim seasonally moved their
herds by no means implies that Amorites elsewhere, or in other times, lived in the
same manner; but even if they did, this would not make them nomads in the modern
sense of the term. Most recently, W. Sallaberger (2007: 448) has pointed to the fact
that in Ur III times people who are designated as Amorites sometimes delivered fat-
tailed sheep, and from this he concludes that they must have been nomads, because
these animals, which have the ability to store extra energy in their tails, are particu-
larly suited to a nomadic lifestyle. Breeds of such sheep, such as the Awassi, which are
prevalent in the Middle East today, are well adapted to arid landscapes and are raised
by nomadic and settled communities alike, but there is no good reason to correlate
the raising of fat-tailed sheep with any particular lifestyle. 7 Moreover, as Steinkeller
(1995: 51) has observed, fat-tailed sheep are commonly mentioned in the Drehem
archives and therefore cannot be specifically identified with nomadic existence. As
Sallaberger himself points out, the Amorites also brought other types of animals, in-
cluding cows and oxen, creatures that are not well suited for nomads. The texts listed
below that register booty from the Amurrum lands mention fat-tailed sheep, but
other animals appear as well, predominantly equids. All of this evidence points to
mixed husbandry, with various animals used for different purposes. And the sources
themselves are completely silent about whether these groups were pastoralists or
nomads. It is quite possible that some of them were nomadic, but more than this one
cannot say; Norman Yoffee (2005: 146), in a discussion of people of the Amoriti-
cal persuasion, puts it succinctly: “being Amorite has little to do with any common
subsistence pattern (pastoralists vs. agriculturalists), or a common residential pat-
tern (nomads vs. city dwellers), or any common economic status.” This becomes
quite clear once the notion that the Mari situation is paradigmatic for the study of
Amorite ethnicity in other times and other places is discarded. More recently, Die-
derik Meijer (in press) writes:

7. For example, in a survey of villages in the Bint Jbeil and Marjeyoun districts of South
Lebanon, all of the sheep were of the Awassi fat-tailed breed (Rouda 1992: 115).
90 The Amorites in Ur III Times

The distinction made between Amorites and Akkadians in some ways is striking,
but . . . no discrimination in the modern sense can be noted. Such often repeated
notions that “they didn’t bury their dead, they lived in tents, etc.,” are obvious
contradistinctions to the urban, settled way of life, undoubtedly used to bolster the
cohesive spirit of the urban, settled population. . . , perhaps even to “indoctrinate”
one’s subjects against these unruly dangers from the steppe. But how closely corre-
lated were these notions of “Amorite” and “unruly dangers from the steppe” really
for the man in the street, at a time when the Amorites were accepted in the higher
echelons of society?

The identification of the “Amorites” with nomadic lifestyle undoubtedly grows out
of a conceptualization that creates radical distinctions between urban and rural, state
and non-state, center and periphery, settled and mobile, and other binary opposi-
tions, some of them actually rooted in ancient ideological formulations. But for some
time now, it has been apparent that such categorizations impede rather than assist
historical analysis. Indeed, some archeologists with very different points of view on
many matters have been arguing that early cities in certain ecological zones were
founded, in Syria at least, as centers for semipastoralists who occupied both urban
and non-urban occupational niches. The best examples of research along these lines
can be found in the work of Anne Porter (2002, 2004, 2007) and Bertile Lyonnet
(1998, 2001, 2004, 2008); in addition, we must also mention studies by Giorgio
Buccellati (1990, 2004, 2008), who suggests, following well-known theoretical pos-
tulates, that pastoralism in Syria was secondary to agriculture. All three scholars
stress that there was a fluid back-and-forth movement between settled and mobile
or semimobile ways of life. Here I must stress again that seasonal pastoralism should
not be equated with fully mobile nomadism.
The comments just made concern the specific geographical and ecological reali-
ties of Syria, but the theoretical concerns about the misleading role of binary op-
positions are important for understanding the very different situation found in Mes-
opotamia, particularly in its southern areas. Nonetheless, the notion that cities and
settled countryside must be distinguished from the sometimes friendly, sometimes
hostile nomads who are “outside” oversimplifies historical reality, even if it reflects
categorizations occasionally encountered in the ancient literature, which sometimes
presents stereotypes of barbarian outsiders (Cooper 1983: 30–33). Adams (1981:
136) notes that “the accounts of ancient scribes, officials, and literati do not supply
us with entirely balanced and comprehensive testimony on matters from which their
authors were socially remote and of which they were technically ignorant.” Adams
goes on to provide a powerful argument for the existence of large areas, within the
borders of the Ur III state and not beyond, that were primarily but not exclusively
dedicated to the raising of very large animal herds by pastoral semi­sedentary folk
(1981: 149). In other words, the very large numbers of animals recorded in Ur III
texts, and which were exploited for milk, wool, hides, and other products, came from
within the alluvial plain. Although it is obvious from the Drehem records that the
frontier regions to the east were also a source of animals of this kind, the state was
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 91

not solely dependent on outlying regions for pasturing flocks, even if some flocks may
have been moved seasonally into the flanks of the highlands. If Adams is correct,
then we must discard the idea that all pastoralists were “outsiders”; some of them
were an integral part of the “inside” economy.
It is true that the native Ur III and later literary stereotypes portray Amorites
as people who raise animals and who are “ignorant of agriculture” (Cooper 1983:
32). In the Curse of Agade 45–46, which may be one of the earliest portrayals of the
Amorites in this manner and which was composed in Ur III times or slightly earlier,
they are described as breeders of both cattle and caprids:
MAR.TU kur-ra lú še nu-zu
gud du7 máš du7-da mu-un-na-da-an-ku4-ku4 8
Highland Amorites, who are ignorant of agriculture,
Delivered to her (Inana) butting bulls and butting bucks.

Goats certainly are raised by mobile folk, but cattle typically are not. So while this
depiction of Amorites characterizes them as people who raise animals but do not
grow grain, it does not necessarily follow that in Ur III times they were imagined
as nomads in the romantic mode that permeates some of our modern studies. Some
may have moved from pasture to pasture in the highlands during the course of the
year, but there is no evidence at present that the Amorites on the eastern borders of
Babylonia lived some version of a fully nomadic lifestyle. 9
Finally, I would like to question the explanatory value of the very problem: even
if some Amorites in fact were nomads, how much would this really matter? The
extensive research on this problem has only served to demonstrate that, as noted by
Khazanov, it is very difficult to define nomadism, aside from the fact that nomads lack
permanent dwellings. Brian Spooner (1971), already cited above, has insisted on an
ecological focus in studies of nomadism, and his perspective is highly relevant for our
work. 10 Once again, I stress that the historical situation revealed in the Mari letters
is determined by unique ecological as well as political and ethnic circumstances and
can by no means be considered as paradigmatic for the analysis of this problem in
other times and places. Moreover, with all due respect to the brilliant work of our
Paris colleagues, the Mari information is itself open to further analysis, braced by
theoretical and comparative work. For example, it is unfortunate that the translation
“Bedouin,” first proposed by I. J. Gelb (1961: 37) for the native term, ḫanûm/ha.na,
used for transhumant groups, has been widely adopted of late (Heimpel 2003: 34–36,
with earlier literature). Of course, we understand that this translation is meant as
a generalized analogy, but it is nevertheless unfortunate, because it brings to mind

8. The translation assumes that the prefix da is transitivizing here, in accordance with the
theory espoused by Miguel Civil (2010: 528–29).
9. Deiderik Meijer (in press), writing about Bronze Age Syria, also focuses on pastoralism
in contrast to nomadism—that is, herders of animals but not necessarily nomadic.
10. He is not alone; see, for example, more recently, Sørbø 2003.
92 The Amorites in Ur III Times

many modern myths pertaining to a category of people whose identities have shifted
in various ways throughout the centuries and whose culture has been associated,
although not explicitly, with two elements that are obviously missing in the second
millennium b.c., the camel and Islam (D. P. Cole 2003).
Comparative study has revealed the endless varieties of cultural, organizational,
structural, and adaptive strategies developed by nomadic peoples all over the world
and has provided ample evidence for a distinction between nomadism and pastoral-
ism. According to Spooner (1971: 208):
Nomadism is an extreme form of adaptation which generates extreme degrees of
instability of minimal social groupings and requires a high degree of fluidity of social
organization. There are, however, no forms of social organization or other cultural
features which are found in all nomadic societies or found exclusively in them.
To press the point further, I refer to the work of Philip Carl Salzman, who summa-
rized years of research in a comprehensive essay entitled “Pastoral Nomads: Some
General Observations Based on Research in Iran” (Salzman 2002). He begins by
asserting the distinction between “pastoralists,” who raise livestock on natural pas-
ture, and “nomads,” who move from place to place. He begins with a summary that
includes the following (2002: 245):
[N]omadism is not tied to one economic system; some nomads have generalized
consumption-oriented production, while others are specialized and market-oriented.
Nor is nomadism limited to one type of land tenure; some nomads migrate within
a territory that they control, while others have no political or legal claim over land
that they use. . . . Pastoral nomads vary in political structure from state-controlled
peasants, to centralized chiefdoms, to weak chiefdoms, to segmentary lineages.

He concludes (2002: 261):

The peoples whom I have in this essay called “nomads” could equally—depend-
ing upon the particular case—be labeled “tribesmen” or “peasants,” “Muslims” or
“pagans,” “Persian” or “Turkic” or “Baluch” or “Arab,” “fierce warriors,” or “pacific
civilians.” There are many aspects and dimensions to peoples’ lives and to a people’s
culture. For us to select and emphasize one aspect as paramount would be a distor-
tion of the always complex human reality. And such an essentialism and reduction-
ism would be a distortion of nomadism, for to understand nomadism truly, we must
grasp its dependence on human objectives and upon multiple social, cultural, and
environmental circumstances and thus appreciate its variability, its malleability, and
its impermanence.

I cite Salzman at length because his words force us to rethink what we mean by the
term “nomad” in the context of early Mesopotamian history. As a result, we must
also avoid using the word as if it were a unitary term that allowed us to associate
various groups of people with one another over time and space just because they
sometimes are denoted by the same descriptive terms in the native sources. One
must therefore be careful not to automatically identify cultural and ethnic groups
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 93

in different times and places simply because they are designated by the same label.
Indeed, the explanatory value of terms such as “nomad” and “tribe” and the practice
of associating cultural patterns such as a specific kinship system with mobile groups
was questioned a quarter of a century ago by Rudi Lindner (1982) in an essay titled
“What Was a Nomadic Tribe? ” At this juncture, it is important to recall that Robert
McC. Adams (1974) has warned us that the boundaries between people living in
agricultural towns and villages and those who moved about on the outskirts of these
towns, tending herds, was quite fluid in ancient Mesopotamia. There must have been
considerable population flux between these modes of life due to the instability of
farming conditions, and these modes of life must be seen as nodes on a continuum,
rather than as contrasting means of subsistence. Furthermore, as Adams observes
(1974: 2):
The antipathy between the steppe and the sown is deeply rooted, of course, in West-
ern religious and literary traditions, finding perhaps the most comprehensive expres-
sion in Ibn Khaldun’s statement that nomads are “the negation and antithesis of
civilization.” . . . That same attitude may be at least partially implicit in Sumerian
myths and proverbs. . . . But these are the views of urban literati. . . . Hence norma-
tive statements like these, important as they are for the continuities of Mesopota-
mian literate civilization, must be treated with reserve as an expression of the forces
and patterns of behavior actually prevailing in the countryside.

In light of this, we must be careful not to view nomads through romantic Western, or
even later Middle Eastern lenses, but at the same time we also must remain skeptical
about the perspectives of ancient Mesopotamian elites as well.
With regard to the subject at hand, the Ur III period, I repeat what I said above:
there is no evidence that permits us to determine if the people on the frontiers of the
kingdom who are described as MAR.TU were nomads, pastoralists, or both. Some
may have been pastoralists who moved up and down between pastures during the
year but lived part-time in durable homes; others may have been on the move, with-
out permanent abodes; the evidence available at present is inconclusive on these
points. But even if the MAR.TU raised livestock and moved from place to place, this
would, in the end, tell us very little about them, because designating them vaguely—
and anachronistically—as “nomads” would have little if any historical explanatory
value. 11

2. Did the Amorites Infiltrate Mesopotamia from the West?

Many authorities have assumed that, because there were peoples described as
Amorites living in Syria, they must have made their way into Babylonia and Sumer
down the Euphrates through the Jezira. Some published maps in, for example, the
standard compilation on Ur III geographical names (Edzard and Farber 1974), show

11. Note, however, the nuanced approach to Mari-era nomadism in the remarkable study by
J.-M. Durand (2004).
94 The Amorites in Ur III Times

arrows implying this sort of movement. Wilcke (1969) had already questioned this
conclusion, as had Lieberman (1968–1969), and in RCU, I argued that there was no
historical basis for this movement. It is true that hostile as well as allied Amorites
that had contact with the Ur III state were located in the mountain regions to the
east of Mesopotamia, most probably in the valleys around the Jebel Hamrin, and
this can be understood as supporting some, but by no means all, of the ideas of Bauer
(1926, 1929). Some have accepted our conclusions but others have not, continuing
to seek the Amorites in the west, unwilling to disassociate the specific historical situ-
ation from the general “western orientation” of MAR.TU/Amurru in other periods.
The eastern location of these Amorites can be discerned from an analysis of
administrative documents from Drehem that mention kur MAR.TU, that is the
“Amorite (high)lands;” many of these texts are concerned with war booty (nam-
ra-ak), but it is also evident that there were also peaceful relationships with these
areas. I will revisit this material below (p. 102), 12 but first we need to take a close
look at the larger context of the military and diplomatic strategy of the Ur III state
so that we do not see these texts, and the events that lie behind them, merely from
a philological and literary perspective.
War and Foreign Relations during the First Half of the Ur III Period—
An Overview
We know next to nothing about how Ur-Namma pieced together a new ter-
ritorial state, bringing together a variety of polities that had been independent for
approximately a century and driving out invaders from the highlands out of areas in
the south such as Umma, as well as from the territory around Marad, Kazallu, Girkal,
and Akšak. Foreigners aside, we simply do not know how much assent there was for
his state building and which efforts required force. Suffice it to say that, at the end of
his eighteen-year reign, the core of the Ur III state had apparently been established,
but his ill-fated death on the field of battle undoubtedly threatened to undermine
the very foundations of the nascent state. As I have argued elsewhere (Michalowski
2008), the battlefield death of a king was only possible as the result of the withdrawal
of divine favor and thus constituted the worst possible negative omen: it signaled
nothing less than divine abandonment. Ur-Namma’s successor, Šulgi, worked hard to
reestablish his authority by demonstrating his piety toward the divine world, and this
is reflected in the year-names of the first half of his reign, which almost exclusively
commemorate cultic activities, culminating in his divinization around year 21. It is
telling that his 11th and 12th years were named in honor of “introducing” the city-
gods into their towns, Der and Kazallu; the former is a transfer center that controlled
the piedmont route into the highlands, and the latter is a major city in the northern
defense territory, the mada. 13 It is likely that these two place-names defined the
eastern and northern borders of the state at the time.

12. See also Steinkeller 2004; Sallaberger 2007.

13. On the mada as “frontier,” see p. 132 below.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 95

A diplomatic marriage with Mari under Ur-Namma had already created a per-
sonal bond with the state that controlled the Euphrates corridor to Syria (Civil
1962). In his seventeenth year, Šulgi arranged to have one of his daughters become
queen of Marhaši, a powerful polity deep in Iran. But matters were not peaceful
closer to home, and in year twenty he was forced to move against Der to secure a
vital node on one of the most important roads into the highlands and even to the
lowlands of Susa. This was the very same place that he had dealt with on a cultic
level just a few years earlier.
A diplomatic marriage contracted with the highland polity of Anšan in year
twenty-nine did not guarantee peace, however, because four years later the king
of Ur had to wage a major war there, as commemorated in his thirty-fourth and
thirty-fifth year-names. Now Šulgi and his advisers sought to pacify the areas on the
eastern frontier, presumably to ward off raids against the homeland and to safeguard
the routes through the eastern mountains that were critical for access to many of
the luxury goods required for display and gift-giving to allies and clients but also
for the export of cloth and grain. 14 The peace established by war and marriage with
the powerful states in southwestern Iran—namely, Anšan and Marhaši—eventu-
ally calmed the far frontier, and the alliances appear to have remained intact until
the last decades of the kingdom. Between these two polities and Ur lay the more
troubling highland areas that were much less stable politically and militarily. Some
of the people living there controlled the communication routes through the moun-
tains: in the south, through Susiana; to the north, up the Diyala Valley and past the
Jebel Hamrin; as well as even farther north, through the valleys around the Adheim
and lower Zab rivers on the one hand and the passage known much later as Great
Khorasan Road on the other. All of the areas were in the hands of smaller powers
centered around cities or areas such as Kimaš, Hurti, Urbilum, Šuruthum, and, most
important, an entity that is referred to in the texts as Šimaški.
The term Šimaški does not refer to a unitary state like the one centered in Ur
but rather to a loose confederation of local people, towns, and cities whose scope
and control ebbed and flowed but whose fate was undoubtedly influenced by the
Mesopotamian state that they interacted with on both diplomatic and martial terms
(Stolper 1982; Steinkeller 2007a; Potts 2008 [see chap. 6]). The term is used both
in a geographical and in a political sense; politically, it encompassed many different
subgroups, individual cities, and kin groups and had various rulers who were contem-
poraneous—though they may also have been organized in a hierarchical manner that
makes it difficult to trace its development. In the end, however, pressured by Ur, the
disparate elements that made up the areas of Šimaški finally consolidated into a pow-
erful polity that also involved Anšan and eventually overran its western opponent,
ending the already weakened state ruled by the House of Ur-Namma.
The ebb and flow of war in these areas can be mapped only partially, but even
without a full picture, it is obvious that the endless, and ultimately futile, military

14. On Drehem as a redistribution center for elite gift giving, see Sallaberger 2003–4.
96 The Amorites in Ur III Times

encounters in these regions must have put massive strain on the resources of the
state, draining manpower, organizational capacity, and wealth. This is a long and
complicated story, however, and here we are only interested in certain parts of the
narrative, concentrating on the reign of King Šulgi and providing detail to the story-
line sketched out above.
As already observed above, in the second half of Šulgi’s reign, his administration,
having consolidated the core of his kingdom, began a long process of pacification of
areas directly to the east, northeast, and southeast. We can trace some of this activ-
ity in the year-names and in chance references in the administrative record, but this
information is sometimes unreliable and more often incomplete. Moreover, Šulgi’s
claims of victory were often exaggerated to various degrees: for example, it took him
nine such announcements before his armies supposedly subdued an entity called
Simurum. We often tend to think of every victory that is celebrated by a year-name
as a separate “campaign,” but the record, as we will presently see, makes it more
likely that these wars went on with very little respite for decades, even if the exact
contours of the flow of this military activity cannot be established from the surviving
documentation. Some of the year-names undoubtedly commemorated major battles
or campaigns, but it is also more than likely that many of them were actually inspired
by border skirmishes or low-level military encounters. The problem is that we rarely
are in a position to distinguish between a major military undertaking, such as the one
against Huhnuri during Amar-Sin’s reign, or Šu-Sin’s assault on Zabšali, and smaller,
badly documented skirmishes. 15 Equally important, we should not underestimate the
ideological nature of the year-name discourse, which undoubtedly often represented
defeat or minor victories as major military successes. How we perceive this military
history is very much a function of the year-names we read, and therefore we are often
influenced, unintentionally, by ancient propaganda. But we should not always think
of years as campaigns; the conduct of these wars was as much determined by physical
and organizational factors as by the requirements of immediate politics or of broader
strategy. Hot summers and cold winters, topography, access to food and water for
people and for animals, as well as to supply lines, must all have played a significant
role in the conduct of these wars.
The motivations for this sustained and complex military activity are nowhere
to be found in the ancient literature, and we can only hypothesize regarding what
factors drove Šulgi’s regime to undertake these wars. All of them took place in the
highlands, within the Zagros ranges. The best summary of the geography of these
areas is still Louis Levine’s (1973, 1974), whose personal knowledge of the topog-
raphy was critical for his analysis of these mountain areas in Neo-Assyrian times. 16
Levine mapped out the various routes through the mountain valleys, and though we

15. The campaign against Huhnuri (AS YN7) is documented by an inscription found in
Iran (Nasrabadi 2005); the war against Zabšali and surrounding regions (ŠS YN7) is documented
in a variety of sources (Steinkeller 2007).
16. Subsequently, Timothy Potts (1994: 38–43) provided an excellent overview of the over-
land communication routes between Mesopotamia and the highlands.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 97

cannot pinpoint the location of any of the places that fought against Ur, it is possible
to approximate the general area that was the object of much of this military activity.
One such place is Assyrian Harhar, which Levine (1974: 117) suggested was
located close to or directly bordering the Great Khorasan Road, in the central part
of eastern Mahidasht. If this is indeed the Karhar of the Ur III texts—and this is
by no means certain—then at least one of the polities that was the target of armies
from Sumer has been located with some degree of probability. The defeat of Karhar is
mentioned in four of Šulgi’s year-names: YN24, 31, 33, and 45; interspaced with this
are no less than eight claims of victory over Simurum, culminating, in YN45, with
a version of the year-name that includes mention of a decisive rout of Urbilum and
Lullubum, in tandem with Simurum and Karhar. These seemingly unending wars,
stretching over more than two decades, known to us from self-serving claims of vic-
tory, suggest that Šulgi’s armies were well matched by the forces of the highlanders.
But the tenacious drive for victory over the highland polities requires some kind of
explanation.
As observed above, the most obvious conclusion to be drawn is that Šulgi’s ad-
ministration had a strong interest in controlling the communication routes through
the Zagros—those moving north toward what would later be Assyria, perhaps to
Urmia and beyond, and those moving south along the Great Khorasan Road that
ultimately led to the Hamadan plain and connected to further routes in various
directions. 17 It seems that this was accomplished by the time of YN45; Karakar,
if it was indeed where Levine places it, would have marked the southern, and Ur-
bilum (Erbil) the northern, limits of this control, and the main goal of this policy
would have been achieved, covering the main routes through the Zagros outlined
in Levine’s study. The next three years are named after victories over the lands of
Kimaš and Harši. The locations of these polities are likewise a matter of speculation:
many, following A. Goetze, have placed them in the vicinity of Kirkuk, but this is
improbable, because two well-known passages in inscriptions of Gudea specify that
Kimaš encompassed areas where copper was mined. 18 This, as Vallat (1993: 139–40)
and Lafont (1996: 92) have argued, could refer to the documented copper sources of
Kashan or Anarak, roughly in the area of the archaeological site of Tepe Sialk, which
has revealed abundant evidence of copper smelting in antiquity, although there are
other sources of copper in Iran. 19 Thus, it was only toward the end of Šulgi’s reign
that his kingdom achieved, for the time being at least, control of trade and of copper
mining areas in the frontier, extending control, if only nominally in many places,
beyond the Zagros.

17. One of the nodes in this communications nexus was Susa; the Ur III kings, according
to Elisabeth Carter (1985: 46) “seemed to have viewed central Khuzistan and the Deh Luran
regions as a kind of corridor through which valuable highland commodities could be channeled
and transshipped to points northwest along the foothill road or eastward into the Zagros valleys.”
18. See already Edzard and Röllig 1980. A discussion of these issues, with bibliographical
information is provided in Lafont 2006.
19. Tomothy Potts (1994: 24) also summarizes succinctly the information on Kimaš and
suggests that a location “near the mines of the Tiyari mountains north of Amadiyeh is possible.”
98 The Amorites in Ur III Times

Economic issues must also have been part of the equation, because the moun-
tains and valleys of the Hamrin and Zagros could be exploited for natural resources,
labor forces, and pasture. But it would be a mistake to see such specific local benefits
as the only motivation for a costly and exhausting military policy, which must have
been organized and sustained with a broader set of concerns in mind. It is important
to recall here that, when Šulgi’s father Ur-Namma was creating the Ur state, he had
to drive out highlanders who had occupied important parts of Babylonia—the Guti
in the south near Umma, Adab, and elsewhere, and Puzur-Inšušinak’s forces that
were ensconced in the area of Marad and Kazallu west and northwest of Nippur.
Puzur-Inšušinak’s polity may not have outlived its creator, but he had demonstrated
well that at any moment a variety of highland polities could coalesce into a powerful
enemy force that could overwhelm the lowlands. The armies of Ur had to make sure
that nothing like this would happen again in the frontier areas on Sumer’s borders,
and such potential fears would have been well justified, because this is exactly what
happened a few decades later, when the various highland polities banded together
into a powerful coalition that eventually toppled the kingdom of Ur.
At the same time, Šulgi had to contend with powerful polities that lay beyond
the Zagros—for example, Marhaši and, most importantly, Anšan in Fars, ruled from
the city that is now Tal-e Malyan. Šulgi’s diplomats arranged for an alliance through
dynastic marriage (YN30), but this did not prevent an eruption of hostilities, as is
documented by claims of victory over Anšan four years later (YN34), as already
mentioned above. In the following decades, before the collapse of Ur, the only docu-
mented contacts with Anšan appear to be peaceful, but it is impossible to trace the
shifting dynamics of this relationship and of the history of Anšan itself, which was
eventually merged with the polities of Šimaski (Steinkeller 2007a). But even with
these uncertainties, it is possible to imagine that some of the conflicts with areas that
lay between Anšan and Ur were in essence proxy wars that involved polities that
were in the buffer zone between the two larger states.
The end of the third millennium was a time of complex long-distance relation-
ships between sophisticated cultures that stretched from the Mediterranean to Mar-
giana, Bactria, Baluchistan, Makran, and beyond. Lyonnet and Kohl (2008) have
provided a compact synthesis of the complex movements of people, ideas, represen-
tations, finished goods, and raw goods across these broad areas. Sumer was a major
player in this interconnected world, but it was hardly the dominant one. Elements of
spiritual and material culture were transmitted overland and by sea; some resources—
for example, lapis—had to come from one area only, while copper or workable stone
such as steatite could be obtained from multiple sources. We still cannot pinpoint
the origin of much of the tin used in Mesopotamia and Iran at this time, but it is
probable, as Lyonnet and Kohl (2008: 39) have suggested, that it came

either from Afghanistan south of Herat. . . , or the tin-belt extending from the Kyzyl
Kum to the Pamirs to the south of the Zeravashan Valley. It is probably not purely
coincidental that the BMAC developed directly between these areas. We now know
that some of those who were involved in tin mining, and probably in the prepara-
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 99

tion of metal ingots, belonged to Andronovo-related steppe groups who were in-
stalled in the Zeravashan Valley itself. 20

The BMAC (Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex) refers to late third‑

and early second-millennium cultures reconstructed from archaeological sites in
present-day northern Afghanistan and Turkmenistan. Daniel Potts (2008) has re-
cently drawn the attention of Assyriologists to the BMAC in a remarkable study that
sheds light on the exchange of luxury goods between that area, Elam, Anšan, and
other parts of Western Asia, complementing the synthesis of Lyonnet and Kohl and
providing concrete evidence for late third-millennium circulation of worked metal
goods and shared artistic conventions over a large area of the ancient world. 21 The
military activities of the Ur III state are but one element among competing strategies
of participation in this complex communication network; indeed, while we by habit
isolate martial acts for heuristic purposes, driven partly by the nature of the surviving
data, it might be better to view them as but one node in a differentiated strategy di-
rected at full participation in the broad interconnected world of the time, a strategy
that involved devices that we would label with terms such as trade, gift exchange,
kinship ties, vassalage, political and military control, or diplomacy.
It is impossible to determine, with the evidence at hand, how much of this was
driven by detailed broader central strategic planning and how much was due to ad
hoc decisions made either by the central government or by local commanders on the
frontier or simply in reaction to immediate contingencies. Those of us who study
early Mesopotamia have rarely asked such questions, but they have been broadly dis-
cussed by other historians of the ancient world, prodded, during the last century by
Edward Luttwak’s provocative, albeit highly flawed, monograph The Grand Strategy
of the Roman Empire (1976). The book was not well received by historians of ancient
Rome, but the ensuing debate brought new focus to the issues raised by the author,
even if the criticisms of Classicists have not deterred specialists in other disciplines
from taking it much too seriously. 22 Subsequent research on Roman frontiers and on
the potential forms of military and diplomatic decision-making have shown just how
difficult it is to analyze the contingencies of organization, information flow, com-
munications, as well as the roles of central and peripheral officers in the defensive
and offensive policies of the state, even though the available information on these
matters is much richer than it is for the Ur III kingdom. 23 As summarized by Kagan
(2006: 347):

20. Note also the recent suggestion that some of this tin may have originated in Gujarat/
Southern Rajasthan (Begemann and Schmitt-Strecker 2009).
21. I sidestep here his final conclusion that BMAC is to be identified as ancient Šimaški, a
conclusion that I find highly unlikely. Note that Maurice Lambert (1974: 11–12), more than 30
years ago, had already drawn attention to the importance of Central Asian contacts, in reference
to Old Akkadian times.
22. An early, devastating review was produced by Mann (1979). For a recent comprehensive
review of the objections leveled against it, see Kagan 2006.
23. There are many works on this subject; my thinking on these matters has been particu-
larly influenced by Fergus Millar (1982).
100 The Amorites in Ur III Times

Because the Roman state did not apparently have a formal body that made imperial
security decisions, and because records of such decision-making do not survive, it is
very difficult to prove that the emperors or their advisors engaged in consistent or
systematic planning. And the evidence from the narrative sources, combined with
the archaeological record, suggests that ad hoc security arrangements far outnumber
instances of systematic long-term planning, which occurred mainly (but not exclu-
sively) at major turning points such as the reigns of Augustus (31 b.c.–a.d. 14) and
Diocletian (a.d. 284–305).

In light of these analogies, I hesitate to ascribe to Šulgi, or to whatever group or

groups in his state that might have been empowered to make strategic decisions, any
well-planned long-term grand strategy beyond a general policy of securing defensible
frontiers and control of communications routes that may have acquired a life of its
own and led to many unpredictable consequences, with unexpected reactions. 24
This is a complex set of issues that is worthy of a much fuller investigation; here
I only touch on the major outlines of the story to provide some historical background
for the main topic of this discussion. The chart on pp. 101–102 provides a compi-
lation of all the existing documentation on Ur III wars based on the administrative
texts. The narrative of Ur III warfare on the eastern, northeastern, and southeastern
fronts, told through the medium of year-names, may appear to be triumphant, but
when we look more closely, it is possible to dismantle the official story. The military
conflicts in the highlands during the last 28 years of Šulgi until the sixth year of
Amar-Sin, if not longer, may seem to be represented as a series of victories, but there
are indications that there were defeats and setbacks as well as successes. A glance at
the chart indicates that wars with Urbilum, Simurum, Šašrum, Šuruthum, Šimaški,
Karhar, Harši, Hurti, and Kimaš, which all lay near one another up and down the Za-
gros, went on and on, and even though the year-names and the economic texts pro-
vide evidence of victories for the Ur III state, these successes seem to be short-lived
and not to have resulted in stability on the eastern frontier. Victories over Karhar
adorned the names of four regnal years, spanning more than two decades. Nine de-
feats of Simurum are mentioned, while Šašrum, supposedly crushed in Šulgi’s fortieth
year, remained a problem, together with its neighbor Šuruthum, until at least AS6,
14 years later. It took 22 years to subdue Harši. The case of Kimaš and Hurti, already
referred to above, is illustrative of the difficulties faced by Ur: year 46 was named
after a victory over these principalities. But administrative records show that hostili-
ties continued; the records even mention celebrations of the capture of the king of
Kimaš in the fifth month of Š46 and various announcements of subsequent victories,
but it took another year before, once again, a year-name would proclaim military
success (YN48). The peace thus established lasted for two decades; it is difficult
to determine the exact status of Kimaš, be it vassal, ally, client state, or colony, but
its relations with Ur remained strong at least until the very end of IS2, when the

24. A very different perspective on these issues will be presented by Piotr Steinkeller in a
forthcoming essay.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 101

Date  25 Event Source

Š20 Der defeated YN 21
Š23 Karhar defeated YN 24
Š24 Simurum defeated YN 25
Š25 Simurum defeated YN 26
Š26 Harši defeated YN 27
Š29 diplomatic marriage w. Anšan YN 30
Š30 Karhar defeated YN 31
Š31 Simurum defeated YN 32
Š32 Karhar defeated YN 33
Š33 Anšan defeated YN 34
Š33.11.- n. Anšan AOAT 240 80 6
Š36 Bad mada built YN 37 & 38
Š40.5.- n. kur Amurrum Ontario 1 50
Š41 Šašrum defeated YN 42
Š41.12.- n. Simurum m. S TCL 2 5502+5503
Š43 Simurum, Lullubum defeated YN 44
Š44 Urbilum, Simurum, Lulubum, YN 45
Karhar defeated
Š44.3.- n. kur Amurrum BIN 3 321
Š44.4.- n. Šuruthum MVN 20 193
Š45 Kimaš and Harši defeated YN 46
Š45.7.17 n. Urbilum Trouvaille 86
Š45.11.15 n. Urbilum MVN 13 423
Š45.12.2? n. Urbilum AUCT 2 326+336
Š46.4.27 Kimaš (destroyed)26 TRU 144
Š46.2.- Kimaš (destroyed)27 YOS 4 74
Š46.5.3 celebration: king of Kimaš OIP 115 428
captured
Š46.5.- n. Badadu Šimaški Princeton 1 130
Š46.12.7 n. kur Amurrum SumRecDreh 9
Š47 Harši, Kimaš, Hurti defeated YN 48
Š47.2.0 n. Šimaški JCS 31 175 H
Š47.2.- n. Šimaški ZVO 25 134 1
Š47.2.11 šà n. SmithCS 38 7 (animals are Šimaški)
Š47.3.20 n. kur Amurrum JCS 22 57
25 26˜  27
Š47.3.22 n. kur Amurrum Nisaba 8 App. 3
Š47.3.22 n. kur Amurrum BM 104355 (unpubl.)

25. In the chart, YN = year-name, n. = nam-ra-ak “booty,” m. = military context. For com-
prehensiveness, the chart covers the entirety of the period, not only the reign of Šulgi.
26. Line 2: u4 ki-maš   ki, “the day/when Kimaš (was defeated).”
27. Line 2: u4 ki-maš   ki, “the day/when Kimaš (was defeated).”
102 The Amorites in Ur III Times

Date  25 Event Source

Š47.5.- n. kur Amurrum Amorites 11 (pl. 4) = OIP 115 336
Š47.5.- n. kur Amurrum & n. Šimaški PDT 2 802
Š47.5.- n. kur Amurrum OIP 115 336
Š47.5.8 n. [ ] VN 13 113
Š48.-.20 n. kur Amurrum, n. Urbilum Ontario 1 53 (includes Badadu šimaški)
Š48.4.14 n. Hurti MVN 15 201
Š48.6.16 n. Harši www.smm.org SMM 12
Š48.7.- n. Harši SAT 2 611
Š48.7.- n. Kimaš, Harši, [Hurti?] Princeton 1 60
Š48.7.- n. Harši TCL 2 5485
Š48.7.- n. kur Amurrum Amorites 12 = OIP 115 287
Š48.10.- n. Šimaški OIP 115 355
AS1 Urbilum destroyed YN 2
AS1.1.- n. kur Amurrum RA 62 8 11
AS2.1.- news of Šašru defeat28 AnOr 1 83
AS3.2.- šà n. AUCT 2 284
AS3.7.28 šà n. AUCT 1 028
AS.4.8.- n. Šuruthum YOS 4 67  29
AS4.8.29 n. Šašrum Šuruthum TCL 2 5545
AS4.8.30 sa n. TRU 326
AS4.12.18 n. kur Amurrum SAT 2 800
AS5 Šašrum, Šuruthum destroyed YN 6
AS5.1.03 n. kur Amurrum PDT 1 32
AS5.1.20 n. uru Nergal BIN 3 532
AS5.1.20 n. uru Meslamtaea PDT 1 120
AS6.1.- news of Šašru defeat30 UTI 4 2315
AS6 Iabru, Huhnuri destroyed YN 7
ŠS2 Simanum defeated YN 3
ŠS3.-.- news of Simanum defeat31 MNV 16 960
ŠS6 Zabšali defeated YN 7
28 29 30 31
IS2 Simurum defeated YN 3

28. Lines 3–4: á-á-á sig5 ša-aš-šú-ru hul-a, “(on the occasion of) the good news of the
defeat of Šašru.”
29. An account of female prisoners of war with children, from Šuruthum (written ša-rí-it/
ip-hu-um) destined to be ex-voto slaves for the temple of Šara, taken in charge by the governor
of Umma. There are at least four other near duplicates of this text: ASJ 7 191, Prima del’alfabeto
33, RA 15 61, and SAT 2 1163.
30. Lines 3–4: á-á-á sig5 ša-aš-šú-ru hul-a, “(on the occasion of) the good news of the
defeat of Šašru.”
31. Line 16: lugal-si-sá rá-gaba á-á-á sig5 si-ma-númki hul-a de6-a, “for the mes-
senger Lugal-sisa who brought the good news of the defeat of Simanum.”
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 103

last known messenger returned from Kimaš through Garšana. 32 Two months earlier,
representatives of Kimaš had sworn a loyalty oath in the Ninurta temple in Nippur
(MVN 13 128: 16–18, IS2.10.25).
A glance at the chart presented above shows that by year 33 the Šulgi adminis-
tration had ended openly hostile relationships with far-off Anšan, and from then on
the wars took place in the Zagros and surrounding areas, some of them in what might
be described as the buffer zone between the two states. The difficulties in locating an-
cient toponyms hinder any precise indentification of the locale of these wars, but it is
safe to say that Urbilum undoubtedly marks the northern or northwestern limit and
that the enemies of Ur controlled communications routes and access to resources.
Most important, however, is the fact that wars with all of these places stretched up
and down the Zagros and spanned three decades, all the way into the reign of Amar-
Sin, targeting the same areas again and again, suggesting that the armies of Ur faced
tenacious opposition. More ominously, their strategies were driven less by overall
design other than the control of the marches than by the exigencies of events and by
the intentions of their enemies.
Kur Amurrum
Having sketched in broad outline the eastern and northern military confronta-
tions of the Ur III state, I now return to the issue of the location of the area that
contemporary administrative texts label as kur Amurrum (MAR.TU), which may
be rendered “Amorite mountain lands.” A listing of Drehem texts that mention
booty from the Amorite land provides some information but only makes sense when
viewed within the context of the general martial situation outlined above: 33

Date Text Delivering Officer Animals

Š40.5.- Ontario 1 50 kids
44.3.- BIN 3 321 ìr Abuni equids
46.12.7 SumRecDreh. 9 ìr Hun-Habur FTS, goats
47.3.20 JCS 22 57 Lu-Nanna equids
47.3.22 Nisaba 8 App. 3 equids
47.5.- OIP 115 336 equids
47.5.- PDT 2 802 goats, kids
48.-.20 Ontario 1 53 ìr Šu-ili nu-bànda equids, FTS
48.7.19 OIP 115 287 ki Lu-Nanna šakkana equids
AS1.1.- RA 62 8 11 equids
4.12.18 SAT 2 800 FTS
5.1.3 PDT 1 32 FTS

32. Unpublished messenger text, courtesy of David Owen (IS2.xii-).

33. All these texts document animals from nam-ra-ak kur MAR.TU, “booty from Amorite
mounain lands.” It must be stressed that these accounts concern the fate of parts of the booty
within the Drehem system, not the date of their seizure. See now also Sallaberger 2007: 407, with a
very different analysis and conclusions. In this listing, FTS stands for “fat-tailed sheep” (gukkal).
104 The Amorites in Ur III Times

A glance back at the listing of references to military operations on the chart above
reveals that booty from Amurrum lands comes from the same time that wars were
taking place against such places as Urbilum, Šimaški, Šaruthum, Kimaš, and Harši—
that is, against locations to the east, northeast, and northwest, but not to the west of
Sumer. The military officers who deliver this booty—often generals—are the same
as those who are doing much of the fighting in the highlands: Abuni, Lu-Nanna,
and Hun-Habur. The captain Šu-ili delivers goats and sheep in Š47.10.18, as do the
generals Ṣilluš-Dagan and Šu-Enlil (OIP 115 262).
These people all took part in the expedition against Urbilum; in Trouvaille 86
(Š45.7.17) officers deliver metal objects from the plunder, and among them are Abu-
ṭab, a subordinate of the general Abuni, acting on behalf of the prince Šu-Enlil, the
leader of the expedition, as well as the general Hun-Habur. Five months later, Abuni
was involved in another delivery from that booty (AUCT 2 326+336, Š45.12.2+).
Note also that, in Ontario 1 53, the booty of Urbilum follows that of kur amurrum.
No year was named for any expedition against this Amorite land, suggesting that
skirmishes with Amorites were not significant and took place on the way to the more
important war areas. It is also possible that the hostile Amorites were not perma-
nently associated with any specific geographical location and that the term “Amorite
land” was a shifting component in Mesopotamian mental maps.
Not all relationships with the hostile Amorite lands were comprised of battle
and strife. This was clearly a frontier region that could serve as a place of refuge, as
is documented by a fragmentary Nippur text that records that a slave woman had
escaped there for the third time, although the very fact that she had been apparently
caught there implies that the Ur authorities had some way of retrieving runaways
who fled to the area (NATN 354). Various people are documented as having traveled
to and from there, including the chief Naplanum, who may have been the head of
the Amorite royal bodyguards. 34
The term kur MAR.TU is not, properly speaking, a specific location, which is
why it never has a place-name classifier /ki/ but is a descriptive term that refers to the
highlands in which certain Amorites were thought to live. As such, it has no borders
and could possibly be used of more than one area. 35 It is important to observe that
the use of kur in this term, traditionally rendered “highland,” is probably better con-
ceived simply as “hostile territory” or “borderland,” since it is fairly obvious that this
is not a single mountain. To be sure, in Ur III times, enemy lands were almost always
located, by definition, in the highlands, but when Gudea informs us that he was in
contact with highland Amorites, he specifically uses the term hur-sa “mountain
(range),” not kur. 36

34. See MVN 13 656; MVN 11 179; Ebla 1875–1985 286; AUCT 1 942; AUCT 1 133;
AUCT 1 276; OrSP 47–  49 38; OIP 121 543 (Naplanum).
35. Piotr Steinkeller (2004: 39 n. 68) suggests that the term was used of the entire piedmont
region from the “middle course of the Tigris to the region of Susiana, within which the Amorite
groups moved back and forth, pasturing their flocks.”
36. On the meaning of hur-sa as “mountain range/chain,” see Steinkeller 2007b.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 105

In conclusion, all evidence leads us to think that, as far as the Ur III state was
concerned, all hostile Amurrum resided in the borderlands flanking the Diyala Val-
ley and perhaps in the Jebel Hamrin and in the valleys beyond, as well as further
southeast along the Great Khorasan road, where they raised equids, sheep, goats,
and cattle in areas that the Drehem administrators thought of as the Amurrum bor-
derlands. This is not to say that peoples who were called Amurrum did not live
elsewhere at the time, but only that those who were of enough concern to the Meso-
potamian state to be mentioned in documents did so. There is also circumstantial
evidence to suggest that some people designated as Amurrum were dwelling east of
Mesopotamia already in late Sargonic times. 37

3. Did Some Amorites Undergo a Process of Sedentarization

That Can Be Traced in Texts?
More than forty years ago, G. Buccellati (1966: 355–60) devoted a chapter in his
book on Ur III Amorites to the issue of the sedentarization of these “nomads” and
their integration into Mesopotamian societies, and his conclusions have never been
questioned. If Amorites were not nomads, then the issue of sedentarization is moot.
But in order to disprove the notion completely, we need to take a closer look at the
actual documentation concerning people who are labeled “nomads.” This exercise is
important because it sheds light on several issues at the same time. Before addressing
the matter of “sedentarization” directly, it is important to analyze the word MAR.
TU, because it has a direct bearing on the problem.
It is commonly accepted that the Akkadian word for “Amorite” is Amurru(m)
and that the Sumerian is mar-tu or mar-dú. There is no evidence at present for
any Amorite language equivalent of the term, if one actually existed; indeed, it is
important to note that ethnic terms often are invented by outsiders and are not
necessarily used by those to whom the label is applied. 38 The Akkadian word is rare
before the Old Babylonian period; in early texts, MAR.TU functions both as a Su-
merian word and as a logogram for Amurrum as a “people” and as the name of a deity
(Kupper 1961; Klein 1997). The assumption that mar-tu/dú is the Sumerian word
for this group is purely hypothetical and is not based on strong data. There is very
little evidence for the reading of mar-tu/dú in Sumerian; indeed, the few existing
“phonological” renditions of the word—Martu, Mardu, of even ardu—have been
deemed unhelpful for resolving the problem of the reading of this sign combination
(Wilcke 1974–1977: 93; Marchesi 2006: 11).
The term MAR.TU is first attested in the third-millennium literary texts from
Fara, Abu Salabikh, and Mari and is then more amply documented in the Ebla texts
(Archi 1985), where it is clearly used as a logogram for an Eblaitic word that cannot

37. Note the mention of rá-gaba MAR.TU gu-ti-um in texts from this period (e.g., Lam-
bert 1974: 2).
38. I sidestep the issue of the use of the term amurrum/MAR.TU in Old Babylonian times at
Mari or in the edicts of the kings of Babylon.
106 The Amorites in Ur III Times

be recovered at present. 39 The term is encountered more often in texts from the
Old Akkadian period (A. Westenholz 1999: 97) but is most often found in Ur III
documents (Buccellati 1966). I refer here only to the term MAR.TU and do not link
these sporadic references with a historical narrative.
The thousands of Ur III occurrences are of no help in determining the reading of
MAR.TU. There are, however, a small number of texts that may provide us with an
important clue to the matter. The sign sequence a-mu-ru-um is known only from
five Ur III documents, four of which are from Girsu and one from Nippur. The latter
(NATN 909: 2) is fragmentary and should be left out of the discussion. The Girsu
references are:
1. lú-dnin-gír-su dumu a-mu-ru-um (TUT 160 r. viii: 22–23)
2. a-mu-ru-⸢um⸣ ì-dab5 (ITT 4 7134:2)
3. má a-mu-ru-um (ASJ 2 30 86:1)
4. 10 a-mu-ru-um (WMAH 33 iii: 4)
There can be no doubt that nos. 1 and 2, and most probably 3, have to be construed
as personal names. This is how Buccellati (1966: 133) interpreted nos. 1 and 4. The
last example, however, requires closer examination. While it is always possible that
it contains nothing more than a personal name, the immediate context suggests
otherwise:
iii 3. 4 gud TÚG.⸢KIN⸣
4. 10 a-mu-ru-um
5. [ugula] ⸢ur-dig-alim⸣
6. [x gud TÚG.KIN]
7. [x] ⸢lú⸣-hu-á
8. [ugula ur]-⸢d⸣nanše
9. [3? gud] ⸢TÚG.KIN⸣
10. [1 gud] ⸢iš⸣-ùr
11. [ugula] ⸢lú⸣-diir-ra
12. [. . .] x x [. . .]
13. 20 lú-hu-á
14. ašag5 ur-d  ⸢en.zu⸣
15. 3 gud TÚG.⸢KIN⸣
16. 1 gud iš-ùr
iv 1. [x] lú-[hu-á]
2. [ugula] ⸢lú-d  šul-gi⸣
     etc.

39. Literary text from Fara and Abu Salabikh: kur MAR.TU (SF 39 iv 15 and 17) =
UD[= kur] MAR.TU (IAS 118 v 4) [mss. K. Zand]; Mari: sipa MAR.TU (Bonechi and Durand
1992: 153 iv′ 5′). Also in a Fara administrative document WF 78: ii 5. A type of dagger, ír MAR.
TU, which is often encountered in Ebla documents, is also attested in contemporary lexical texts
from Southern Mesopotamia; see Civil 2008b: 88.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 107

The pattern in this section of the text is clear: a number of oxen are followed by an
entry with a designation of a group of people; here it is hired workers (lú-hu-á),
although earlier sections of the tablet do include personal names in this position.
This strongly suggests that the spelling a-mu-ru-um is a syllabic writing for the
normal designation MAR.TU; the entry in line iii 4 therefore has to be read as
10 Amurrum and rendered “10 Amorites.” The occurrences of a-mu-ru-um in
the other texts in this list (nos. 1–3) are undoubtedly personal names and have to
be interpreted as full writings of the name MAR.TU that occurs in accounts from
Girsu (see, e.g., Rev. Sem. 11 184: 3; ITT 4 7051: 4; HSS 4 2: ii 18; CT 1 2: 8, engar
[“farmer”]; ITT 4 7955: 4, mušen-dù [“fowler”]; ITT 4 8106: 4, ugula [“foreman,
captain”], etc.). This demonstrates that a-mu-ru-um is equivalent to MAR.TU,
both as a personal name and as an ethnic or professional name. The conclusion is
clear: there is no Sumerian word mar-tu/dú; in Sumerian, as in Akkadian, the word
is Amurrum.
There is an important corollary to this analysis that brings us back to the main
topic of this section. Buccellati (1966: 357), and others following him, assumed that
the Girsu references cited above provided proof of the integration of Amorites into
local society: since “Amorites” were farmers, fowlers, and the like, this was evidence
for a process of sedentarization of nomads. If Amurrum is simply a personal name,
then all instances of persons designated as MAR.TU holding these occupations dis-
appear. A closer look at the evidence confirms this conclusion. In his section on
“the Amorites as residents,” Buccellati (1966: 340–42) summarizes the evidence
for the occupations of people referred to as “Amorites.” First, we must take out all
references to individuals whose names are etymologically Amorite but who are not
designated as MAR.TU. Second, we must eliminate functions, as opposed to occupa-
tions—that is, people who serve as “conveyors” (ìr) in specific contexts. Finally, we
must dispose of all references to Amurrum who temporarily served as “musical orga-
nizers” (gala) at certain ceremonies, perhaps weddings (Michalowski 2006b). Once
this is done, we are left with a much smaller collection of references and with a few
exceptions that are entirely military. In texts from Umma and Girsu, we find docu-
mentation concerning a cohort of àga-ús amurrum, “Amorite bodyguards,” who
were stationed in the capital during the last two years of Šulgi’s reign, 40 and in one
Umma account, there is an ugula gèš-da amurrum, “captain of sixty Amorites.” 41
A small group of undated accounts from Umma record beer rations for amurrum
igi lugal-šè tuš-a, “Amorites stationed before the king”—that is, most probably,
royal bodyguards. 42

40. Girsu: HLC 1 311: 2, (Š46.11.-); MVN 12 112: 2 (Š46.11.-); HLC 1 305: 2 (Š46.12.-);
Umma: OrSP 18 7 24: r. i 9 (Š47.2.-); NYPL 291: 2 (Š48.1.-); see also possibly TSDU 108: iii 22′
(n.d.).
41. TSDU 108: 15′ (n.d.), followed by rations for àga-ús.
42. CHEU 56: 5, RA 8 156: 5, OrSP 47/9 477: 5, MVN 13 726: 5, SAT 3 2083-6: 5.
108 The Amorites in Ur III Times

The idea that some of these people may have been royal and elite bodyguards
leads us to the best-known Amorite of Ur III times, namely, Naplanum. This man,
who lived in Sumer for at least 19 years, from Š44 to ŠS6, is documented in more
than 90 texts, sometimes with other members of his family. 43 Piotr Steinkeller (2004:
38) wrote that he was “one of the most important persons of his age” and located his
Mesopotamian home in Kisig, close to Larsa, although I am not as certain that we
can establish his base. The claim about Naplanum’s importance is based partly on
the sheer number of references to this individual and his family, as well as on the fact
that he was undoubtedly the eponymous ancestor of the lineage that eventually took
power in Larsa after the collapse of the Ur III state. 44 But what was Naplanum actu-
ally doing in Sumer? The fact that he appears so frequently in Drehem documents
suggests that he was a foreign envoy or a visiting dignitary or even a ruler, member
of the state elite, courtier, or member of the extensive house of Ur. If we set aside
Drehem texts that record his receipt or delivery of animals apart from any context,
he appears most often together with foreign rulers, with their ambassadors, or with
members of the Ur III royal family. What sets him apart from anyone else in the
Puzriš-Dagan archives is the large group of underlings who are part of his entourage,
some of them definitely kin. He first appears in Š44 (MVN 13 704: Š44.3.21), but a
year later he appears at the end—and therefore at the head—of a list of 21 Amurrum;
all of them are receiving one sheep each from the booty of Urbilum (MVN 13 423,
Š45.11.15). The information we have is insufficient for any secure conclusions, but
in light of the facts we do have it is quite possible that Naplanum and his cohorts
constituted the personal guard of the Ur III king and his entourage. In this case, they
may have accompanied him on the campaign or been present for a victory celebra-
tion at home.
While we cannot prove this conclusion decisively at present, the concept of an
elite foreign royal guard in Ur III times is hardly surprising and has many historical
analogs. To cite one historian on the matter (Kiernan 1957: 68):
Despots have often chosen to surround themselves with bodyguards of aliens: we see
Byzantine emperors with their Varangians, French kings with their Scots and their
Swiss Guards, Napoleon with his Poles, Franco with his Moors.
In the Middle East, examples include the early Janissaries or the Mamluks, but there
are even more pertinent Mesopotamian examples of kings surrounding themselves
with foreign elite legions. Julian Reade (1972: 106–7) observes that Sennacherib’s
bodyguard may have consisted of men from the Levant and that Elamites were part
of a similar cohort around Assurbanipal. Most important, however, is Mario Liv-
erani’s (1995; 2001: 391) fascinating reexamination of the famous Vassal Treaties of

43. For references, see Fitzgerald 2002: 165–67 and Steinkeller 2004: 37–40.
44. Sallaberger (2007: 446) tries to link Naplanum with the Old Babylonian Yamutbal
“tribe,” because the latter were associated with Larsa, but this only holds for the lineage of Kudur-
mabuk, not for the descendants of Naplanum.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 109

Esarhaddon, discovered in the ruins of Nimrud; he views them not as vassal treaties
but as loyalty oaths given by Medes who served as palace guards. I should also note
that this view of the term Amurrum in Ur III and early Old Babylonian times is
not new; others had made similar claims before, albeit mostly in passing. Among
the scholars who claimed that in Babylonia the word Amurrum may, in certain
circumstances, have denoted a profession rather than an ethnic description were
F. Thureau-Dangin (1910: 18 n. 2) and I. M. Diakonoff (1939: 61). 45
We have now narrowed down the context in which some of the people desig-
nated as Amurrum surface in the Ur III accounting record, with everything point-
ing in the direction of the military. 46 This parallels the Ur III-period use of the term
elam, the other non-native bodyguard designation in texts from the period (Mi-
chalowski 2008b: 109). In this case as well, the same word is used in both Sumerian
and Akkadian. The people named as elam apparently were guards in the employ of
envoys from eastern, northeastern, and southeastern foreign lands, but Amurrum
designated military personnel that for the most part protected the royal family and
important individuals from abroad, as well as their representatives, although like
all Ur III soldiers, they also performed many other duties as well. This is the profes-
sional role of most Amorites who actually lived in Sumer, and there is nothing in
the currently known Ur III records that documents a process of “sedentarization” of
a putatively nomadic people.
It is also true that the word Amurrum was utilized in Ur III times in a way that we
might today describe as ethnic. The clearest case of this comes from documents from
AS4 from an “industrial park” in Girsu that include rations for amurrum munus,
“Amorite females,” who were apparently prisoners of war (Heimpel 1998: 397–98).
This is certainly the case in the full version of Šu-Sin’s fourth‑ and fifth-year formulas
that celebrate the construction of bàd amurrum muriq-tidnim, “the fortifications
against the Amorites ‘Muriq-Tidnim’ (The One That Keeps the Tidnum at a Dis-
tance),” an event also commemorated in at least one royal inscription. 47 Slightly
later, after the collapse of the Ur III state, this usage is encountered repeatedly in the
early Old Babylonian letters from Tell Asmar (Whiting 1987) and in the early Isin
literary letter to King Iddin-Dagan (SEpM 2).
I should be clear on this: I am only claiming a military role for some, not the
majority, of people resident in Babylonia who are designated as Amurrum in Ur III

45. Thureau-Dangin presciently described the word for “Amorite” as a “gentilice employé
comme nom de function; comparer p. ex. notre terme ‘Suisse’.” For a contrary view, see Buccellati
1966: 351.
46. This is not exactly new; Weeks (1985) and Whiting (1995) suggested, in different ways,
that Amorites, being organized militarily, were in a position to take power in times of chaos.
Charpin (2004a: 57 n. 134) criticized Weeks and rejected his ideas, claiming that they were based
on out-of-date information. But although new information has improved our knowledge, there is
much to be said for Weeks’s main thesis, even if his analysis is not without problems.
47. For the year-name and inscription, see p. 124 below.
110 The Amorites in Ur III Times

administrative records, but there are other occasions in other times when the term
referred to an area, ethnic groups, as well as to a language, and while ultimately these
meanings are all related, they are not the subject of the present investigation.

4. Did Amorites Infiltrate the Ur III State

in Large Numbers?
In order to understand the function of these people in the state, it is important
to examine the statistics. Buccellati (1966: 100) based his analysis on a corpus of
309 names of people who were designated as Amurrum. 48 By now, the number has
almost doubled, but it is still a relatively insignificant number in the overall Ur III
documentation available to us, which now numbers almost 75,000 published tablets
(Molina 2008: 20). It is hard to believe that several hundred references constitutes
evidence for a major infiltration of a new population into the land. Moreover, only
39.8% of these people have names that can be identified etymologically as Amorite.
What does this say about attempts to recover ethnicity on the basis of personal
names? The core problem is that naming and renaming patterns involve many vari-
ables, and it is impossible to reduce this to something that we label loosely as ethnic-
ity. What is one to do with a family in which the father has a Hurrian name (Hašib-
atal), his son an Akkadian name (Puzur-Šulgi), and whose bride or daughter-in-law
(é-gi 4-a) bore a Sumerian name (Ereš-hedu; Limet 1972: 134)? The same holds true
for the matter of native language as a marker of ethnic identity, now dramatically un-
dermined by evidence that Yasmaḫ-Addu, who governed Mari on behalf of his father
Šamši-Addu, usually considered to have been a classic “Amorite,” could not speak
Amorite and therefore could not communicate directly with the tribal units in his
area of the kingdom (Charpin and Ziegler 2007). These cases force us as Assyriolo-
gists to question the traditional means by which we have assigned ethnic identity—
that is, solely by means of language and onomastics—and, therefore, once again, we
need to reexamine what we mean by the term “Amorite.” Here, Buccellati’s (1990,
2004, 2008) ideas about the urban/rural distinction are particularly pertinent.
As I have already attempted to demonstrate, in most cases, the term Amurrum
is a professional designation in Ur III documents and should probably be translated
as “elite Amorite guards” or the like, not as a general ethnic label. But even if one
does not accept this conclusion, the ethnic identity of these persons is difficult to
determine, even if one uses the evidence of personal names.
One-fifth of the individuals who were designated as Amurrum bear Sumerian
names, leading some to suggest that this is evidence of acculturation. But the major-
ity of these people are documented in Girsu texts, where 59 of the 89 Amurrum have
Sumerian names (Buccellati 1966: 255). Consider these numbers:

48. Streck 2000: 34 has somewhat different numbers.

 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 111

Total Amurrum 309

Amurrum at Girsu   89
Total Amurrum with Sumerian PNs   63
Amurrum with Sumerian PNs at Girsu   59
Note that of the 63 Ur III Amurrum who have Sumerian names, 59 are known only
from Girsu documents. Are these statistics indicative of ethnicity, or do they simply
provide evidence for naming patterns? It has been observed repeatedly that, during
the Ur III period, personal names in the Girsu province are almost exclusively Su-
merian. For example, Heimpel (1974–77: 173) calculates that they constitute 93.8%
of all names. These calculations have been used by a number of scholars as proof of
the persistence of Sumerian speakers in the south (Woods 2006: 94 with previous
literature). I suggest that none of this data provides any information about ethnicity
or spoken language but only about onomastic habits. It is even possible that people
who carried Akkadian, Elamite, or Amorite names were registered in Girsu texts
with ad hoc Sumerian names, but this may be difficult to prove.
Let us assume that there are at least 600 or 700 people designated as Amurrum
in Ur III texts. Even if new definition of the word offered here is not accepted, given
the wealth of epigraphic documentation for the period, this is a strikingly insignifi-
cant number, and this discovery supports the idea that there is no empirical evidence
for a massive Amorite infiltration of Mesopotamia in Ur III times.

5. Did Hostile Amorites Play a Significant Role in the

Collapse of the Ur III State?
This notion is derived almost exclusively from Old Babylonian literary sources,
from the Lamentation over the Destruction of Sumer and Ur, as well as from the CKU.
The Ur III and early Isin documentary record points to Šimaški as the main military
foe that brought down the House of Ur-Namma. There were, however, hostile Amo-
rite polities on the eastern borders of the state, but we have hardly any knowledge
about them at the present time. The two political—perhaps ethnic—entities that
fought Ur during the reign of Šu-Sin are Tidnum and Iaʾmadium.
Tidnum and Iaʾmadium
Much has been written about Tidnum, and recently Gianni Marchesi (2006:
7–19) has offered an exhaustive treatment of all references to this word in cuneiform
sources, in previous scholarly literature on the subject, and of the root DDN in other
ancient Near Eastern traditions. The classic philological method Marchesi uses has
its value, but here I would like to take a somewhat different look at the matter. The
word Tidnum, in various guises, is attested in Mesopotamia from at least as far back
as the Akkad period into late Old Babylonian times and survives, in the lexical and
literary tradition, into the first millennium. There can be little doubt that at root this
is an Amorite subgroup name, but it does not follow that all occurrences of Tidnum
112 The Amorites in Ur III Times

(sometimes written as PIRI.PIRI) and its variants denote the same referent. The
occurrences are so sporadic and isolated that any discussion of the issue at this time
remains highly tentative. In light of the full documentation presented by Marchesi,
only relevant references are repeated here.
1. Although the sign sequence PIRI.PIRI is attested already in the archaic
“Cities” lexical list, it is unlikely that this is already a reference to Tidnum.
2. The earliest attestation of the root is the place name da-da-nuki in Syrian
texts from Ebla.
3. The use of PIRI.PIRI in connection with Eanatum of Lagash does not
seem to have anything to do with the word under discussion, as Marchesi has shown
quite clearly.
4. All extant references to Tidnum as a geographical/political entity are re-
stricted to the Ur III period and to the time immediately preceding and succeeding
it, as well as to literary texts that are dependent on Ur III traditions.
5. The first reference comes from Gudea Statue B (Edzard 1997: 34). This pas-
sage has been cited many times, but it nevertheless bears additional scrutiny. The
king is rebuilding the Eninnu, the main temple of the state god Ninirsu, and he
wishes to demonstrate that he can obtain precious items from the whole known uni-
verse. Therefore, in columns v and vi he describes in detail how he obtained wood
and stone from a broad arc of source areas that begin close to the Mediterranean,
then move eastward. First, he acquires “cedars” from the Amanus (v 28), then aro-
matic woods from Uršu, which he locates in the “Ebla ranges” (hur-sa ib-la-ta,
v 53–54), and then in vi 3–8 he brings down great blocks of stone from two highland
areas that are described as:
ù-ma-num
hur-sa me-nu-a-ta
PÙ-sal-la
hur-sa amurrum-ta
na4
na gal
im-ta-e11
(Gudea) brought down great (blocks of) stone from Umanum, in/of the
mountain range(s) of Menua, and from PUsala in/of the mountain range(s) of
Amurrum.
None of these places can be identified at present. The only toponym in this sequence
that seems familiar is PÙ-sal-la, which has generally been read ba 11-sal-la and
identified with Bašar, the ancient name of the mountain range known today as Jebel
Bishri (Marchesi 2006: 12). Marchesi questions the reading ba 11 of PÙ and, conse-
quently, of the identification of this toponym with the Syrian mountain range; 49 as a
result, some doubt remains concerning its connection with Bašar. Finally, Gudea pre-

49. See also Sallaberger 2007. Heimpel (2009b: 27) is apparently unconvinced by Marche-
si’s doubts and promises a future discussion of this passage.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 113

sumably goes farther east, describing how he brought “alabaster” from still another
Amurrum highland area (vi 13–16):
ti-da-núm
hur-sa amurrum-ta
nu11-gal lagab-bi-a
mi-ni-de6
(Gudea) brought in blocks of alabaster from Tidnum, in/of the mountain
range(s) of Amurrum.
Here Tidnum is a geographical name or an ethnicon that serves as a place-name.
We cannot determine what is meant, except to suggest that it is a distinct place and
farther east than Umanum and PUsala. 50
6. The second occurrence, and the first alleged Ur III example, is found in a
broken passage of a fragment of an Old Babylonian royal hymn in honor of the
god Nergal, one that perhaps may be a copy of an Ur III poem of Šulgi (Hymn U),
although it may very well be later in date. The pertinent lines read (BL 195: 23–26,
van Dijk 1960: 13–15): 51
⸢ki⸣ dib-ba-zu érin ur-bi-šè hul m[i-ni-ib- . . .]
an-ša4-anki ti-da-nu-um-m[a . . .]
d  
nergal ki dib-ba-zu érin ur-bi-⸢š è⸣ [hul mi-bi-ib- . . .]
Wherever you go, evil falls on all the troops,
Anšan, Tidnum . . .
O Nergal, wherever you go, [evil falls] on all the troops!
This broken passage is hardly revealing, although the association of Tidnum with the
highland polity of Anšan once again suggests an eastern or northeastern location of
these Amorites who were of concern to the Ur III kings.
7. The third reference is also embedded in Old Babylonian manuscripts of a
poem that may have been composed in Ur III times, namely Šulgi Hymn X 116–117:
kur-ra é-bi-a igi mu-ni-bar-bar
tidnum-e u6 du10 ì-mi-dug4
In the foreign land (the inhabitants) looked upon them (Šulgi’s deeds) from
their dwellings,
Tidnum admired (them) in joy.

50. For a different interpretation, see Marchesi 2006: 14. Keeping in mind the uncertain-
ties about the identification of nu11-gal, it is useful to point out that sources of alabaster are well
documented in Iran; see Beale 1973: 136
51. The composition is known from a single manuscript of unknown origin. The ascription
to Šulgi is based on van Dijk’s reading of line 36 as ur-sa ⸢šul1-gi⸣-ra z[i . . .], based on a colla-
tion from a photograph.
114 The Amorites in Ur III Times

8. The set of references linked to the line of fortifications that are mentioned in
Šu-Sin’s fourth year-name: Muriq-Tidnim, “The One That Keeps the Tidnum (Amor-
ites) at a Distance.”
Just before these fortifications were built, the king’s armies encountered enemies
as they marched against the northern principality of Simanum, which had rebelled
against Ur and deposed a ruling family that was tied to the house of Ur-Namma
by means of a dynastic marriage (Michalowski 1975). An Old Babylonian copy of
an inscription of Šu-Sin contains the lines (Šu-Sin E3/2.1.4.1 iii 38–44, Frayne
1997: 297):
amurrum l[ú kúr-r]a
ti-id-n[u-um]ki
ìa-a-ma-d[ì-um]ki
im-ma-da-[è-eš]
lugal-⸢bi⸣
mè šen-š[en-na gaba]
im-m[a-d]a-r[e]-eš

Hostile Amurrum came down against (him) from Tidnum and Iaʾmadium.
Their chiefs confronted him in battle.
This passage, now fully restored by C. Wilcke (1990) and G. Marchesi (2006: 12),
is particularly important. Tidnum is never mentioned in Ur III documents outside
of the Šu-Sin year-name and the texts cited above, and this means that it had no
diplomatic relations with the Sumerian state, or at least that none are known in the
preserved record. The only Amorite subgroup name that is mentioned in these texts
is in fact Iaʾmadium. 52 D. I. Owen (1993: 183–84) has collected all the references on
the matter, which can be briefly summarized here. 53
1. Orient 16 42 10: 3 (Š46.8.3) mu lú-kin-gi4-a lú ìa-ma!-d  ì-um
2. Owen, FS Hallo 183: 11 (AS2.7.21) du-ul-qá-núm lú ìa-a-ma-dì-umki
3. JCS 7 (1953) 105: 8–9 (AS2.8.-) dú-ul-qá-nu-um amurrum ìa-a-ma-dì
4. JCS 7 (1953) 106: 14–15 (ŠS6?.-.-) i-pí-iq-re-e-ú ⸢amurrum⸣ ìa-a-ma-d[ì-um]
5. Amorites 22: ii 31′ (ŠS 6.-.20) i-pí-iq-re-e-ú ⸢amurrum⸣ ìa-a-ma-dì-[um]
6. Amorites 21: 17 (ŠS 6.8.14) i-pí-iq-re-e-ú amurrum ìa-a-ma-dì-um
These texts inform us that ambassadors from Iaʾmadium were treated like those of
other independent polities, including Syrian principalities such as Uršu, Ebla, and
Mari, as well as Šimaški and other principalities in the Iranian highlands that were
allied to the house of Ur. Contrary to Owen (1993: 181) and Sallaberger (2007: 450),

52. Note also the PN ìa-a-ma-tu, an Amurru who was part of Naplanum’s cohort (BibMes
25 151 54:8, ŠS1.6.24)). There were, of course, other groups and chiefs at the time, but they
rarely make an appearance in the archival record; see, for example na-ap-⸢ta⸣-núm lú kí-
gi4-a na-ap-ra-núm, “Naptanum, envoy of Napranum,” ( JCS 57 [2005] 29 10: 17, n.d.).
53. See also Sallaberger 2007: 437–38.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 115

I do not think that the order of entries in the Drehem accounts is in any way indica-
tive of the geographical location of Iaʾmadium; some of these texts list it together
with Syrian cities, but others include places in Iran. These texts provide fragmentary
glimpses of three separate diplomatic events, one in Šulgi 46 (text 1), another in the
second year of Amar-Sin (texts 2–3), and a third in Šu-Sin year 6 (texts 4–6). Each
event is discreet; the Amar-Sin references document intense diplomatic activity at
the beginning of the king’s reign, and the Šu-Sin texts are probably evidence for
complex international negotiations that accompanied the massive attack on Zabšali
and neighboring lands in Iran that took place that year; this will be discussed further
below. The fact that Iaʾmadium was vilified as an evil enemy only two years earlier is
hardly surprising, similar to many other relationships between eastern principalities
and Ur, swinging back and forth from military confrontation to alliance.
Therefore, in Ur III documents, Iaʾmadium was the only polity whose emissar-
ies are qualified as Amurrum that had diplomatic relations with the Mesopotamian
state, and, according to the Šu-Sin inscription, it must have been located close to
another such unit, Tidnum, which remains undocumented in the archival texts. But
geographical proximity and Amurrum identity aside (from the Mesopotamian point
of view), the two shared one more important feature, in the Šu-Sin text at least:
they were both governed by rulers whom the scribes of Ur designated as lugal. Of
course, we have no way of knowing what the natives called their sovereigns, but
the Sumerian designation is almost unique. In Ur III political language, there is
only one lugal in the terrestrial realm, and that is the king of Ur. All other rulers
are énsi at most, even the king of the powerful kingdom of Anšan, which dwarfed
the Mesopotamian state. 54 One may be reading too much into this, but it is striking
that the scribe who fashioned this inscription had such a high opinion of the rulers
of Tidnum and Iaʾmadium that he described them as lugals. Perhaps Tidnum and
Iaʾmadium were a well-organized force that constituted a true threat to the kingdom
at this time, and this justified using this label for their leaders. But it is more likely
that this is simply the way that scribes chose to render the idea of an ethnic chieftain
in Sumerian, just as some time later Iaḫdun-Lim of Mari would use the word LUGAL
to describe various sheiks in his well-known foundation deposit inscription (Frayne
1990: 606–7, lines 67–75, 96). References in some Mari letters to the Bene-iamina
may reflect a similar scribal practice (Durand 2004: 158). Dominique Charpin (2007:
171) suggests that in passages like this the logogram LUGAL is used to express the
term sugāgum, “tribal leader/king,” an Amorite loanword into Mari Akkadian.
Tidnum, which proved to be such a bother that it was immortalized in the name
of Šu-Sin’s fortifications, seems to have escaped the grasp of Ur, leaving no trace in
the Mesopotamian archival record, while Iaʾmadium, as noted above, did participate
in a small number of diplomatic exchanges, three of which are known to us at pres-
ent. As a military and political entity, the latter disappears from the historical record

54. The one exception was a ruler of Mari whose daughter married one of Ur-Namma’s sons;
see Civil 1962.
116 The Amorites in Ur III Times

after Šu-Sin’s sixth year, while the former leaves a few more traces. The poet who
wrote the Lamentation Over the Destruction of Sumer and Ur, which describes the fall
of the state built by Ur-Namma, counted Tidnum among the areas that contributed
to the final fall of Ur, cursing them all in the final sections (lines 486–492):
u4 ki-en-gi-ra ba-e-zal-la kur-ré hé-eb-zal
u4 ma-da ba-e-zal-la kur-ré hé-eb-zal
kur ti-id-nu-umki-ma-ka hé-eb-zal kur-re hé-eb-zal
kur gu-ti-umki-ma-ka he2-eb-zal kur-re hé-eb-zal
kur an-ša4-anki-na-ka hé-eb-zal kur-re hé-eb-zal
an-ša4-anki-e im-hul dal-la-gin7 kuš7 hé-ni-ib-su-su
šà-ar lú ní-hul hé-en-da-dab5 ù hé-em-ši-gam-e

So that the storm that blew over Sumer will blow over the foreign counties,
That the storm that blew over the frontier will blow over the foreign countries,
Blow over Tidnum-land, blow over the foreign countries,
Blow over Gutium-land, blow over the foreign countries,
Blow over Anšan-land, blow over the foreign countries,
So that it will level Anšan like a blowing storm,
And seize it with a horrid famine, 55 its people be brought down low before it.
Here Tidnum is associated, as one would expect, with two general terms for large Ira-
nian geographical areas, Anšan and Gutium, suggesting that the author thought of it
as a major player in the geopolitical configuration of the time. Such glory was short-
lived, however, because, save for two enigmatic references in somewhat later literary
texts, 56 Tidnum as a political entity never appears again in the historical record.
The location of the people designated as Tidnum and Iaʾmadium is difficult to
establish. The fact that they appear together as enemies of Ur who sided with Si-
manum suggests, but does not prove, that they are to be sought in proximity to one
another, and the manner in which they appear in the Šu-Sin inscription cited above
seems to indicate that the armies of the Ur III ruler encountered them as they made
their way north to subdue the rebels of Simanum. Whatever one thinks of the real
motivations behind the building of Muriq-Tidnim, the fact that the fortifications
were supposedly directed against Tidnum indicates that at least a sizable portion
of them had to be in its vicinity, and this means that they must be localized in the
mountains that bordered the Diyala valley. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume
that Tidnum as well as Iaʾmadium attacked the forces of Ur as they made their way
toward Simanum, either from their encampments in the old strategic center around
Apiak, Marad, Kazallu, and Urum, or from the newer military outposts in the Diya-
55. Note the transitivizing use of -da-.
56. Nippur Lament 231: ugu-bi-ta ti-id-nu-um/tidnum nu-ar-ra í b-ta-(an)-zi-
ge-eš-[àm], “They removed treacherous Tidnum from upon it (Umma),” Letter of Lugal-nisae
(SEpM 8: 4): ti-id-nu-um/tidnumki-e šu bí-in-ar šibir-bi mu-un-dab5-ba /ar, “who sub-
jugated Tidnum, seized its royal staff.”
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 117

la. 57 The road that Šu-Sin’s armies took on their way to Simanum is not described
in the surviving narrative of the expedition. It is possible that they went up along
the Tigris, but it is more likely that they moved up the Diyala, or started from the
Diyala area, crossed the Hamrin range and then proceeded toward what would later
be Assyria, in essence taking in reverse the roads that many years later Šamši-Adad V
would traverse in his campaign against Babylonia (Levine 1973: 22). In this scenario,
Šu-Sin’s armies would have encountered hostile Amorites somewhere in the valleys
surrounding the Jebel Hamrin.
In this context, it may be relevant to recall that there is an account from Ur,
dated to IS4.8.- —less than a decade after the Simanum campaign—that mentions
gifts (ní-šu-taka 4) for “Amorites of the bolt of the frontier (sa-kul ma-da).” 58
There are, quite obviously, different ways of interpreting this phrase; it may not be
simply fortuitous that in much later Akkadian literary texts Ebih—that is, the Jebel
Hamrin—is described as sikkur mati, “bolt of the land,” most prominently in the
“lipšur litanies” edited by Erica Reiner (1956: 134 line 37). The phrase occurs else-
where in first-millennium texts, 59 but as Reiner (1956: 131) notes, there are indica-
tions that these litanies may have originated in Old Babylonian times.
The sparse and sometimes contradictory evidence on Tidnum that has survived
is inconclusive and is open to a number of interpretations. It is important, however,
to isolate the Ur III data that refer to a political entity from earlier, and especially
from later, references that contain the same Semitic root but have no bearing on the
historical issues that are under consideration here. By contextualizing the informa-
tion in the political geography of the time, we can reach certain conclusions, always
keeping in mind their highly speculative nature.
Just before the rise of the Ur III state, during the reign of Gudea, Tidnum was an
Amorite subgroup name, one that was known to Mesopotamians, although the area
in which they were encountered cannot be located at present. Some time during
the Ur III period, at least two groups that had settled in the upper Diyala region and
farther east in the valleys around the Jebel Hamrin and beyond came into contact
with the Mesopotamian state—Iaʾmadium and Tidnum. The former was engaged
in diplomatic relations with Ur, but the latter was not. Nevertheless, at least by the
time of Šu-Sin they constituted a military threat; their geopolitical importance may
have been amplified by their location, because they seem to have menaced the all-
important trade and military routes that lead from the Diyala region into Iran. It is
most probable that their own political emergence was also precipitated by their loca-
tion, caught between the powerful highland polities of Anšan, Šimaški, and Zabšali
and the Mesopotamian kingdom. It is highly unlikely that both Iaʾmadium and Tid-
num were wiped off the map during their encounter with the forces of Šu-Sin; more

57. Sallaberger (2007: 449), implausibly to my mind, suggests, “the Yamadium were a main
group of pastoralists of the Balikh and Khabur plains and/or around the Jebel Sinjar.”
58. UET 3 1685: 4–5.
59. For other examples, see CAD S 258.
118 The Amorites in Ur III Times

probably, they disintegrated in the aftermath of the fall of Ur, when the Diyala area
became the seat of new political entities, some of them dominated by Amorite lead-
ers, many of whom may at some time have been a part of these tribal confederations.
This is all that is known with any degree of precision about hostile Amurrum in
Ur III times. The role of Amorites in the military events that led to the collapse of
the state has been gleaned from the CKU, specifically, from the Šu-Sin, and most
specifically, the Ibbi-Sin, correspondence (Wilcke 1969, 1970). As we will presently
see, this evidence is tenuous at best and difficult to interpret, but everything points to
the conclusion that these people had only a minor role to play in the disintegration
of the Ur III kingdom.

6. Did Amorites Take Power in Mesopotamian Cities after

the Ur III Collapse?
Historians of early Mesopotamia often claim that Amorite dynasties took power
in the aftermath of the Ur III collapse. Most recently, D. Charpin (2003b: 43) wrote:
Au moment où disparut le dernier roi d’Ur, des nomades amorrites, venues de Syrie,
envahirent la Mésopotamie et fondèrent un certain nombre des dynasties, come à
Isin ou à Larsa. . . .

My goal here is not to criticize one author but to exemplify a commonly held opin-
ion, one that I in part shared until recently. Here I am proposing that a reexamina-
tion of the pertinent information does not fully support this conclusion. In light of
the data collected earlier in this chapter, there is no evidence that the Amorites
mentioned in Ur III texts were nomads, and those who posed a danger to Ur were
located in the east or north, not the west. Moreover, the matter of the early histo-
ries and ethnic identity of the “dynasties” that were established in Isin and Larsa is
likewise less than clear.
The main actor in the post–Ur III drama was Išbi-Erra, who had already taken
over Isin and Nippur and possibly a number of other towns and cities before the fall
of Ur; of him we will have more to say in chap. 7. A decade or so after this event, he
was able to oust the Elamites from the old capital and add it to his new kingdom. The
dynasty he founded at Isin lasted more than two centuries, but nothing about him
or his successors can even remotely be linked to anything “Amorite,” however one
may interpret the term. Indeed, it appears that some of his descendants, most notably
Iddin-Dagan, Išme-Dagan, and Lipit-Eštar, quite consciously appropriated many of
the outer trappings of Ur III self-representation, thereby laying claim to continuity
with the former regime in the land. And even though it is often asserted that Išbi-
Erra was an Amorite officer in Ibbi-Sin’s employ, there is not one piece of evidence
to support the claim that he was either an officer or an Amorite. As already noted,
the only indication that he ever served Ibbi-Sin comes from CKU, and even here his
status and rank are unstated. Unless I am mistaken, the notion that he was a military
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 119

officer goes back to T. Jacobsen (1957: 40 n. 45), but Jacobsen’s comment was only
an informed guess that was not directly supported by any contemporary evidence and
only inferred from the CKU. Išbi-Erra is mentioned only once in the entire Ur III
documentation, but this one citation refers to him as an independent ruler at Isin. 60
Literary references, including the CKU, link him with Mari, but again without any
further information, and even if his original homeland was there, this does not in any
way indicate that he was an Amorite of any kind (Michalowski 2005b).
I know of no evidence for Amorite presence in Mari during the Ur III period.
The language of the written texts from the city and of many of the personal names
that appear in them is a different Semitic language altogether. Finally, while it is
often asserted that Išbi-Erra’s name is linguistically Amorite, it is equally possible to
analyze it as Akkadian: “Erra Has become Sated.” 61
In Ešnunna, a local dynasty freed itself from Ur III rule, and even if these kings
did link themselves by means of dynastic marriages to Amorite chieftains in the
area (Whiting 1987), they themselves were not of Amorite origin, as far as we can
determine. Only in Larsa did an Amorite group take over, but they were uniquely
positioned, because it is possible that they had made their home in nearby Kisig
(Steinkeller 2004: 38–39) or elsewhere in the vicinity. If my speculations about Na-
planum and his people are correct, this is hardly surprising. A well-organized elite
military troop, bound by kinship ties, with intimate knowledge of the Ur III court,
would have no trouble seizing power and holding a nearby city during a time of
war and disorder. How they did this is a matter of pure speculation, because no
contemporary sources illuminate the matter. Naplanum himself is last attested in
ŠS6 (PDT 2 1172), and his son is mentioned in an unpublished Drehem text from
IS2.9.20 (Buccellati 1966: 263), at a time when Larsa was still part of Ibbi-Sin’s orbit
(Fitzgerald 2002: 19). It seems likely that Naplanum, if he were still active or alive,
would not have established any independent polity before IS3, which seems to be the
watershed year for Ibbi-Sin’s kingdom. In the Isin texts there is no mention of the
great man, but there are two references to one e-mi/me-zum, otherwise unquali-
fied, who may be the Jemṣium who is listed as the second ruler in the Larsa Dynastic
List. As Fitzgerald (2002: 26–27) observes, he is listed together with Amorite chief-
tains, some of who are known from contemporary texts from Ešnunna, suggesting
that Jemṣium was likewise a high-status individual. There is no way of establishing
whether he was actually an independent ruler at Larsa or a vassal of Išbi-Erra. Royal
inscriptions only begin with the fourth and fifth rulers of Larsa—Zabaya (1941–1933
b.c.) and Gungunum (1932–1906 b.c.)—and therefore we cannot determine the
nature of kingship in the city before that time. It is not possible to establish the role
or even the precise geographical location of this lineage before that time.

60. See p. 182 with n. 28.

61. Thus CAD Š/2 253 sub šebû. Others disagree; see, for a recent example, Selz 2005: 104
(“der Name ist amuritisch”).
120 The Amorites in Ur III Times

One must be careful not to conflate the political, demographic, and social land-
scape of Old Babylonian times with events that took place generations earlier. A case
in point concerns the alleged ascription of “Emutbalian” origins to Naplanum during
the Ur III period. P. Steinkeller (2004: 40) cautiously has suggested that a connec-
tion of this sort existed, based essentially on the fact that his entourage included a
man by the name of Napšanum, who was a messenger of one ìa-a-mu-tum (TCL
2 5508: 12, Drehem, AS 4.1.6). 62 I find this unconvincing, but one must note that
Steinkeller himself was aware of the very tenuous nature of this suggestion. Aside
from the fact that connections with an envoy of a person named Iamutum does not
make one a member of a putative Emutbal tribe, it is important to stress that the
connections between Larsa and this corporate name are attested only for the last
independent rulers of the city, Warad-Sin and Rim-Sin, as well as for their father
Kudur-mabuk. But these persons constitute a completely new lineage on the throne
of Larsa, and there are absolutely no grounds for projecting these genealogical claims
back to earlier times, to the rulers who claimed descent from Naplanum. The fact
that the first members of this lineage who ruled at Larsa used titles such as rabiān
amurrim can be explained in a number of ways (Michalowski 1983b: 240–41; Seri
2005: 55–60), but it has nothing at all to do with Emutbal, as far as we know.
However, Steinkeller’s cautious conjecture has fueled further speculation, lead-
ing D. Charpin (2003a: 15) to suggest that already in Ur III times Naplanum and
his group had migrated from the region south of the Jebel Sinjar in Syria and had
brought with them new toponyms that they applied in Babylonia. I think that this is
an anachronism, because it projects the claims of Kudur-Mabuk and his descendants
several centuries into the past. More importantly, however, F. Joannès (1996: 353)
had already argued that the issue at hand is not tribal affiliation but the naming of
places and regions. Indeed, there is no evidence to support the notion that Emutbal
was ever a tribal name to begin with—only a geographical designation, although
Charpin (2003a: 17) remains unconvinced. More recently, W. Sallaberger (2007:
446) has taken this even further, reversing the direction of Charpin’s toponymic
renaming, stating that “the case of Yamut-balum may serve as a prime example of
the extension of a Mardu tribal name from the South to Upper Mesopotamia.” In
other words, unless this is simply a redactional lapse, a hypothetical identification of
Emutbalum in one Ur III text has now led to the historical scenario of an Amorite
tribal movement from Babylonia to Syria.

62. The account lists animals given to various foreigners, beginning with Naplanum, his
brother, his son, and his brother’s wife, followed by Napšanum, and then two individuals, Šulgi-
abi and Hun-Šulgi, and these are (all?) summarized as MAR.TU-me (line 16). Then follow the
envoys of various eastern states, followed by members of the royal family. Hun-Šulgi, his subordi-
nate Šulgi-abi, and in some texts also Šulgi-ili were important members of Naplanum’s troop and
were often present when foreign envoys and royal family members were present. It is unlikely, in
my opinion, that the envoy Napšanum was part of Naplanum’s organization; instead, the latter
and his family and lieutenants were assisting and guarding Iamutum’s ambassador, because this
was part of their normal duties.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 121

Instead, I suggest a somewhat different scenario for the developments that took
place in the aftermath of the Ur III collapse, one that does not simply paint all the
new polities as “Amorite” nor link them to an otherwise unattested large influx of
new peoples in the preceding decades. In the Mesopotamian homeland, the main
new political center was in Isin, which to some degree portrayed itself as the legiti-
mate extension of the Ur III kingdom. From what little we know, it seems that the
new kingdom had extensive relations with small polities in the Diyala and surround-
ing regions, many of which were now in the hands of Amorite chieftains, although
some of the older urban centers, such as Ešnunna, were not. It is only somewhat
later that Amorite leaders established themselves in Babylonian cities such as Larsa,
Sippar, and Babylon. The approximate time of these events can be associated with
the beginning of the reign of Sumu-la-el in Babylon, around 1880 b.c. by the Middle
Chronology—that is, more than a century after the fall of Ur. Indeed, while one
may ultimately see this as a long-term consequence of the Ur III collapse, the rise of
“Amorite dynasties” for the most part takes place generations after the last king of
Ur was carried off to Anšan. 63 The first Amorite royal family came to dominate Larsa
some time around 1940 b.c., but these Amorites were not outsiders and certainly not
nomads, because their ancestors had been living in Babylonia for generations.
With these general thoughts in mind, let us return to an earlier period and focus
on “Amorite” matters that are highlighted in the CKU, especially the fortifications
that were supposedly built against their dangerous intrusions. In light of the con-
clusions reached above, we must ask the question: if Amorites posed no significant
threat to the Ur III kingdom, why would King Šu-Sin order the construction of mas-
sive fortifications that were ostensibly designed to keep them from infiltrating the
Mesopotamian homeland?

63. Charpin (2004a: 80) and Charpin and Ziegler (2004: 29–30) already recognized that
there might have been a “new wave” of Amorite infiltration into upper and lower Mesopotamia
around 1900 b.c., the first taking place in Ur III times; they are proponents of Amorite invasions
from the west, from Amurrum, which they situate in the mountainous region from east of Ugarit
up to the Jebel Bišri.
 Chapter 6

The Royal Letters in

Their Historical Setting 2
Great Walls, Amorites, and Military History:
The Puzur-Šulgi and Šarrum-bani Correspondence
(Letters 13–14 and 19–20)

The Great Wall(s)

Ancient Mesopotamians are often accused of collapsing history by narrative con-
centration on emblematic personages and events. Modern historians, however, often
share some of the same discursive strategies. One such characteristic moment that
practically serves to define an era is the construction of a great wall that, according
to many of our modern authorities, served to separate Sumer from hostile nomadic
Amorite infiltrators in Ur III times. Indeed, no matter how sketchy the description
of the period may be, one can be sure to find a mention of the wall that Šu-Sin
claimed to have built, a wall he named Muriq-Tidnim 1—“The One That Keeps the
Tidnum (Amorites) at a Distance.” The image of a massive wall separating Sumer
from the barbarians certainly appeals to the imagination, but it may not accurately
reflect historical reality. Lacking informative sources, some scholars have turned, by
analogy, to the image of the Great Wall of China, which has become part of Western
popular imagination going back at least into the sixteenth century and is reflected
in art and literature as disparate as the works of Franz Kafka (1917) and Jorge Luis
Borges (1964). R. D. Barnett (1963: 18), in his influential article on the “Median
Wall” mentioned by Xenophon, already invoked the metaphorical connection:
Nebuchadnezzar (604–561 b.c.) constructed a sort of Babylonian equivalent of the
Great Wall of China; whereas that was intended to keep out the Mongols, this was
intended to keep out the Medes, who were then threatening the Empire.

1. For the interpretation of the Akkadian participle as mureʾʾiq, see Marchesi 2006: 11–12
n. 33. Here, the conventional rendition of the name of the fortifications will be used.

122
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 123

He also made the most forceful connection between this notion and Šu-Sin’s con-
structions based on a translation of the first eleven lines of ŠaŠu1 (18) that he had
received from C. J. Gadd, who utilized the only source known at the time, a then-
unpublished tablet in the British Museum found at Ur. 2 Barnett’s (1963: 20) descrip-
tion, couched in language characteristic of his time, reads:
Fifteen hundred years before Xenophon’s time, the Sumerians found themselves
faced with the problem of protecting their flourishing countryside and wealthy cities
from the incursions of barbarian nomads from the north. The Third dynasty of Ur
struggled to keep out the Amorite Bedouin or Martu as they were called, and Shu-
Sin, King of Ur, dates the fourth year of his reign (2038–2030 b.c.) by the official
description as that in which ‘Shu-Sin constructed the wall called Muriq Tidnim—
that which keeps out the barbarians’.

Most recently, another scholar (Marchesi 2006: 19) has reiterated the historical
metaphor, asserting that:
During the period of the Third Dynasty of Ur, a sort of Great Chinese Wall was built
in order to keep them (=Tidnum) out of the territory of the Ur state.”

One can easily see how the Chinese example influenced thinking about this con-
struction, although much of what most of us think we know about the Chinese
Great Wall is based on nationalism and myth (Waldron 1992). Ancient Near East-
ern polities were certainly capable of building long defensive or offensive walls, as
illustrated by Nebuchadnezzar’s construction, or the Sasanian wall on the Gorgan
Plain in northern Iran, 195 kilometers or more long, with a canal and 33 forts that
reached from the Caspian Sea up to the highlands to the east, marking the northern
border of the state; the latter is currently under study by Iranian and British archae-
ologists (Nokandeh et al. 2006; Rekavandi et al. 2007; 2008; Sauer et al. 2009).
The excavators of this amazing construction claim, “if we exclude earthworks, the
Gorgan Wall may be the longest wall anywhere in the ancient world” (Nokandeh et
al. 2006: 121). There are traces, however, of an even longer ancient wall, more than
200 kilometers long, in Syria, that was probably built in the third millennium b.c.e.
(Geyer et al. 2007: 278–79; Geyer 2009). The height of this wall is unknown, as is
its purpose. As with so many similar constructions, it is impossible to know if the
primary motivation for its construction was to keep people and/or animals in or out.
And yet if we are to believe the CKU, Muriq-Tidnim spanned a length of at least
269 kilometers and when finished may have covered another 100 kilometers or more;
in other words, it may have been almost twice the size of either of these construc-
tions. Of course, the analogy goes only so far. The Sasanian and Syrian walls were
continuous stone-made constructions, but Šu-Sin’s project was most probably a line
of discontinuous fortifications.

2. Source Ur1 of the present edition.

124 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 2

What do we actually know about this phantom wall, or line of forts, from Ur III
sources? The answer is: practically nothing, since our evidence consists of two year-
names and half a sentence in a dedicatory inscription:
Šulgi year-names 37 and 38: mu bàd ma-da ba-dù, “The year: the wall of the
‘land’ was built.”
Šu-Sin year-names 4 & 5: mu dšu- den.zu lugal uri 5ki -ma-ke 4 bàd amurrum
mu-rí-iq-ti-id-ni-im mu-dù, “The year: Šu-Sin, king of Ur, built the
fortifications against the Amorites ‘Muriq-Tidnim’(The One That Keeps the
Tidnum [Amorites] at a Distance).”
Šu-Sin inscription 17 (Frayne 1997: 328, E3/2.1.4.17: 20–26): u 4 bàd amurrum,
mu-ri-iq,-ti-id-ni-im, mu-dù-a, ù ìri amurrum, ma-da-né-e, bí-
in-gi 4-a, “When he had built the fortifications against the Amorites ‘Muriq-
Tidnim’ (The One That Keeps the Tidnum [Amorites] at a Distance) and
turned back the incursions of the Amorites to their territories.”

Perhaps because the evidence is so meager, it has fueled much speculation on the
location and purpose of these fortifications. Indeed, it may be apt to cite the words
of the great British historian R. G. Collingwood (1921: 37), written about a differ-
ent but equally notorious military construction, words that could be appropriated to
apply to the Ur III situation as well:
The theories that have been advanced concerning the Roman Wall in England and
its attendant works have been so many, so divergent, and at times so rapid in their
succession as almost to justify the favourite taunt of irresponsible criticism, that
their sequence is a matter of fashion or caprice rather than of rational development.

As far as I can determine, it is generally assumed that the Šulgi and Šu-Sin year-
names, although 23 years apart, refer to the same project (e.g., Sallaberger 1999: 159,
2009: 37); 3 Muriq-Tidnim was an extension of the earlier bad mada, although noth-
ing in the surviving Ur III documentation links these two ventures. The assumption
is exclusively based on the information from CKU; indeed, the two projects have
been lumped together under the common name “MAR.TU-Mauer” (Wilcke 1969:
1). Moreover, the Ur III references tell us nothing about the location of these con-
structions, their full length, or basic characteristics, and little, names aside, about
their purpose. Although it is usually taken for granted that the “wall(s)” had to be
continuous, it is more likely that one or both could have consisted of a line of for-
tifications or a combination of strongholds and walls. Most important, there is not
a single direct reference to these massive building projects in the tens of thousands
of known Ur III documents, and later texts, excluding CKU, are likewise silent on
this matter. The only information on the location and possible length of the Šulgi
construction is found in two CKU letters, 13 and 14 (PuŠ1, ŠPu1), written from the
military officer in charge of the fortifications, or at least part of them, to the king. It

3. I have myself contributed to the confusion between the two by asserting, incorrectly, that
Šu-Sin renamed Šulgi’s wall Muriq-Tidnim (Michalowski 2005a: 200).
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 125

is only supposition, however, that these letters actually describe the bad mada. Be-
cause the authenticity of this epistolary information cannot easily be established, it
is best to consider all other relevant data first and then compare the results with tes-
timony from the Old Babylonian literary correspondence. Before proceeding, how-
ever, I would like to note that the lack of archival evidence should not be considered
a good argument for dismissing all other forms of documentation on this subject;
some have gone so far as to claim that Muriq-Tidnim might have been a small local
construction. 4 It is true that the existing Ur III administrative documents record ex-
penditures and other official acts connected with certain large building projects, such
as the rebuilding of the Tumal during the time of Šulgi, or work on the Šara temple
at Umma that is the subject of Šu-Sin’s ninth year-name and is also documented in
archival texts (Frayne 1997: 294). 5 But there are also many examples of large con-
struction undertakings that have left no footprint in the recovered archives, even
though they are known from royal building inscriptions and year-names. The fact
that the construction of Muriq-Tidnim was heralded in two successive year-names
testifies to the significance and the very scope of the undertaking.

The bad mada of Šulgi

The lack of Ur III archival information is not surprising in the case of the Šulgi
constructions, since the work antedates the founding of Puzriš-Dagan, commemo-
rated in the names of Šulgi’s thirty-ninth, fortieth, and forty-first years, and therefore
comes from a time when documentation is extremely sparse and is limited to the
archives of Umma and Girsu, relatively far from the area of the fortifications. To
get some insight into the purpose or nature of this construction, it might be best to
start with its name, which, as already noted, is known to us only from the Šulgi year-
names. The expression bad mada (bàd ma-da) is usually translated as “the wall of
the land/des Landes/du pays,” which is imprecise and seems to leave the impression
that it was designed to protect the whole “country,” that is, the state of Ur itself. But
Sumerian ma-da—obviously a loan from Semitic (Jacobsen 1957: 40 n. 47)—does
not mean “country” in this sense when it stands alone and does not qualify a geo-
graphical name (certainly not in Ur III times) but designates, more narrowly, the
concept of “territory, countryside, march, frontier (area),” in the general as well as
political sense, as distinct from the geographical term ki-en-gi, “Sumer,” and ka-
lam, “homeland.” 6 When used in connection with a place-name, it has a somewhat

4. E.g., “The wall itself may have been built as a modest protecting wall against sheep and
serving as a demarcation line” (Sallaberger 2007: 445). He has now changed his mind on the
scope of these fortifications; see Sallaberger 2009.
5. On such projects, see now the forthcoming paper by Piotr Steinkeller, “Corvée Labor in
Ur III Times.”
6. It is only during the time of the Isin kings that, under Akkadian influence, ma-da comes
to mean more and can be applied to the “homeland,” as in Išbi-Erra’s title lugal ma-da-na,
“king of his own land.” The semantics of all three terms require a full investigation, because their
126 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 2

different shade of meaning. For example, in Šu-Sin’s description of the raid on Sima-
num, the expression ma-da ma-da-bi describes the territories surrounding the city
that were under its control (iv 29), and the same holds for Amar-Sin’s claim earlier,
in the formula for his seventh year, that he defeated Bitum-rabiʾum, Iabru, as well
as their surrounding territories. 7 Similarly, Ur III texts use mada GN to refer to the
specific provinces of the state, such as Girsu, Umma, and so on. In administrative
documents, mada often means “countryside,” as in “the orchard of the estate of
Amar-Šulgi, in the Isin countryside,” 8 or refers to small chapels in the Umma prov-
ince. 9 As “frontier,” mada is an areal concept and must be distinguished from zag,
“frontier (line).” 10 I should add that these distinctions may not have been apparent
to all teachers and students in Old Babylonian times and, therefore, some if not all of
them may have interpreted the CKU usage of mada as the full semantic equivalent
of Akkadian mātum.
The use of mada as “frontier” is documented in certain literary texts that go
back to Ur III and somewhat later times; subsequently, semantic leveling with Ak-
kadian mātum restricts the range of the term in Sumerian. The best example comes
from the curse at the end of the Lamentation over the Destruction of Sumer and Ur,
486–87, where the storm is beseeched to return home:
u4 ki-en-gi-ra ba-e-zal-la kur-re hé-eb-zal
u4 ma-da ba-e-zal-la kur-re hé-eb-zal
So that the storm that blew over Sumer should blow over the foreign lands,
So that the storm that blew over the frontier should blow over the foreign lands!

This is followed by Tidnum, Gutium, and Anšan; 11 mada here is not a quasi-syn-
onym of Sumer; instead, the progression is geographical, from Sumer to the frontier,
then to the “Amorite” lands on the edge of the eastern frontier, and then on through
to the large territory of Anšan in the southeast.
Similarly, in Šulgi Hymn A 45–47:
anzumušen kur-bi-šè igi íl-la-gin7 du10-u10 hu-mu-sù-sù
uru ma-da ki ar-ar-ra-u10 ha-ma-su8-su8-ge-eš-àm
ù sa-gi6-ga u8-gin7 lu-a u6 du10-ga ha-ma-ab-dug4

usage and meaning change over time; for example, as a logogram in Sargonic inscriptions, kalam
corresponds to Akkadian mātum. Jacobsen (1953: 40 n. 47) argued that ma-da is to be under-
stood as “level land that may be found at the edge of the desert.” For a discussion of these terms,
with somewhat different conclusions, see Limet 1978.
7. mu damar-den.zu lugal-e bí-tum-ra-bí-umki ì-ab-ruki ma-da ma-da-bi ù hu-úh-
nu-riki mu-hul, “The year: King Amar-Sin destroyed Bitum-rabiʾum, Iabru, their surrounding
territories, as well as Huhnuri.”
8. iškiri6 é amar- dšul-gi, ma-da isin2in.ki (MVN 18 132:5–6; see also BCT 1 127 4:5).
9. éš-didli ma-da (Nebraska 37: r. iv12′; Nik 2:236 r ii 23; AnOr 1 88: r iii 5′, et passim);
see Steinkeller 2007d: 193.
10. The latter is equivalent to Akkadian pāṭu, for which see Charpin 2004b: 53–55.
11. See p. 116 above.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 127

Like Anzu, sighting his mountain (lair), I elongated my steps,

And so the (inhabitants of) the cities I had founded on the frontier stood up for me,
And the Black-Headed People, numerous as ewes, gazed at me with sweet
admiration.

And in Šulgi Hymn C 87–88:

uru ma-da ki-bala gú-érim-ma mu-da-gub-na-u10-šè
mè-u10 a-ma-ru-kam ság nu-um-ši-íb-èn
When I stand up to the cites of the hostile rebel frontier,
My war (making) is as a flood wave that cannot be withstood!
The notion of the frontier is critical for our understanding of salient aspects of the
Mesopotamian geographical imagination. A frontier is not a line in the sand but
a liminal zone, an area of multifaceted interactions that can unite as much as it
separates, and is often the place where new cultural and political orders can estab-
lish themselves and grow, challenging established centers and resisting hegemony
(House 1980; Lightfoot and Martinez 1995). This fits in perfectly with certain as-
pects of the denotation of mada, as we shall presently see.
Seen in the light of what has been said above, bad mada must be rendered
as “wall/fortifications (guarding) The Territory/Frontier,” but this then leads to the
question: what is the specific territory that required such protection?
As it happens, there is some neglected Ur III archival information that might
shed light on a province or area that was designated, in native terminology, as mada.
Two texts from Umma document the existence of an entire dossier of transactions
concerning the lú énsi ma-da-(ke 4-ne), “representatives of the governors of ‘The
Territory/Frontier.’” The first, and the only dated text, mentions a reed basket with
accounts of these officials covering the years Š33–45, 12 and an undated tag from the
same city was used to label a basket with similar transactions. 13 Only one text of the
kind referred to in these tablets has been published to date, and it needs to be cited
in full (MVN 14 228, collations in MVN 16: 231–34): 14
1. 348.0.0 še gur
2. mu i-sà-rí-ik-šè
3. kišib3 hi-bí-DIG ̃ IR
4. 2.2.3 dabin gur kišib3 dèr-ra-ul-lí
5. 120.0.0 še gur kišib3 di-ni-lí
6. 572.0.4 še gur
7. kišib3-bi 2-àm kišib3 i-ṣur-DIG̃ IR
8. 51.0.3 1 sìla 12 gín še gur
9. kišib3 ì-lí-be-lí

12. 1 išpisa kišib3/dub énsi ma-da (SANTAG 6 20:3).

13. pisa-dub-ba, kišib3/dub lú énsi ma-da-ke4-ne, ì-ál (BRM 3 174:2).
14. I refrain from speculating on the specific nature of the transactions involved, but I doubt
that they have anything to do with the building of the Šulgi fortifications.
128 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 2

10. 55.2.5 5 sìla dabin gur

11. kišib3-bi 2-àm
12. kišib3 é-a-ma-lí-ik
13. lú énsi ka-zal-luki
14. 3.0.0 še gur kišib3 puzur4-ma-ma
15. 1055.0.0 še gur
16. kišib3-bi 4-àm
17. kišib3 é-a-ba-ni
18. 77.0.0 se gur
19. kišib-bi 2-àm
20. kišib3 nu-úr-dadad
  (line)
21. lú énsi már-ra-ad ki
22. 2.0.0 še gur kišib3 puzur4-sú
23. lú ur-dEN.ZU énsi úrumki
  (line)
24. šu-nígin 2286.0.0 12 gín še zíz gur
25. kišib3-bi 16-àm
26. kišib3 dab5-ba ki lú-giri17-zal-ta!
27. ur-dšára-ke4 ba-an-dab5!
28. kišib3 lú énsi ma-da-ke4-ne
The last line, “accounts of the representatives of the governors of ‘The Territory/
Frontier,’” is the key to our understanding of one particular Ur III usage of the term
mada. Although undated, the document can be assigned to the period covered by the
reed container with similar accounts. Issariq, the person mentioned in line 2, must
be the earliest known governor of Kazallu, first attested in the position in Š33.3.-
(YOS 4 75:7). His successor, Kallamu, first appears in Š43.2.- (PDT 1 509:3), and so
this transaction is probably earlier than that. 15 Issariq is followed by three persons;
the first, Ḫib-ili, belongs with the governor; the second, Erra-ulli, is documented in
another Umma tablet, where he is described as a man working for the governor of
Kazallu; 16 and in line 13 Ea-malik is specifically described as the man of the governor
of Kazallu. One may conclude that the whole section up to line 13 or 14 concerns
Kazallu and that Din-ili (5), Iṣṣur-ili (7), and Ili-beli (9) are also associated with the
administration of that city. 17 Thereupon follow representatives of the governor of

15. Ur-Suʾena, governor of Urum is first attested in Š42.7.15 (Ontario 1 12:2).

16. BPOA 6 1530: 3–4 (Š38.-.-) dèr-ra-ul-lí, lú énsi ka-zal-luki. The tablet bears the seal
of Erra-ulli and may be one of the sealed accounts summarized here. Note that the editors, Marcel
Sigrist and Tohru Ozaki, recognized the association between the entries in the two texts, which
concern the exact same transaction, providing a date for the MVN document.
17. There is a Dan-ili who appears in Umma texts, known from texts and his seal, as dub-
sar. He is first attested in SAT 2 263 (Š33.7.-). This is undoubtedly not the same person as the
representative of the governor of Adab in V. Scheil, RA 12 (1915) 164 r. ii 1 (AS4.-.-). In this
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 129

Marad: Ea-bani and Nur-Adad. 18 Ur-Sin is otherwise attested as governor of Urum

in Š42.7.15 (Ontario 1 12:2) sometime around AS7, 19 so this would be his earliest
appearance in the Ur III record. All the identifiable people fit into the time around
Š33 or slightly later, and judging by the Erra-ulli entry, it may be dated to Š38.
Seven of the eleven people mentioned here—excluding the officials in charge
of the transactions—are from Kazallu, Marad, and Urum. The rest remain uniden-
tified at present, and until evidence is uncovered that proves otherwise, one may
assume, as a working hypothesis, that they also represented the governors of Kazallu
or Marad. Should new texts demonstrate otherwise—for example, if some of these
people were linked to Adab—the argument presented here would be invalidated. In
that case, one would have to render énsi ma-da-ke 4-ne as “governors of various
provinces;” but in fact one would expect something along the lines of énsi ma-da
ma-da-ke 4-ne for such a meaning. 20
If my hypothesis is correct, these three records offer proof that there were nu-
merous Umma accounts pertaining to the mada that have not been recovered to
date and that the MVN text is only one of many transactions from this period that
concerned these governors. To be sure, there are similar texts from Umma that list
“accounts” (kišib 3) of governors of cities and provinces of the Ur III state, includ-
ing Adab, Marad, and Kazallu (RA 12 164, AS2.-.-, bricks), or Marad, Babylon,
Ešnunna, Nippur (SNAT 404, AS8.-.-, breads and flour), but such texts—and there
are others of this kind—never mention the “governors of the mada.”
In light of these facts, tenuous though they may be, one can formulate two alter-
native hypotheses, both of which are difficult to substantiate: either the bad mada
was located somewhere in the Diyala or even beyond, in the areas where Šulgi was
engaged in almost constant warfare, or it was located closer home, in a different
mada region.

The Early Ur III Defense Zone

Although only these fragments of a larger dossier have survived, they do provide
clues that permit us to narrow down the meaning of a specific area that was desig-
nated as mada. It clearly denotes the area that included the cities of Kazallu, Marad,
and Urum, all of which lay just northwest of Sumer proper, west of Nippur, and just

text, Adab is followed by Marad and Kazallu, but this order is simply the bala order for AS 4, as
documented by the text published by W. W. Hallo in JCS 14 (1960) 113:21.
18. Ea-bani, who is not to be confused here with the governor of Ereš by the same name, is
the lú énsi már-daki in BIN 5 154:6–8 (Š36.-.-) and Babyl. 7 20 5:3–4 (Š36.8.-). It is impossible
to establish if Puzur-Mama ends the Kazallu section or begins the part concerning Marad.
19. YBC 130, with a broken date, summarized by A. Goetze (1963: 21), which is most prob-
ably from AS7.
20. For a different view of this matter, see now the forthcoming paper by Piotr Steinkeller,
“Corvée Labor in Ur III Times” [added in proofs].
130 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 2

south of Sippar. Kazallu and Marad were situated south of Kish, on the Abgal canal,
northwest and west of Nippur, while Urum was north of the great city, between
Kutha and Sippar, in the “district of Sin,” according to the Ur-Namma “cadastre,”
as demonstrated by Steinkeller (1980: 24–27). After throwing off the yoke of Puzur-
Inšušinak’s polity, Ur-Namma proceeded to organize the area as he included it in
his state. A record of this activity was probably inscribed on a public stele that has
not survived, but the text that adorned it was copied in Old Babylonian times and
is known from two tablets from Nippur known today as The Cadastre Texts of Ur-
Namma (Kraus 1955; Frayne 1997: 50–56), and this is the composition that describes
the area in question. 21
To understand the military and ideological status of this region in Ur III times,
one must go back even earlier, to the beginnings of the dynasty, as recounted by its
founder, Ur-Namma, in the prologue to his “Law Code:” 22
u4-ba akšakki már-daki ír-kalki ka-zal-luki ù maš-gán-bi ú-za-ru-umki ní an-ša4-anki-a
nam-árad hé-éb-ak-e á dnanna lugal-á-ta ama-ar-gi4-bi hu-mu-ar
At that time, by the power of my master Nanna, I liberated Akšak, 23 Marad, Girkal,
Kazallu, their (surrounding) settlements and Uṣarum, which were all in servitude
to Anšan.

This then, hypothetically to be sure, is the military area designated as mada, which
included Kazallu, Marad, and probably Urum, along with other cities and towns. It is
curious that Kish, which lay in the middle of this area, is not included in the list, but
at some point it must have been integrated into the conceptual framework of this ter-
ritory. 24 It is likely that some of the state army was positioned here and that the mada
was conceived of as an in-depth defensive line against raids from the highlands, as a
buffer that stood behind the first protective areas. In a sense, this is the frontier area
of the state in the time of Ur-Namma but also throughout most of Šulgi’s reign, as
we shall presently see.
On the face of it, it seems unlikely that such an area would function as the
frontier military staging area for the northwestern part of the Ur III state during the
reign of Šulgi. The campaigns that originated there, targeting areas in the highlands,
would have to be mounted through the Diyala Plain and the break in the Hamrin,
which is essentially the route of the later Great Khorasan Road, while other armies
would have marched from or through Susa. It would therefore appear to be more
likely that the Diyala Plain would be more suited for this role and, indeed, there

21. There is a new piece of this composition that will be published by Piotr Steinkeller.
22. Code of Ur-Namma A iii 125–134, C i 1–10 (Roth 1995: 16, Wilcke 2002: 308), collated.
23. Frayne (1997: 48) and Sallaberger (1999: 134 n. 51) read Umma, rejecting the reading
Akšak reported in Steinkeller 1991: 15 n. 1, which was based on my collation of the original
tablet.
24. A Drehem account from Š43.5.- (Princeton 2 1 iv–r i 2′) includes a cluster of governors
and officials from the same area (Girtab, Kutha, Kazallu, Kish, Marad) but without mention of
mada. The only earlier Ur III reference to Kish is CST 45:5 (Š39.3.-).
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 131

Fig. 2. The central part of the Ur III state: the hypothetical mada of Šulgi’s time.
132 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 2

is evidence for precisely such a situation in the time beginning with the reign of
Amar-Sin. But information on earlier Ur III presence and control east of the Tigris
is neither abundant nor easy to interpret. A closer look at the geographical reality of
early Ur III times helps to clarify the issue.
As already noted above, the mada must be associated with the areas described in
the Ur-Namma cadastre text. The first section of this composition delimits precisely
the borders of districts belonging to specific towns and their titular deities: Kiritab
(Numušda), Apiak (Meslamtaea), possibly Urum (Sin), two or three others, and
then Marad (Lugal-Marada), followed by a fragmentary section with other districts.
The location of these towns has been the subject of much speculation in the past but
can now be seen more precisely due to the work of Steven Cole, Hermann Gasche,
and their collaborators, who have used a broad range of interdisciplinary tools to
map out the complex and shifting runs of the river system of northern Babylonia in
the late-third and early-second millennium (Cole and Gasche 1998; Gasche et al.
2002). According to their work, as well as that of their predecessors (Carroué 1991:
123–30; Frayne 1992: 48–51), the branch of the Euphrates (Buranun) that flowed
through Kish split downstream of the city, with the Abgal flowing from the right,
running through the territories of Kiritab, Apiak, and Marad; then, around Marad,
the Me-Enlila watercourse branched off the right side of the Abgal, possibly running
south to Nippur, Larsa, and beyond (Cole and Gasche 1998: 28–29). 25 If this is cor-
rect, then the first three districts of the Cadastre were located along the Abgal south
of Kish. The same authors have also reinterpreted the location of the fourth district,
centered on Urum, which they place farther north, just south of modern Baghdad,
stretching from the Euphrates to the Tigris, bordering on the place at which the
Diyala joins the Tigris. 26
If we combine all of this information, it is highly probable that in the latter part
of Šulgi’s reign the whole area west of Nippur and up to the conjoining of the Tigris
and the Diyala was designated as mada, “frontier territory.” It is equally probable
that this designation was abandoned when the frontier moved into the Diyala and
into the highlands in the last years of Šulgi and in subsequent times. This would
explain why the tax named gun, which was applied to the valleys and highlands
outside of Babylonia, became gun mada during the reign of Šu-Sin, when the fron-
tier had shifted.
Piotr Steinkeller (2010) has focused attention on a frontier district just north
of the region that may have been the mada, south of Sippar on the Arahtum ca-
nal, that included such places as Dimat-Enlila, Ur-Zababa, Maškan-Amar-Sin, and
Al-Šu-Sin. While Steinkeller suggests that the settling of this region was a state
undertaking that may have begun already under Ur-Namma, it is possible that the

25. It must be noted that neither the Abgal nor the Me-Enlila is currently attested in Ur
III administrative documents; both make an appearance, however, in the Cadastre Texts of Ur-
Namma (Frayne 1997: 51, 53).
26. Steinkeller (1980) provides a full discussion of Urum but places the district of Sin closer
to Sippar.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 133

development of this agricultural and military area took place only after the construc-
tion of the bad mada and was actually a northern extension of the frontier that took
place in subsequent years. Dimat-Enlila is mentioned for the first time in Šulgi’s last
year (BE 3/2 84, Š48.8.-), and the rest of them only appear in the record later, two
of them founded, as their names indicate, under later kings. The region was already
fully integrated into the Ur III administration by Amar-Sin’s second year, when men
from the area were included, together with workers from what had been the mada,
in a large harvesting project that brought together men from different cities and their
hinterlands, documented in a tablet that was analyzed many years ago by Albrecht
Goetze (1963) in his classic study of the commanders of the Ur III state (TCL 5
6041, AS2.-.-).
Recall that the bad mada was the subject of two consecutive Šulgi year-names,
years 37 and 38. This was followed by a two-year celebration of the building of Puzriš-
Dagan. This suggests that the two events were linked and that these fortifications
and the founding of an administrative center for the collection of provincial taxes
were possibly but part of an elaborate restructuring of the territories and dues of the
state. This supports my contention that these fortifications were meant to protect
military staging areas and to provide a central mobilization point for offensive activ-
ity. Nevertheless, as I have repeatedly asked above, why would one create a military
zone at some distance from the wars that were taking place in the highlands and from
the vulnerable Diyala Plain?
One answer to such a question may lie in the concept of defense-in-depth. The
term was first developed by Edward Luttwak (1976) in his much-criticized book on
the grand strategy of the Roman Empire, already referenced in the last chapter. Al-
though specialists on antiquity have rightly disproved most of his claims on the mat-
ter, the concept has been adopted in a variety of other contexts, from military and
peace studies to chess and even computer safety. 27 Dankbaar (1984: 150) defines the
issue in the following terms, within the context of modern warfare:
[A]ttrition by firepower is achieved not so much by a formidable concentration of
fire on one zone, but by confronting the attacker with a never-ending network of
anti-tank groups, constantly engaging in small fights, using prepared positions, arti-
ficial barriers and natural obstacles, avoiding a big battle, but slowly absorbing the
attacking force.
While one would not want to project these ideas literally into the past, it is possible
to modify the notion somewhat and suggest that, in addition to serving as an inland
mustering area, the mada was also conceived of as a secondary defensive area that
was designed to repel any infiltrators or attackers who might have managed to skirt
or penetrate any of the forward defenses on the outer frontier.

27. For example, C. J. Mann (1979: 180–81) dismantled Luttwak’s claims on Roman de-
fense-in-depth in an early review.
134 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 2

The Diyala Plain in the Time of Šulgi

References to the Diyala Plain and to the area immediately outside the Hamrin
gates only begin to show up in the latter part of Šulgi’s reign. The lower region of
the valley in mentioned once in a fragmentary Old Babylonian copy of an Akkadian
royal inscription, probably from Kutha (Frayne 1997: 14, lines 1′–5′, collated):
⸢ù⸣ ⸢íd⸣-da-ba-an, ⸢iš⸣-bi-ir-ma, ù in ⟨a ⟩-pá-ri-im, kà-ma-ra-ma, iš-ku-un
He then crossed the Ṭaban watercourse and built a rampart in the swamp. 28

The beginning of the inscription is not preserved, but one must assume that it be-
longs to the reign of Šulgi. It is impossible, however, to relate this to any other infor-
mation from the time, and therefore this piece of information is of little use to the
historian in its present form. 29
The main Diyala Plain city that was nearest to the core of the state, Ešnunna, is
first documented in Š36 (MVN 21 8:2, Š36.5.-), and by Š45 had a governor whose
name was Bamu. 30 Zimudar, even closer to the homeland, is first mentioned in Š46
(UCP 9-2-2 38:3, Š46.3.24), and its status is unclear. It pays taxes, but there is no
governor there, nor, it seems, is it under the control of a general as it would be dur-
ing the time of Šu-Sin. Most references from this time mention “men” (lú) of the
city, and it seems to be a small transitional military post during this period. The town
of Išim-Šulgi, apparently somewhere in the vicinity of Ešnunna, is mentioned only
once during Šulgi’s reign; the first of its many governors, Lugal-paʾe, is documented
in Š48. 31 The same holds true for Garnene and Tablala, two outposts that were also
close by. 32 Little is known of the area farther east; Maškan-šarrum and Kismar are
documented together in Š45 and Š46 in a manner that is difficult to interpret:
(twelve animals) ní-gur11 MAŠ.EN.KAK lugal ki giš-mar ki ù maš-kán-šar-ru-umki-
ke4-ne (TRU 144:11, Š45.4.27)
(twelve animals) ní-gur11 MAŠ.EN.KAK ki-is-mar ki, ù maš-kán-šar-ru-um ki-ke4-ne
(MVN 2 99:8–9, Š46.4.27)

28. I take the first verb as a faulty form of ebērum. Frayne (1997: 143) understood it differ-
ently and translated the passage “and the River Ṭaban he smashed and in a swamp he annihilated
(the enemy).”
29. Unless, of course, one accepts the translation offered in the footnote above. Frayne
(1997: 103) relates this passage to the conquest of Der in Šulgi’s twentieth year and connects it
with a passage in Šulgi Hymn C that is difficult to read and requires collation.
30. PDT 2 1246:3 (Š45.10.-); more than a year earlier he officiated (ìr) over a delivery of
equids from Ešnunna and may have already been governor there (Princeton 1 51:4, Š44.4.-). He
also appears in the next year in CST 119:4 (Š46.7.-), but by Š48.10.- had been replaced by Kal-
lamu (OIP 115 355:7), who was moved from Kazallu. Kallamu remained at his new post at least
until AS7.7.26 (NATN 453:2). By ŠS2 Lugal-kuzu had been posted in Ešnunna (Torino 1 72:12,
ŠS2.8.6).
31. AUCT 2 281 (Š48.8.-).
32. SACT 1 65:3, 6 (Š48.7.22).
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 135

The two transactions are dated one year apart to the day, but the almost identical list
of animals makes one suspicious that the first tablet has a mistake and that the year
should be Š46 rather than Š45. The term ní-gur 11 is generally assumed to mean
“property,” although it has been argued by K. Maekawa (1996) that in some cases it
means, more precisely, “(confiscated) property.” However, a survey of the Drehem
references suggests that it must be some kind of a minor tax on military personnel
from small outlying places. No one really knows what MAŠ.EN.KAK, later trans-
lated in Akkadian as muškēnum, really means in this era; perhaps these are low-status
homesteaders in the area. 33 It is all the more interesting because it is one of only two
other Ur III occurrences of such people in connection with a specific geographical
name found in a very similar context from just two years later: 34
(animals) udu ba-ug7 šà ní-gur11 MAŠ.EN.KAK me-dur-anki (MVN 15 195:20,
Š 48.6.9)

The town of Meturan, known from Old Akkadian, Old Babylonian, and later sources,
has been identified as Tell Haddad on the Diyala east of the Hamrin gates (Muhamed
1992), but it never appears, outside of this passage, in any other Ur III document.
Kismar and Maškan-šarrum, however, became important military centers. Toward
the end of Š46, Išar-ramaš, a man who ran affairs in the middle Diyala region for
years, delivered animals from troops from nearby Abal 35 and then in Š47 from the
“shepherds” (sipa) of Kismar. 36 Almost exactly a year later, the same man oversees
deliveries from a group of shepherds who are listed by name but without any place-
name, but who are clearly from the same area. 37 At least one of them, SI.A-a, rose to
become a military officer (nu-banda 3 ) by AS5, as documented in a text that men-
tions Išar-ramaš again and the troops of Abal. 38
Finally, the towns or hamlets of Puttulium and Sabum, which in all probabil-
ity lay in the Diyala Plain, make their first appearance in Š48 (AUCT 1 743:2, 5,
Š48.9.19).
The evidence is admittedly quite thin and its interpretation hampered by philo-
logical uncertainties, but it all points to a weak Ur III presence on the Diyala Plain

33. See OB Diri Nippur 7:29 (MSL 15 30); OB Diri Nippur 9:22 (MSL 15 32); OB Diri Ox-
ford 498 (MSL 15 48); and Aa I/6 131 (MSL 14 228). This is not the place to discuss the reading
and meanings of this difficult Sumerian word; the reading mášda is not used here, following the
strictures of Civil 2008b: 88 n. 195.
34. Note a MAŠ.EN.KAK named G ̃ išgaga who functions as ìr, delivering animals left over
from an accounting of booty from Urbilum in Š48. He is described as MAŠ.EN.KAK lú ì-lí-am-
raki, an otherwise unattested place-name (Ontario 1 53:20, Š48.-.20)
35. JCS 52 7 6:2–3 (Š46.9.11).
36. MVN 13 868:14–15 (Š47.7.17). On Išar-ramaš, possibly the governor of Awal and Tašil,
see Steinkeller 1981: 165.
37. OrSP 18 (1925) pl. 5 15 (Š48.6.26) mentions a number of shepherds under (ugula) Išar-
ramaš. Among these are Ili-tappe, SI.A-a, and Puzur-Ebiḫ (puzur4-a-bi-⟨iḫ⟩).
38. MVN 15 350 (AS5.9.24).
136 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 2

and in the valleys adjacent to the Hamrin to its north prior to the last years of Šulgi.
The main administrative and military centers for the region still lay close to the
homeland in places such as Ešnunna, Išim-Šulgi, and Zimudar. It seems likely that
the stabilization of the Hamrin area and the lands beyond took place around Š47
and Š48. One must conclude that prior to this the staging areas for major military
expeditions against Iran had been located within Babylonia itself, possibly in the
district designated as mada. The armies from this area may have traversed the un-
ruly Diyala Plain on their way to the highlands, or they may have skirted it by the
piedmont route through Der. Henry Wright, who knows the area well, informs me:
Armies going from Babylonia into the north-central Zagros valleys would have to
proceed either northeast up the pass above Sar-i Pol-i Dokhtar, then southeast into
the Islamabad area, or north up the Diyala and into the Sanandaj Area or southeast
into the Mah-I Dasht and the Kermanshah Area. Once in either of these places,
they would be in a series of large inter-connected north-central Zagros valleys. It is
difficult, however, to go from these valleys southwestwards over the high and almost
continuous mass of Kabir Kuh and get to the foothill region and Susiana. Alterna-
tively, if they were going toward Susiana and the southern Zagros, they would have
to go southeastwards to Der, and from there to Susiana and even beyond towards
Anšan. 39 Once could, of course do a loop, moving directly via the plain of Ru-
mishgan into the Saimarreh (upper Karkheh) or more circuitously via Nehavand
and Khorramabad and into Susiana, returning to Mesopotamia via Der. There were
routes marked by settlements in Uruk and Early Dynastic times, and groups of no-
mads and traders with goods had been traveling them for centuries. However I do
not know of an account of any army doing this before Hellenistic times.

I should also note that the general area that was considered to be mada at the
time of Šulgi, which needs to be studied in full, was a trouble spot that created prob-
lems for various rulers in third- and second-millennium Mesopotamia. When Rimuš
ascended to the throne of Akkad, he had to put down a massive rebellion in Sumer.
No sooner had he quelled this uprising, when “thereupon, on his return, Kazallu
revolted. (Rimuš) vanquished it and slew 12,052 men inside Kazallu. He took 5,862
prisoners and captured Ašared, ruler of Kazallu, and tore down its (city) wall.” 40
The area in question was also part of the “great revolt” against Naram-Sin, which
included the cities of Kish, Kutha, Tiwe, Sippar, Kazallu, Kiritab, and Apiak, as well
as Dilbat, Sippar, and Borsippa. 41 Centuries later, Hammurabi faced a conspiracy at
Kazallu and its countryside, which at that time was named Mutiabal. After discover-
ing that their elites were plotting with the ruler of Elam, he destroyed the city and
deported its inhabitants to Babylon (Van De Mieroop 2005: 118–19). The punish-

39. On the importance of Der (Tell ʿAqar) and the roads that passed through it, see Postgate
and Mattila 2004: 240 and now Frahm 2009: 51. Der figures prominently in the Ur III messenger
texts from Urusag˜rig (personal communication, courtesy of David I. Owen).
40. Rimuš E2.1.2.4: 44–63 (Frayne 1993: 48).
41. Naram-Sin E2.1.4.6: i′ 14′–20′ (Frayne 1993: 104) and passim.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 137

ment was apparently not severe enough, because Kazallu rebelled soon thereafter
against his son Samsu-iluna. These are some of the more dramatic moments in the
long history of Kazallu and its environs, but they are important because they signal
the long-term strategic importance of a town that plays an important role in CKU.

The bad mada and Bad-igihursaa

If one accepts the information gathered above pertaining to an area designated
as mada, then it is possible to go further and hypothesize that this provides some
evidence on the location of the bad mada that is known from Ur III year-names.
But once again, one must stress that this name never appears in the CKU. The only
mention of any sizable fortifications in the Šulgi correspondence is found in letters
PuŠ1 (13) and ŠPu1 (14), an exchange between the king and an officer by the name
of Puzur-Šulgi or Puzur-Numušda. Is it possible that the subject of these letters is the
bad mada commemorated in Šulgi’s thirty-seventh year-name? Many seem to think
that this is indeed the case (Wilcke 1969: 1; Sallaberger 2007: 445; 2009). If we as-
sume that these letters do indeed refer to the bad mada, then, in light of the argu-
ments laid out above, the Puzur-Šulgi works should be localized somewhere within
or on the perimeter of the defensive zone of Urum, Marad, and Kazallu; but here
we move from hypothesis to conjecture. None of these cities is mentioned in the
correspondence, and the officer in charge is the commander of a place named bàd-
(igi)-hur-sa-á, which is unattested anywhere in the literary or documentary re-
cord outside of the CKU. As he addresses his master, he states (PuŠ1: 6–8 [13]): “My
king, for the well-being of the army and his country has built the great fortifications
of Igihursaa against the vile enemy for the sake of his people and his country.”
There are two ways of understanding the toponym or descriptive phrase bàd
igi hur-sa-á: one can take it literally and translate it “fortification(s) facing the
mountains” or “fortification(s) facing Hursa.” 42 Most scholars have preferred the
first solution, but Douglas Frayne (1992: 19) has observed that the Ur-Namma cadas-
tre text mentioned a place, or geographical feature, named an-za-gàr hur-sa-á,
“tower of the Hursa,” and linked it to the subject of the CKU letter; the use of
hursa fits well with Heimpel’s definition cited in the last footnote. Frayne’s felici-
tous discovery provides a reasonable, if not absolutely convincing, reason to place
Bad-igihursaa within the defensive zone of the mada, although his conclusion has
been contested (Huber 2001: 193). Therefore, in light of this, unless the CKU mate-
rial concerning the issue is pure fabrication, one may think of Bad-igihursaa as a fort
that anchored the “wall” of bad mada.

42. This is generally taken to refer to the mountains to the northeast of Sumer. On the in-
terpretation of hursa as “mountain range, hills,” see now Steinkeller 2007b. Heimpel (2009b:
26 n. 3) has taken this interpretation further and states that it designated “anything that was not
flat alluvium or a hill created by a ruined settlement.” The references to the use of the phrase igi
hur-sa-á are collected in Appendix C below.
138 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 2

The Officials of the Puzur-Šulgi Correspondence

At this point, we must take a closer look at the people and places that are men-
tioned in CKU letter PuŠ1 (13) and attempt to harmonize this information with the
archival record of Ur III times. From the prosopographic point of view, this epistle is
the most troubling one in CKU. In contrast to most of the other items of the royal
correspondence, none of the officials mentioned in the letter from Puzur-Šulgi to
Šulgi, including the writer himself, can be identified in Ur III documents, and their
respective areas of responsibility do not correspond to anything that we can find in
the surviving texts of the time. To add to this, there was clearly a good degree of
confusion in the transmission of the passage that corresponds to lines 15–22 of the
reconstructed text: no two manuscripts contain the same line order, and there are
significant variants in the names.
Puzur-Šulgi
The name of the writer is not without problems, as there is some textual confu-
sion between the governor of Bad-Igihursaa (PuŠ1 [13], ŠPu1 [14]) and the gover-
nor of Kazallu who is one of Ibbi-Sin’s correspondents (PuIb1 [23] and IbPu1 [24]). If
we tabulate the different names of the two officers who exchanged letters with Šulgi
and Ibbi-Sin, with reference to the sigla designating the various manuscripts of the
composition, the problems of textual transmission become evident: 43

PuŠ1 ŠPu1 PuIb1 IbPu1

Puzur-Šulgi N1, X1 X1, X3, X4 Ur1, Ur2, X1 X1
Puzur-Numušda N4 N5, N8, N9 N2
Puzur-Marduk Ki1

The name Puzur-Numušda occurs only once attested in Ur III sources; 44 the variant
Puzur-Marduk is clearly an editorial anachronism that requires no comment. How-
ever, the name Puzur-Šulgi is documented in tablets from Drehem, Girsu, Ur, and
Nippur, ranging in date from Š41 to IS14. Two different persons are identified by pro-
fessional designation: a lú ištukul (MVN 17 135:8, messenger text, no year-name)
and a šár-ra-ab-du, son of Abija (MVN 8 207:rev. 4′ and seal, IS2.12.12). 45 Other
messenger texts may contain references to the former, namely, RTC 388:3; MVN 5
250:24; DAS 144:3; and Nisaba 3 2 32:8. There was also another Puzur-Šulgi, active
at least between AS8 and ŠS3, who was identified twice as the son of the general
Hašib-atal, an officer who was stationed in Arrapha (  JCS 31 166A:2; CT 32 36: ii

43. The letters and numbers refer to the individual manuscripts of the composition, defined
in the edition below.
44. AUCT 1 294:3, a fragmentary document from Umma; date broken.
45. I cannot offer translations of these designations, although the former clearly has military
connotations and the latter “may be involved with surveying and agricultural work” (CAD Š/II
67, sub šarrabtû).
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 139

8). Much lower on the social ladder was someone by that name whose seal, dedicated
to a certain Ibani, is attested at Nippur in ŠS3, if the reading of the name is correct
(TMHnf 1/2 76)
In addition, there are other attestations of one or more Puzur-Šulgi’s in Drehem texts
from the reign of Šulgi, beginning with year 41, but it is impossible to determine the
exact title or function of any of them:

Nisaba 8 172:5 Š41.7.22

OIP 115 151:8 Š43.5.3
PDT 1 86:10 Š43.6.14
ŠA 39:1 Š43.9.00
Nik. 2 523:10 Š44.-.-

The contexts and dates strongly suggest that this is one and the same person and that
he was part of the military establishment.
Whatever the origins of the letter, the passage that contains the names of officers
in charge of segments of the fortification looks suspiciously as if it had been redacted
with school mathematical exercises in mind. All of this is presented in detail in the
edition of PuŠ1 (13), but the composite text for lines 15–21 is reprised here for ease
of discussion:
15. nam Ipuzur4-dnu-muš-da énsi ul4-lum-TUR.RAki
16. ninnu nindan uš sa ba-ab-gíd murub4-ba im-ma-an-ri
17. nam Ilugal-me-lám šabra ídšeg5-šeg5
18. ía nindan uš-ni ha-ni-dar-dar
19. nam Ika-kù-ga-ni énsi ma-da murub4ki
20. 35 nindan uš gaba dúr-bi ba-gul-gul
21. nam Ita-ki-il-ì-lí-šu kù-ál íd áb-gal ù ídme-den-líl-lá
22. nimin nindan uš-ni gúr ugu-bi-šè nu-ub-g̃ar
15
In the sector under the responsibility of Puzur-Numušda, governor of Ullum-
ṣeḫrum, 16a 300 m. section had sagged and collapsed in the middle; 17in the sector
under the responsibility of Lugal-melam, the overseer of the Šeššektum canal,18 30
m. of his section can be breached; 19in the sector under the responsibility of Kaku-
gani, governor of the inland territory, 20a 210 m. section, its face and based are dam-
aged, 21(and) in the part under the responsibility of Takil-ilišu, canal inspector of
the Abgal and Me-Enlila waterways, 22240 m. of his section does not have its perimeter
laid out yet.

Puzur-Numušda, Governor (énsi) of Ullum-ṣehrum (line 15)

This name, which only occurs in the solitary Nippur manuscript for this line
(N1), is rare; indeed, it occurs only once in Ur III times, as already noted above. All
the other sources have different names, which are also relatively rare, or even non-
existent, in Ur III:
140 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 2

Šu-Marduk (Ki1) Unattested in Ur III; the name of Marduk is clearly an anachro-

nism here. The same manuscript uses the name Puzur-Marduk
for the sender of the letter.
Šu-Numušda (X2) Only two people are known by this name: one at Umma, 46 and
a bodyguard (àga-ús) documented in a Drehem text. 47
Šu-Nunu (X1) There are five examples of this name in Ur III, but none of them
is even remotely related to the functionary in the letter. 48
The place name Ullum-ṣeḫrum is attested in a variety of spellings from the Old
Akkadian texts through Old Babylonian lexical lists; the first sign is variously writ-
ten bil, bí l, bìl, and ul 4, and the last part is either TUR or TUR.RA. There was
also a Billum (known already from Early Dynastic sources) and a Billum-rabium.
The various spellings of this place-name are collected by Steinkeller (1986: 35).
The reading ul 4 rather than ír is based on the gloss ul in MSL 11 p. 16 (McEwan
1980: 159). Although it is impossible at present to identify the place-name, it was
definitely located in northern Babylonia. If one assumes that Billum, Billum-ṣeḫrum,
and Billum-rabium were located in proximity to one another, then the listing of
bí l-lum in line 165 of the ED geographical list from Ebla and Abu Salabikh in the
section dealing with northern Babylonia (Steinkeller 1986: 35; Frayne 1992: 19–20)
provides evidence on the matter. Two Old Akkadian references to Billum-ṣeḫrum
(MAD 5 69: ii 8′) and to Billum-rabium (MAD 5 101: ii′ 14) come from “Umm-el-
Jīr,” on which see Gelb’s comments in MAD 5. Although the provenance of tablets
that have been described as coming from this place is somewhat problematical, they
are all from northern Babylonia, close to Kish. Frayne (1992: 19), moreover, points
to the presence of an é-duru 5 i-bil-lum, “Hamlet of Ibillum,” in the cadastre text,
right after an-za-gàr hur-sa-á, “The Tower of Hursa,” which supports the ge-
ography of the letter but suggests the reading Billum for the place-name.
Lugal-melam, Overseer (šabra) of the Šeššektum Canal
In contrast to the other personal names discussed here, there are almost 280
examples of this name in Ur III texts, although not one of them can be connected
with the individual mentioned in the Puzur-Šulgi letter.
The waterway is not attested in a single Mesopotamian administrative text, and
even the reading of the name is uncertain. Lexical texts provide information on a
reading še/ig 5 for the sign URU×TU as well as G̃IŠGAL×TU (also EZEN×TU and
KA×TU). Thus Proto-Ea 544 (MSL 14 53) has the readings ši-ig and si-ig, a tradi-
tion repeated in the later lexical texts; the Akkadian glosses indicate the meaning
šaqummatum, “silence” (e.g., Aa VI/4 45–46 [MSL 14 442]; Reciprocal Ea Tablet A
191 [MSL 14 528]). All of this is somewhat confusing. The Standard Babylonian
versions of HAR-ra XXII and Diri III provide the most direct evidence:

46. BIN 5 298:6 (AS7.8.3); MVN 14 573:8 (AS8.11.2); MVN 20 46:4; MVN 20 57:4, both
with date broken.
47. BOAM 2 34 86:41 (ŠS2.7.29).
48. CST 263 r. iii 7 (AS6.2.-, Girsu); Princeton 1 7 (SS1.5.8, Drehem); RA 32 190:7 (ŠS9.‑.‑,
prov. unkn.); SAT 3 1952:2 (IS2.2.-, Drehem); YOS 4 35 (IS2.12.-, prov. unkn.).
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 141
íd
KA×TUšeš-šeš-K[A×TU] = ŠU (Hh XXII 4 ii 20′ [MSL 11 25])
[. . .]-še?-eg? = ídG̃IŠGAL×TU.G̃IŠGAL×TU (var ídG̃IŠGAL×TU.TU)= [še]-eš-še-
ek-tu (Diri III 198 [MSL 15 146])

The earlier documentation is somewhat more complicated. The entry does not seem
to be attested in the preserved part of the “forerunners” to Hh XXII. There is an
entry in the Ugarit version that may shed light on the Emar and Nippur redactions:
íd
sig-sig zi-zi-ik zi-ni-ki (Hh XX–XXII Ras Shamra. A iii rev. 15 [MSL 11 46]), which
corresponds to:
íd
SAL.SILA4-sig iš-me-e-tu4 (Hh XX–XXII Emar [Arnaud, Emar VI.4 148]
íd
SAL.SILA4-sig (Hh XX–XXII Nippur F 333 [MSL 11 106])

If SAL.SILA4-sig is another writing of the same watercourse name, then line 5 of

the third kirugu of Išbi-Erra Hymn B is the only other Old Babylonian literary text
in which it occurs (collated):
buranun-na ídidigna ídSAL.SILA4-sig íd-kiški zag-bi im-mi-in-gu7
íd

He found nourishment on the banks of the Euphrates, Tigris, Sigsig?, and Kish
watercourses.

Jacobsen (1960: 478) identified íd-SAL.SILA4-sig as the Sumerian writing of the

Isinnitum canal, which branched off from the Euphrates north of Nippur, an inter-
pretation that was followed by CAD I/J 197 and by Frayne (1992: 39). The lexical
entry cited in CAD, which is one of the two data items that constitute the main basis
for this identification, is now read as [íd-x.x] ki-en-gi /⸢ki-uri⸣/ = i-ši-ni-⸢tum⸣ (Hh
XXII 4 ii 16′ [MSL 11 25]). The other is a Sultantepe bilingual. This identification,
which now has no solid basis, is also not supported by any archival evidence. The
other is a bilingual hymn to Ninisina, KAR 6 15 and duplicates, recently reedited,
with new copies and an Old Babylonian manuscript, by K. Wagensonner (2008:
281). In the Assur version, from the 10th or 11th century, íd ídSAL.SILA4-sig-a is
translated as i-na i-si-ni-ti (VAT 9304 [KAR 16]: 15). The earlier version does not
preserve these signs. Could SAL.SILA4 have been read as sigx/šegx in the literary
mode? Whatever may have been the case, the identification of this Sumerian name
with the Isinnitum is tentative at best and is not supported by any archival evidence.
The Isin canal is attested as i-si-nu in the ED LGN (Frayne 1992: 39) and in
Ur III texts as íd-i-si-in (ki)-(na) (RGTC 2 270). It is therefore possible that these
entries represent a separate manuscript tradition of the lexical text and that they
stand for the ídšeg 5-šeg 5ki. This is far from certain, however, and the information on
this watercourse name remains highly unclear; the fact that it is known primarily
from the lexical tradition suggests that the CKU reference is spurious.
Finally, the use of the title šabra for the overseer of a waterway is also unknown
in Ur III times, and in this letter it looks suspiciously like a back-translation from the
title šāpir nārim, “governor of the river (system),” known primarily from Old Baby-
lonian sources.
142 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 2

Kakugani, Governor of the “Inland” (murub 4) Territory

There are at least thirteen attestations of this personal name, from Š48 (WMAH
176: iii 4) to IS1 (AnOr 45 60: r. iv 14), mostly from Girsu but also once from Umma
and once from Nippur. None of these references provides any information on the
function of these individuals.
The geographical designation ma-da murub4ki is not attested in any text other
than this one and ŠaŠu1:21 (letter 19). The only similar usage is found in a year-
name of Sin-iddinam of Larsa: mu ia-ab-ra-at ki uru murub 4 uru-didli ba-an-
tuku/dab 5, “The year: Iabrat, (its) central city, and various surrounding settlements
were taken” (Goetze 1950: 97–98). In the present letter, the term has to refer to an
area within the military zone discussed above; in the Šarrum-bani missive, it has to
refer to an area in the Diyala Plain or its surroundings. In all likelihood, this is to be
interpreted as “central region,” or simply “inland,” and not as a specific toponym.
Takil-ilissu, the Canal Inspector (kù-ál) of the Abgal
and Me-Enlila Waterways
There are only two attested occurrences of this personal name in Ur III docu-
ments: in a court protocol from Umma from the time of Amar-Sin (SNAT 373:19), 49
and in a seal inscription dedicated to Ibbi-Sin by the general Takil-ilissu, impressed
on a tablet from Garšana (CUSAS 3 525, IS2.i.2). The interpretation of the name
is uncertain, as discussed recently by Hilgert (2002: 485–86). Only three sources for
PuŠ1 preserve the name in full: one uses the modernized Old Babylonian writing
(Ki1), but X1 has ta-ki-il-ì-lí-iš-su, while X4 uses ta-ki-il-ì-lí-sú. There was clearly a
tradition that preserved a garbled version of an earlier writing convention or at-
tempted to archaize the name.
The waterways are not attested in Ur III administrative texts, although they
are already known from Old Akkadian documents and from the Cadastre Texts of
Ur-Namma. The combination of the two suggests that an area around Marad is the
subject of this official. 50 Moreover, both canal names were familiar to persons living
in Old Babylonian times.

The Fortifications of the Puzur-Šulgi Letter

Complex as this presentation of the facts has been, the analysis of geographic
data from the PuŠ1 letter confirms only that the location of the Šulgi fortifications
conforms reasonably well to information gleaned from other sources. Unfortunately,
this only confirms that the author or successive redactors of the composition were
aware of the lexical tradition and of the geographical reality of a specific part of
Babylonia.

49. See Wilcke 1991.

50. On the location of these waterways, see p. 132 above.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 143

Whatever its origins and redactional history, neither of which can be traced at
the present time, the letter PuŠ1 (13) is part of the core of CKU. The reply from the
king, ŠPu1 (14), however, is not, and is attested only in two different OB versions
on tablets of unknown origin and in a bilingual Middle Babylonian tablet from Susa
that has been further redacted. The letter begins with the king’s highly rhetorical
explanation of his reasons for building Bad-Igihursaa, and these are couched in
language more familiar from hymns than from epistolary works. What follows seems
to have been adapted from the Šu-Sin correspondence, including anachronistic ref-
erences to Lu-Nanna, the governor of the province of Zimudar. There can be little
doubt that letter 14 of CKU (ŠPu1) is a post–Ur III fabrication that was concocted,
possibly in northern Babylonia, to create a symmetrical pair with PuŠ1 (13). By
chance, it survived in the periphery long after the rest of the royal correspondence
was deleted from the literary tradition.
This survey has marshaled quite a bit of factual information, but it fails to answer
the main historical questions that come to mind, namely, does the narrative of letters
PuŠ1 (13) and ŠPu1 (14) in any way deal with matters surrounding the construc-
tion or maintenance of the bad mada that we know from the Šulgi year-names?
The general geographical context points in that direction, but that is all. I therefore
provisionally connect Bad-Igihursaa with part of the bad mada, as earlier authors
have already done, even if I remain agnostic about the historical veracity of parts
of the Puzur-Šulgi letter. But even if the bad mada is the subject of these epistles,
the affairs described in PuŠ1 (13) concern small local issues and not any large-scale
defensive wall or line of forts. If these pieces are part of the bad mada, they are only
small elements of a construction massive enough to warrant commemoration in two
successive year-names. The letter, whatever its evidentiary status, implies that the
“wall” is something that could be measured linearly, so it was not perceived as a line
of forts but as an actual wall. One must keep in mind, however, that if we add up all
the numbers in this letter, the deteriorating sections enumerated in PuŠ1 altogether
amount to 130 nindan, approximately 780 meters, and therefore this is but one
small part of a larger construction.

The Fortifications
There is not a shred of contemporary Ur III evidence concerning the purpose of
Šulgi’s fortifications. All the surviving information on military activities places war-
fare far from the homeland and not on its doorstep, but if I am right about the fact
that the Diyala was not under full Ur III control until very late in Šulgi’s reign, then
the location of the staging area in the environs of Kazallu and east to the Tigris may
be less surprising. Some historians have asserted that it was built against Amorite
invaders, but this is merely a supposition that projects their interpretation of Šu-Sin’s
constructions into the time of Šulgi. The PuŠ1 (13) letter is no more informative,
because it refers to enemies in a generic manner, without identifying the source of
the danger that is apparently at the gates. The answer from Šulgi (ŠPu1, 14) does
144 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 2

implicate the Amorites, but it is clearly spurious, as the reference to the Amorites is
a paraphrase of a similar passage from the Šu-Sin correspondence; this passage will
be cited below.
Recall that the bad mada was the subject of two consecutive Šulgi year-names,
years 37 and 38. This was followed by a two-year celebration of the building of Puzriš-
Dagan. Earlier, I suggested that the two events were linked and that these fortifica-
tions and the founding of an administrative center for the collection of provincial
taxes were possibly but part of an elaborate restructuring of the territories and dues
of the state. This would support my contention that these fortifications were meant
to protect military staging areas and to provide a central mobilization point for of-
fensive activity.
Muriq-Tidnim
If the Ur III sources are silent on the reasons why the Šulgi fortifications were
constructed, the purpose of the later Muriq-Tidnim is seemingly well documented.
First and foremost, there is the very name itself, “The One That Keeps the Tid-
num at a Distance,” and second, there is the Šu-Sin inscription, cited on p. 124
above, commemorating the rebuilding of the temple of Šara in Umma “when he
had built the wall against the Amorites Muriq-Tidnim and turned back the incur-
sions of the Amorites to their territories.” As far as the CKU is concerned, the letter
from Šarrum-bani to the king sets out the motivations behind the work simply and
directly (ŠaŠu1:1–7 [18]):
1
Speak to Šu-Sin, my king: 2 saying (the words of) the prefect Šarrum-bani, your
servant:
3
You commissioned me to carry out construction on the great fortifications (bàd
gal) of Muriq-Tidnim 4 and presented your views to me as follows: “The Amorites
have repeatedly raided the frontier territory.” 7 You commanded me 5 to rebuild the
fortifications, to cut off their access, 6–7 and thus to prevent them from repeatedly
overwhelming the fields through a breach (in the defenses) between the Tigris and
Euphrates.
Šarrum-bani continues his narrative with the following information (ŠaŠu1:11–17
[18]):
11
When I had been working on the fortifications that then measured 26 dana (269
km.), 12 after having reached (the area) between the two mountain ranges, 13 the
Amorite camped in the mountains turned his attention to my building activities.
14
(The leader of) Simurum came to his aid, and 15 he went out against me between
the mountain ranges of Ebih to do battle. 16 And therefore I, even though I could not
spare corvée workers (for fighting), 17 went out to confront him in battle.
In this manner, the literary correspondence unequivocally insists that the main pur-
pose of the fortifications was to keep hostile Amorites away from the homeland of
the Ur III kings. In this epistolary world the massive works were a patent failure,
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 145

since a dozen or so years later a man by the name of Išbi-Erra was writing to Ibbi-Sin,
Šu-Sin’s successor on the throne (IŠIb1:7–12 [21]):
7
Word having reached me that hostile Amorites had entered your frontier territory,
8
I proceeded to deliver all the grain—72,000 kor—into (the city of) Isin. 9 But now
all the Amorites have entered the homeland, 10 and have captured all the great store-
houses, one by one. 11 Because of (these) Amorites I cannot hand over the grain for
threshing; 12 they are too strong for me, and I am made to stay put.

The information cited here seems to leave no doubt: early in the time of Šu-Sin, the
state faced a serious danger from a group, or groups, of Amorites identified as belong-
ing to the Tidnum, an incipient state, ethnic group, or confederation. Moreover, the
menace was so serious that it required an enormous expenditure of treasure and labor,
including a line of fortifications at least 300 kilometers long, perhaps as long as 500
kilometers. Who, then, were these Amorites, and were they really so threatening
that Šu-Sin’s administration was forced to build what may have been, potentially,
the longest military construction created in the ancient world? In the previous chap-
ter, I argued that the Amorite problem on the eastern frontier was mostly limited
to low-level hostilities and did not pose a serious threat to the Ur III state. Should
we therefore take the name of the fortifications at face value, or is it possible that it
was purposely misleading, and that they were constructed for offensive, rather than
defensive purposes?
With little else to go on, we must turn to the evidence of the Šu-Sin corre-
spondence and, as with the other CKU compositions, confront it with information
contained in the available documentary record. Rather than criticize previous local-
izations and explanations of the construction, I will simply build my own argument,
relying on my own interpretation of the sources.
According to ŠaŠu1 (18), the king has commissioned the author, named Šarrum-
bani, to build Muriq-Tidnim and, at the time of his writing, the fortifications had
reached the territory of Zimudar in the Diyala region, a place under the control of
the governor Lu-Nanna. In his reply (ŠuŠa1 [19]), the king admonishes Šarrum-bani
and relieves him of his duties, replacing him with his own uncle Babati. Felicitously,
all three officials are well documented in Ur III texts in a manner that conforms to
the image found in the royal correspondence.

Šarrum-bani
The name Šarrum-bani appears more than a hundred times in Ur III texts from
Drehem, Girsu, Umma, and Nippur, and it can be demonstrated that a number of
different individuals are involved, from a messenger (sukkal) to a kennel master
(sipa ur-ra). As already observed by A. Goetze (1963: 16), one of these was a high-
ranking military official who held the rank of šakkana, “general.” He is designated
by this title only twice in texts from AS7.1.20 (Nisaba 8 161:2) and in ŠS1.10.- (TÉL
61:9), but there can be little doubt that he held a high military rank much earlier,
146 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 2

and his high status is reflected in the fact that he married a princess of the realm. 51
He first appears in Drehem tablets from the last six years of Šulgi’s reign, and even
though he is without overt title, the company he keeps in these accounts strongly
suggests that he was already part of the highest ranks of the military, perhaps even
already a general. His importance at this time is documented on a tablet that was
made out when the king and queen, together with their closest entourage, dined at
his estate. 52 He kept his military title when he also assumed the role of governor of
Apiak in the northern defensive zone; he is attested in this position from AS5.3.-
through AS8.1.29, but using other sources one can pin down his tenure more pre-
cisely. Although the city had a governor as early as Š31 (OIP 115 17: 8), only two
names of such officials are known:
Šu-Tirum SAT 2 785: 5 AS4.4.30
OrSP 47/9 80: 10 AS4.9.-
Šarrum-bani OIP 121 587: 8 AS5.3.-
JCS 17 21 AS7?.-.-
UDT 128: 5 AS8.1.29
This narrows the time of his appointment at Apiak to some moment between the
ninth month of AS4 and the third month of the following year. How long he re-
mained at the post after the eighth year of Amar-Sin is unknown; the only gov-
ernor of the city known by name after this is none other than Babati, whose seal
inscription, which will be discussed below, includes the title; it is first documented
on ŠS3.10.-. In CKU, Šarrum-bani bears the title gal-zu unkena, “prefect.”
Šarrum-bani continued his career throughout the reign of Šu-Sin. A possible ref-
erence to his estate and, therefore, presumably to his death or disfavor is documented
in the very beginning of the first year of Ibbi-Sin’s reign (AUCT 1 53:3, IS1.2.7).
According to the Šu-Sin correspondence, Šarrum-bani sought assistance from
another officer, Lu-Nanna, who is described as the governor of the territory of
Zimudar. 53
Lu-Nanna
The name Lu-Nanna is common, and this complicates the study of the man’s
career; moreover, there may have been two or more generals by this name. Com-
manders named Lu-Nanna are attested in texts from Š46 through AS3; a Lu-Nanna
is twice described as general of the town of Nagsu, which was located in the province
of Umma (TIM 6 36:5 [Š 46.3.-] and TCL 2 5488:7 [Š46.4.-]). 54 A general Lu-Nanna
51. An unnamed wife (dam) of Šarrum-bani appears in a list of princesses (dumu-munus
lugal) in CTMMA 1 17:44 (AS4.7.-); one assumes that this is the officer under discussion here.
52. This tablet, which was once in the USA and was published on the Internet, is now in
the Gratianus Stiftung in Germany and will be published soon by Konrad Volk; see Volk 2004.
The date formula is broken, but it is undoubtedly one of Šulgi’s last years.
53. For previous discussions of this official, see Goetze 1963: 16–17, Lieberman 1968–69:
59–60, Owen 1973: 136, and Michalowski 1978a: 34–49.
54. The reading of the first sign, NAG, is uncertain in this name. For its location on the
Iturungal canal, see Steinkeller 2001.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 147

is mentioned in texts from Umma (SAT 2 601:5 [Š48.1.-]), Girsu (HLC 221:13, DAS
179:17, TCTI 1 1021+1022: v 28′, RA 19 40 18:10, WMAH 284: rev. iii′ 12′, all un-
dated), and Ur (UET 3 1770:4′, date broken). Although no one can say for certain,
it is likely that all of these references—the dated ones cover only six years—refer to
the same individual.
After a hiatus of approximately six years, beginning with the first year of Šu-Sin,
there is evidence for a Lu-Nanna serving as general of Zimudar, in the Diyala, where
he remained for at least eight years. His tenure there continued into the early part
of Ibbi-Sin’s reign: in IS2, he is one of the officials in charge of delivering taxes from
the Diyala region (CT 32 19 iii 1, 26, IS2.4.29). 55 In Ur III texts, he is always a com-
mander (šakkana) of Zimudar, while in CKU letters he is a governor (énsi) of the
province. The only imprint of his seal, preserved on a fragmentary envelope from
Nippur published by David I. Owen, reads (NATN 776 [ŠS1.-.-]):
⸢šu⸣-den.zu
[d]

lugal kal-ga
lugal uri5ki-ma
lugal an-ub-⸢da⸣ limmu2-ba
lú-d[nanna]
⸢šakkana⸣
zi-⸢mu⸣-[darki]
árad-[zu]
O Šu-Sin, mighty king, king of Ur, king of the four corners of the universe, Lu-
Nanna, commander of Zimudar, is your servant.

In one receipt from Ur, his dues are delivered “in the town of Šulgi-Nanna, on the
banks of the Diyala.” 56 A document from Nippur demonstrates that his son was
also involved with matters in the Diyala region (NRVN 1 176, IS2). The tablet is a
simple loan of grain, to be repaid after the harvest, and the borrower, Ennam-Šulgi,
is to pay back the loan in Ešnunna. From the seal impression on the tablet we learn
that Ennam-Šulgi was the son of the general Lu-Nanna.
The third individual mentioned in the Šu-Sin correspondence is named Babati,
and he is likewise well known from the Ur III record.
Babati
The Babati of the royal correspondence is the brother of Queen Abi-simti and
uncle of King Šu-Sin; of this there can be no doubt. However, the Ur III archives
document the activities of a number of people named Babati, and it is difficult to
distinguish which person appears in each document. There were Babatis in Girsu
and Umma, including an envoy (sukkal) and a bodyguard (àga-ús), but the queen’s
brother may also have been involved with certain matters in these provinces.

55. UET 3 75:2–3 (ŠS1.1.-); ASJ 4 140 2:2 (ŠS8.5.19); PDT 1 170:4 (d.b., ŠS); UTI 6 3800:
ii 15′ (d.b, “treasury” text, ŠS or early IS).
56. šà dšul-gi-dnanna, gú íddur-ùl (UET 3 75:6–7, ŠS1.1.-).
148 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 2

The main sources of information on our man come from the Drehem archives,
but even here it is difficult to unravel the documentation pertaining to this particu-
lar Babati as distinguished from the work of a bureaucrat (dub-sar) who is well at-
tested throughout the reigns of Amar-Sin and Šu-Sin. The dignitary who holds our
interest first appears in the third month of Amar-Sin’s third year, described as “the
Queen’s brother” (šeš ereš, BCT 1 126: 4, AS3.3.3.19). His exact function at this
time is difficult to ascertain, but he may have been serving in the military, possibly
even with the rank of captain (nu-banda 3 ) or general (šakkana). One may draw
this conclusion from a passage in a receipt dated AS5.1.23 (  JCS 23 113 23:8–15) in
which he is listed as delivering one lamb in the company of officers of the army, Nir-
idagal, Išar-ramaš, Murhigaba, Ur-Eana, Hubaʾa, and Ur-mes, as well as the governor
of Urusarig. Just four months later, he appears, once again delivering a single lamb,
together with two other captains (PDT 1 25:2 [AS5.5.19]). From a text dated five
months later, one can conclude with little doubt that Babati had achieved the status
of general, because he is listed in a long text that registers deliveries of one lamb each
from most, if not all, of the generals of the state (TCL 2 5504: ii 18 [AS5.10.9]).
When his nephew, Šu-Sin, officially took over the throne of Ur, Babati, as expected,
continued his career among the elite and eventually rose in prominence, but first
he had to officiate, together with his two sisters, Queen Abi-simti and Bizuʾa, at the
funerary rites of his brother Iddin-Dagan. 57
By the end of Šu-Sin’s second year, Babati had acquired a new role: he is now
described as pisa-dub-ba, “high commissioner,” which was to be his main title for
the remainder of his career (Rochester 217:5–6 [ŠS2.10.-]). Amazingly, this is his title
in two spurious letters, UdŠ1 (11:12) and ŠIš1 (15:8); at some point, therefore, the
author or redactor of this composition relied on material that went back to Ur III
times. It was to be the first of many titles on his seal, discussed in full below, and
when his son Girini-isa joined the bureaucracy, it was the word he used to describe
his father’s official role, as already noted by A. Goetze (1963: 23). 58
As is often the case with terms for titles and professions, it is difficult to define
the exact meaning of the word pisa-dub-ba (Akk. šandabakkum). The word is
commonly rendered “archivist,” but as W. F. Leemans (1989: 231) observes, this does
not properly describe the activities of persons who held the title; I follow Leemans in
using the translation “commissioner.” 59 Persons who bore it functioned in both royal
and temple contexts. As used by Babati, the title is much more prestigious. There
is an interesting later analogy to this: Anam, who was to rule Uruk following the
57. TLB 3 24 (ŠS1.12.-); for a full discussion, see Michalowski 2005a.
58. Seal on AOS 32 P4 = Frayne 1997: 357. The tablet is dated to the year ŠS9, with no
month or day, but it must come from the very end of the year, because the seal inscription already
extols Ibbi-Sin: di-bí-den.zu, lugal kala-ga, lugal uri5ki-ma, lugal an ub-da limmu2-ba,
ìri-ni-ì-sa6, dub-sar, dumu ba-ba-ti, pisa-dub-ba, [árad-zu], “O Ibbi-Sin, mighty king,
king of the four corners of the universe, Girini-isa, “scribe,” son of Babati, the high commissioner,
[is your servant!]. The tablet belongs to the Guzana archive, discussed by Steinkeller 1982b: 640–
42. For the Diyala area origin of this group of tablets, see p. 151 below.
59. On the function of this high official at Mari, see Maul 1997.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 149

death of Sin-gamil, held this title before he assumed power, and his position was high
enough that he left behind two monumental texts from the time when he was still a
šandabakkum (Frayne 1990: 467–68). During the Kassite period, this title designated
the governors of the city of Nippur (Sollberger 1968: 191–92). 60
Sometime around the third year of Šu-Sin, the Ur III bureaucracy was trans-
formed in a number of ways, and Babati, together with the grand vizier, Arad-Nanna,
was granted many new powers; indeed, these two members of the extended royal
family now seem to share military and diplomatic ranks second only to the king.
After six or so years of glory, Babati disappears from the scene at about the same time
as the rest of the family. The king and queen both die in the last months of ŠS9 and
Babati is last attested in the previous year (PDT 1 483 [ŠS8.8.29]). 61
This brief survey of the lives of the three protagonists of the Šu-Sin letters situ-
ates this epistolary exchange within the realia of Ur III times. This does not in any
way prove that the letters are genuine copies of actual records, because even if they
do go back in some form to the time of the Third Dynasty, they would have been
heavily redacted and rewritten by one or more generations of scribes. It is also pos-
sible that they are later fabrications based on some documentary material that had
survived the fall of Ur. Nevertheless, there is clearly some historical material in these
compositions, even if it has been altered in a manner that is impossible to recover;
indeed, no other texts of CKU, with the possible exception of PuIb1 (21), can be
matched so closely with the archival record. At the same time, one must recall that
the Šu-Sin correspondence is not part of the core of CKU and is unattested in Nip-
pur, but it may have been part of such a collection at some earlier time. This is sug-
gested by the contaminatio in PuŠ1 (13), where Lu-Nanna of Zimudar was inserted
anachronistically, undoubtedly on the basis of ŠaŠu1 (19) or a similar letter, and also
by the very existence of the Lu-Nanna/Šarrum-bani Letter (ŠuLuŠa1 [20]) at Nippur,
which would otherwise seem completely out of context.
These text-historical and redactional problems must be kept in mind when using
the evidence of the Šu-Sin letters for reconstructing events surrounding the building
of Muriq-Tidnim. We must, no doubt, proceed with caution, but it would be folly
to reject this material out of hand, given the close prosopographic fit between the
letters and people who not only lived in the times described therein but also partici-
pated in some of the events that are narrated in the epistles.

60. See now CAD Š/1 373.

61. See Michalowski 2005b: 70. In this article, I state that “the position of pisag-dub-ba
that had been his, was taken over by one Lugal-azida (JCS 19 28 3 seal, IS 1).” This argument
may have to be set aside; first, Babati is never actually described as pisa-dub-ba lugal, but only
as pisa-dub-ba; and second, it is possible that there was more than one pisa-dub-ba lugal
in this period, as documented by the career of Nani, who worked at Girsu. He appears as pisa-
dub-ba in sixteen texts, from AS7.8.11.- (TCTI 2 3764:2) to IS2.-.- (TCTI 2 3846:7), but in
one of them, from ŠŠ4.-.- (ZA 53 [1959] 89 25:11) he may be pisa-dub-ba lugal, overlapping
with both Babati and Lugal-azida. The final sign in the line is not well preserved and requires
collation.
150 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 2

The Construction of the Fortifications

The major topic of this part of CKU is the building of Muriq-Tidnim, finished
in the third year of Šu-Sin’s reign. As described earlier in this chapter, the only
contemporary information on this construction comes from a year-name and from
an uninformative dedicatory inscription, and there is not a single direct reference
to it in the archival material of the time. This does not mean, however, that such
documentation cannot be used, if only obliquely, to assist us in an analysis of the
complex events surrounding the construction of Muriq-Tidnim. The lack of concrete
information has forced scholars to speculate and then to take speculation as fact.
Some have taken it for granted that the Šu-Sin work was an extension of Šulgi’s Bad
Mada/Igihursaa (e.g., Wilcke 1969: 1; Gasche et al. 2002: 542; Sallaberger 2007:
445). Edzard (1957: 44), in his pioneering study of the Early Old Babylonian period,
frankly admitted that we simply did not know its location. It was usually thought
of as starting near Fallujah or Umm Raʾūs (Wilcke 1969: 9) or, simply, somewhat
north of Baghdad (Whiting 1995: 1233); more recently Cole and Gasche (1998: 29)
and Gasche et al. (2002: 542–43) have placed it farther south, running west of the
Euphrates toward Zimudar, but there is no good reason to argue that either locale is
correct. I will suggest that, if we take information relayed in the CKU and combine it
with hitherto untapped data from Ur III sources, we will be able to reconstruct some
of the geographical and ideological factors surrounding the matter of Muriq-Tidnim.
The epistolary exchange between Šarrum-bani and the king of Ur provides
certain important concrete pieces of information: that the fortifications began at
the Abgal watercourse; that they had reached the territory of Zimudar, spanning 26
dana, or approximately 269 kilometers; and that Šu-Sin replaced Šarrum-bani with
his uncle Babati. While no Ur III document refers directly to any of these matters,
there is one text that may provide indirect support for the presence of Šarrum-bani
in the Diyala Plain in a military capacity at exactly the time specified by the Šu-Sin
correspondence (MVN 3 257, ŠS3.4.-, collated):
1. 1(géš) 2(u) 7(aš) 3(barig) 2(bán) še gur
2. érin ugnimki-ma 62
3. ì-í l-la-ne/dè
4. šu ba-ab-ti
5. šà kišib3/dub šar-ru-um-ba-ni
6. lú-dutu-ra ba-an-na-zi
7. kišib3 šakkanana-bi tùmu-da-bi
8. kišib3 lú-diir-ra dumu
9. lú-dutu-ka zi-re-dam
9–10. date
   seal:
   lú-diir-ra
   dub-[sar]
   dumu lú-dutu
62. Written KI.SU.LU.KI.GAR-ma.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 151

87.3.2 kor of barley were taken by the conscripted troops in the military encamp-
ment from the account of Šarrum-bani, consigned to Lu-Utu. When the sealed
receipt from the general is brought over, the document sealed by Lu-diira, son of
Lu-Utu will be destroyed. Date.
Seal inscription: Lu-diira, scribe, son of Lu-Utu.

This text is from the unprovenienced Guzana archive, reconstructed by Piotr Stein-
keller (1982b: 641). There can be little doubt that this is the general Šarrum-bani
who had been working on Muriq-Tidnim; indeed, Steinkeller (1982b: 642) already
suggested that two texts in the archive that mention soldiers stationed “next to the
wall” (da bàd-da) might in fact refer to these fortifications, but he could not se-
curely place its origin, because none of the geographical names mentioned in these
texts is known from any other Ur III document. There is one clue, however, that may
help us locate Guzana’s depot somewhere in the lower Diyala region. A transaction
from this archive (MVN 3 278: 5, ŠS7) is said to have taken place in Dur-Šarrum
(bàd-šar-ru-umki), which may be identified with the Middle Babylonian a.šà bàd.
lugal gú íd ṭa-ba-an, “the field of the city of Dur-Šarri on the bank of the Ṭaban;” 63
the Ṭaban watercourse was located in the Diyala Plain, and this makes a good case
for locating Guzana’s establishment somewhere in the same vicinity.
Thus, we have been able to locate Šarrum-bani in the Diyala at the time specified
by CKU. As we have seen, this man’s destiny was, in the epistolary literature at least,
linked to that of Babati. It may be pure chance, but there is one moment in Babati’s
biography that may provide a direct point of contact with the royal correspondence;
indeed, it may be the only other such convergence between the Old Babylonian
literary letters and archival data from Ur III times. A document excavated in the
Diyala city of Ešnunna, dated ŠS3.10.- (Whiting 1976: 173–74) records an allotment
of flour to (king) Tiš-atal of Nineveh, on behalf of the governor of Ešnunna, but the
whole affair is certified by Babati, whose inscribed seal was rolled over the tablet.
Apparently, Tiš-atal was on his way to Sumer to swear allegiance to the king of Ur, 64
but this does not concern us, for it is probably only tangentially associated with the
fortifications we are chasing. However, the very fact that Babati can be located in the
Diyala region exactly at the time that he is said to be there according to ŠaŠu1 (19)
can hardly be brushed off as coincidence. This is the earliest example of the use of
Babati’s cylinder seal, which is now known from different sealings on tablets dated as
late as ŠS8. 65 The inscription is the longest of its kind from the period, and its size,
38 mm high and 28 mm in diameter, makes it “very possibly the largest seal known
from impressions of the Ur III period (when the average seal was little over 20 mm
in height)” (Mayr and Owen: 2004: 153)
Equally unique is an unprovenienced Old Babylonian version of a similar Ur
III text, published more than a quarter of a century ago by Christopher Walker
(1983) from the holdings of the British Museum. Unlike the seal inscription, which
was dedicated to Šu-Sin by Babati, the copy had been made from an item that was

63. MDP 2 87 33, see Nashef 1982a: 99. On the Ṭaban, see Nashef 1982b.
64. Zettler 2006, with clarifications by Steinkeller 2007c.
65. For references, see Mayr and Owen 2004: 153.
152 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 2

given by the king to his uncle, ending with the formula in-na-ba, “bestowed upon
him.” This formula has hitherto only been known from cylinder seal inscriptions,
and therefore Walker understandably assumed that the text had been copied from a
somewhat different seal of Babati that had survived to Old Babylonian times, but this
now appears unlikely. A copper bowl from Tell Suleima, discussed below, provides
proof that prestige objects other than seals with inscriptions utilizing the “in-na-ba”
formula already existed in Ur III times, or at least in the reign of Šu-Sin, and it is
likely that just such a royal gift had survived into later times.
The two inscriptions read as follows; the Ur III seal inscription is on the left, and
the Old Babylonian copy of a dedication text is on the right.

1. d
šu-den.zu 1. d
šu-den.zu ki-áa den-líl-le
2. nita kala-ga 2. lugal den-líl-le
3. lugal uri5ki-ma 3. ki-ága šà-ga-ni ì-pàd
4. lugal an ub-da limmu2-ba-ke4 4. lugal uri5ki-ma
5. ba-ba-ti 5. lugal ki-en-gi ki-urike
6. pisa-dub-ba 6. lugal an ub-da limmu2-ba-ke4
7. šà-tam lugal 7. ⸢ba4⸣-ba4-ti dub-⸢sar⸣ šà-⸢tam⸣
8. šakkana 8. ⸢pisa⸣-dub-ba iškim z[i?] 66
9. maš-gán-šar-ru-umki-ma 9. ⸢énsi⸣ a-wa-⸢al⸣[ki]
10. énsi 10. ù a-pí-ak⸢ki⸣
11. a-wa-alki 11. kù-gál ma-da a du10-ga
12. ù a-pí-akki 12. šabra ereš min-a-bi
13. kù-gal 13. saa dbe-la-NIR-ba-an
14. ma-da a du10-ga 14. ù dbe-la-at-šuk-nir
15. saa 15. šeš a-bí-si-im-ti
16. d
be-la-at-šuh-nir 16. ereš!(dam) ki-á-á-ni
17. ù dbe-la-at-te-ra-ba-an 17. árad-zu
18. šeš a-bí-si-im-ti
19. ama ki-á-á-na
20. árad-da-ni-ir
21. in-na-ba
Šu-Sin, mighty man, king of Ur, king Šu-Sin, mighty man, king of Ur,
of the four corners of the universe, beloved by Enlil, king, beloved of Enlil
gave (this) to Babati, high commis- who called him (to kingship already)
sioner, royal accountant, commander in the womb, king of Ur, king of
of Maškan-šarrum, governor of Abal Sumer and Akkad, Babati, the scribe,
and Apiak, canal inspector of the sweet accountant, trustworthy high commis-
water territory, temple administrator sioner, royal steward, governor of Abal
of Belat-suhnir and Belat-terraban, and of Apiak, canal inspector of the

66. Walker (1983: 91) reads agrig l[ugal?], which is also possible.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 153

brother of Abi-simti, his beloved sweet water territory, officer in waiting

mother, his servant. to both queens, temple administrator
of Belat-suhnir and Belat-terraban,
brother of Abi-simti, his beloved
queen, is your servant.

The last part of the inscription refers to Babati’s status within the House of Ur: he
is the high priest of the goddesses Belat-šuhnir and Belat-terraban, divine patrons
of the royal family (about whom there will be more to say in a moment), brother
of the Dowager Queen, and—in the later copy only—officer-in-waiting to the “two
queens,” whom I take to be Abi-simti and Kubatum, that is, the Dowager Queen and
the Royal Consort. 67 More perplexing are his new administrative and military duties
that encompass three cities and their territories: Maškan-šarrum, Abal, and Apiak.

The Areas under the Control of Babati and

the Run of Muriq-Tidnim
In order to unravel the symbolism of Babati’s newly acquired domains, we must
go back to the beginnings of the dynasty as documented in the claims preserved in
the inscriptions of its founder Ur-Namma. The new king had to wrestle control of
various strategic territories from Puzur/Kutik-Inšušinak, the king of the highland
kingdom of Awan (André and Salvini 1989; Potts 2008). In a broken passage, he lists
these lands in the following manner (Wilcke 1987: 109–11; Frayne 1997: 65 col. v′):
16′. a-wa-alki
17′. ki-is-ma-arki
18′. maš-kán-LUGALki
19′. [m]a-da éš-nun-naki
20′. [m]a-da tu-tu-úbki
21′. [ma-d]a zi-mu-darki
22′. [ma-d]a a-ga-dèki
This inscription maps out the route of Puzur-Inšušinak’s assault on Mesopotamia.
The result of this invasion was described in the prologue to the Code of Ur-Namma,
cited above on p. 130, wherein the new king of Ur stated that he had liberated
“Akšak, Marad, Girkal, Kazallu, their (surrounding) settlements and Uṣarum, which
had (all) been taken in servitude by Anšan.”
It is clear that the highlanders had attacked Mesopotamia at some time after
the dissolution of the Akkad state, coming through the break in the Jebel Hamrin
and down the Diyala, and had established themselves in the area around Marad and
Kazallu—that is, the later defensive zone described earlier in this chapter. Ešnunna

67. Others interpret this to refer to the two deities mentioned above, which I find difficult
to believe (e.g., Frayne 1997: 341).
154 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 2

(Tell Asmar) and Tutub (Khafajah) are the only cities in this list that have been
securely located, and then follow Zimudar and Agade, undoubtedly on the Tigris not
far from Sippar (Wall-Romana 1990).
The location of Abal/Awal, which was governed by Babati and heads the Ur-
Namma list, is of obvious importance for our investigations. The place is attested
in a variety of sources, beginning with Old Akkadian texts from Susa, Gasur, and
Tell Suleima (Edzard et al. 1977: 20–21; Rashid 1984). 68 A quarter of a century ago,
F. Rasheed (1981: 55) proposed that it was Tell Suleimeh in the Hamrin Basin, but
subsequently D. Frayne (1992: 67) and Y. Wu (1998a: 578; 1998b: 579) rejected this
claim, suggesting instead that Tell Suleimah was the site of Batir. The main reason
for this identification is the cult of a deity named Batiritum, who is documented in
votive and seal inscriptions from the site, and two references to ba-ti-ir ki. Most of
the information comes from Old Babylonian sources from the Hamrin basin. From
Tell Suleimeh itself, we have a seal inscription of a guda priest of Batiritum, a tablet
that mentions an oath by the weapons of the goddesses Šarratum and Batiritum, and
a brick inscription of a petty ruler or sheik (rabiān amurrim?, Seri 2005: 58) of Batir
who built or rebuilt a temple of Batiritum, all cited by Wu. Outside of Tell Suleima,
there is an Old Babylonian extispicy report from the neighboring mound of Tell al-
Seib (al-Rawi 1994: 38–40; Glassner 2005: 277–78) that reads, in part (lines 7–10):
da-du-ša i-na ni-q[í db]a-ti-ri-t[im-ma?]
ù né-pe-eš-tim ši-ru-u[m an?-nu?]-um? [. . .]
iti da-du-ša a-na gu.za é [a-bi-šu i-ru-bu]
ù ši-mu-ru-um ba-ti-[ir . . .]
Daduša—in the sacrifice to Batiritum and in the oracular consultation, these were
the signs. . . .Month when Daduša ascended the throne of his patrimonial house, and
[. . . .] Simurum and/in Batir. . . .

There are Old Akkadian references to Batir in texts from Tell Suleimeh, but the geo-
graphical name is absent from Ur III administrative sources, which reveal only one
mention of the goddess: a Drehem document records items that are the property of a
certain Arzanu, the temple administrator of Batiritum, who came from Zimudar, and
the transaction was officiated by a guard of the “man” of that city. 69 This may mean
that the goddess was worshipped in Zimudar, but it is more likely that Arzanu only
came through there on his way to Sumer. One other Ur III text from Tell Suleimeh
still awaits full publication: a bronze bowl with a dedicatory inscription of Šu-Sin
found in an elite grave rich in prestige items (Müller-Karpe 2002, 2003). The text
68. The toponym is written a-ba-al in Ur III sources, but a-wa-al in OAkk and OB texts;
see Whiting 1976: 179–81 and Owen 1981: 247. The city of e-ba-al, which may have been in
the same region, must be kept distinct from Abal for the time being.
69. Ontario 1 25:3–6 (Š47.7.13) n í  - g u r 1 1 a r- z a - n u s a  a d b a - t i - r i - t u m - m a , z i ‑ m u -
- d a r k i - t a ,  ì r b í - l a - b i à g a - ú s l ú z i - m u - d a r k i - k a , “(confiscated?) property of Arzanu,
temple administrator of Batiritum, from Zimudar. Conveyor: Bilabi, bodyguard of the ‘man’ of
Zimudar.”
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 155

is incomplete, but it appears to document a gift (in-na-ba) from King Šu-Sin to a

man whose name is broken off but who was a temple administrator (saa) of a de-
ity whose name is likewise incomplete. It would hardly be surprising if it were none
other than Batiritum. Of course, it is impossible to say if this was the grave of the
temple officer or if someone else had been buried with an heirloom or booty, but it
does provide some indication of Ur III presence in the area. Equally important, the
inscription demonstrates that dedications with the in-na-ba formula, until now
known only from cylinder seals, were used on other luxury objects as well in Ur III
times; thus, the Old Babylonian copy of the Babati text need not have been taken
from a seal but was more likely found on a larger votive object, as already observed
above.
But the most important references to Batir are found in the rock inscriptions
of Annubanini of Lullubi and Iddin-Sin of Simurum, both of which were carved
ina šadūʾim batir, that is “in the mountain(s) of Batir” (Al-Rawi 1994: 39). As J. de
Morgan and V. Scheil (1893: 104) already observed more than a century ago, Batir is
obviously first and foremost the name of a mountain and not of a city, and Batiritum,
together with Šarratum, was probably worshiped in more than one place, but noth-
ing would prevent her from being the patron deity of Abal. Both were probably local
manifestations of Ištar. There may have been a village at the foot of the mountains
that bore the same name, but it is unlikely that this would have been Tell Suleima.
Therefore, echoing the same caution that Piotr Steinkeller (1981: 164) expressed
some years ago, I would still insist that Awal/Abal was indeed the ancient name of
this mound, and if not, it lay very close to it.
Both R. Whiting (1976) and P. Steinkeller (1981) have collected information
on Hamrin and Diyala Plain place-names, but neither utilized the Ur-Namma list-
ing. As P. Steinkeller observed, Abal is associated with Tašil, since the official Išar-
ramaš seems to have been in charge of both cities. He is also associated with the
town of Kismar (MVN 13, 868, Š.47.7.17), which was listed together with Awal in
the Ur-Namma text and in an inscription of Ilušuma of Aššur. Tašil, in turn, is listed
together with Maškan-šarrum, the other city governed by Babati, in an undated Dre-
hem text (Owen 1997: 371). Maškan-šarrum has also been located in the same area,
so it would appear that prior to the time when Babati took over these functions, the
military rule of Abal, Tašil, and Kismar was in the hands of Išar-ramaš. A close look
at his command reveals that he was in charge of this area from at least Š46 to AS5
or possibly even up to AS7. 70
The copy of the Ur-Namma inscription provides the only solid information on
the location of Zimudar. It is generally agreed that it was located in the Diyala re-
gion, but there has been little evidence for a more precise identification (Micha-
lowski 1978a). In one Ur III text that mentions Lu-Nanna, who, as we have already

70. JCS 52 (2000) 52 7 6:1–3 (Abal, Š46.9.11) to MVN 15 350:4 (AS5.9.24). See already
Goetze 1963: 18 (the text he publishes probably dates to AS7). Later occurrences of the same
name may refer to someone else.
156 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 2

demonstrated, was the officer in charge of the city and region during the reign of
Šu-Sin, the transaction takes place in Šulgi-Nanna, “on the bank of the Diyala.” 71
A somewhat later document from Nippur records a loan of grain that was borrowed
by Ennam-Šulgi, Lu-Nanna’s son; he promises to return the capital in the city of
Ešnunna after the harvest. 72 The logical geographical progression of the listing in
the Ur-Namma inscription leads to the unavoidable conclusion that this city and its
territory lay between Tutub, which is modern Khafajah, and the Tigris.
A number of other cities lay on this route from the Hamrin basin down the Di-
yala, including Maškan-abi. There were close administrative links between the vari-
ous administrative centers along these lines, with Ešnunna most likely the dominant
one, as far as Ur was concerned. The area also seems to have been religiously unified,
because most of the major deities of the towns are connected with the underworld.
Ešnunna had Tišpak, but it was also the place that housed a major temple of Belat-
šuhnir and Belat-terraban, who often occur in religious ceremonies in Ur in tandem
with Annunitum of Agade and with two underworld deities, Allatum, the goddess
of Zimudar, as well as Meslamtaea, who was the patron deity of Kismar. In addition,
Maškan-šarrum was sacred to Kaka, another minor netherworld god (Steinkeller
1982a). Over the years, many have tried to interpret the significance of the Ur III
cult of Belat-šuhnir and Belat-terraban; most recently, Sallaberger (1993: 19) sug-
gested that Šulgi’s spouse, Šulgi-simti, who seems closely associated with the cult of
these goddesses, might have come from Ešnunna. 73 It is clear that the joint cult of
this pair in Ur together with deities from the whole Diyala region must have some
important significance. Perhaps it is not Ešnunna that is key here, but Agade, and it
is more likely that Šulgi-simti came from the old imperial city. But the fact that the
kings of Agade are only rarely mentioned in Ur III texts suggests that if a line of the
House of Ur actually derived from Old Akkadian elites, it was probably not from the
main branch of the descendants of Sargon but from those who had come to power
in the city when that dynasty collapsed. This explains the somewhat reticent cult of
Sargon and Naram-Sin in Ur III times. 74 Nevertheless, Babati’s title, which links him
with the two goddesses, most probably signals his control over the city of Ešnunna.
Babati’s governance of Abal and Maškan-šarrum would put him in charge of the
areas immediately bordering on the Hamrin pass, perhaps on both sides of the open-
ing. But Apiak is nowhere near that area; in fact, it lay on the Abgal watercourse,
more than 200 kilometers from his other domains.
The Abgal, as we now know from the work of Gasche and Cole (1998: 27–29)
and Gasche, Tanret, Cole, and Verhoeven (2002: 542) discussed above, was the
branch of the Euphrates that split off at Kish, or just below it, and moved south

71. UET 3 75:6–7 (Š1.1.-): š à d š u l - g i - d n a n n a k i , g ú í d d u r- ù l .

72. NRVN 1 176:6–8 (IS2.-.-): e  i r b u r u 1 4 - š è , ⸢ š à ⸣ á š - n u n - n a k i - k a , á  - e - d a m , “to
be measured out after the harvest in Ešnunna.” The seal inscription explains that Ennam-Šulgi
was the son of the general Lu-Nanna.
73. See the discussion in Sharlach 2002, with previous literature.
74. For all the Ur III references to the Sargonic kings, see now J. Westenholz 2008.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 157

through Apiak to Marad and, presumably, further south. Among the towns associ-
ated with the defensive zone described above one stands out—often in tandem with
Kazallu—namely the city of Apiak. As we have already established, the governor of
that city prior to Babati was none other than Šarrum-bani, who, according to the
CKU letters 18 and 19 was in charge of building Muriq-Tidnim until Šu-Sin replaced
him with Babati. As already mentioned earlier, it may be pure coincidence, but the
fact that the tablet that bears the earliest example of Babati’s seal places him in the
Diyala region in Šu-Sin’s third regnal year, that is exactly at the time when the for-
tifications were being built, provides the one point of real contact, prosopography
aside, between events that actually took place in Ur III times and those described
in a CKU letter. The Šarrum-bani letter describes precisely the state of the work at
the moment when he is writing, just before being relieved of his duties, and even if
the precise interpretation of parts of this passage are open to discussion, the general
tenor is clear (ŠaŠu1 [18] 8–13):
8
As I was leaving (for the assignment), 9 from the banks of the Abgal canal up to the
territory of Zimudar, 10I levied workers there.
When I had been working on the fortifications that then measured 26 dana (269
11

km.), 12 after having reached (the area) between the two mountain ranges, 13 the
Amorite camped in the mountains turned his attention to my building activities.

Šarrum-bani had mustered workers from the banks of the Abgal, possibly from his
own domains at Apiak, up to Zimudar, which clearly bordered Ešnunna. This does
not specifically state that Muriq-Tidnim began at Apiak, but in light of the Babati
seal inscriptions it appears more than probable. If we take the admittedly risky step of
combining Ur III information with the testimony of the CKU, then it would follow
that when Šarrum-bani was relieved of the task of overseeing the building of Muriq-
Tidnim he also lost his job as governor of Apiak, and the man who replaced him
took over both responsibilities. Seen in this light, the geographical scope of Babati’s
new position as defined in his inscriptions makes sense: the combined governor-
ships of Apiak and Abal define the run of Muriq-Tidnim. It was apparently designed
to stretch from the defensive region on the Abgal canal to the area between the
Hamrin gates and beyond, although it is impossible to know if these ambitious plans
were ever actually completed. In short, Babati’s inscriptions from the time of Šu-Sin
define his new responsibilities when he was appointed to finish Muriq-Tidnim and
the areas that were put in his charge by the king define the planned end points of
the fortifications.
The facts and analysis presented above, while obviously speculative, provide
some evidence for the run of Muriq-Tidnim from Apiak into the Diyala region, per-
haps as far as Awal, beyond the break in the Hamrin. Beginning at Apiak, these
fortifications did not bifurcate the state into two; they only spanned part of the width
of its territory. This differs with all existing reconstructions of its location. 75

75. The one person who anticipated these conclusions, most presciently, was Michael Row-
ton (1982: 322).
158 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 2

Fig. 3. The Ur III state in the time of Šu-Sin: the hypothetical run of the Muriq-Tidnim.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 159

The Historical Setting of the Construction of Muriq Tidnim

Military Policies in the Time of Šu-Sin

We cannot view the construction of these fortifications, as announced in Šu-
Sin’s fourth date formula, in isolation from the major events of the surrounding years,
because it is only part of a complex, shifting military policy that consumed much of
the government’s energies during his reign.
The reign of Šu-Sin marks a turning point in Ur III military strategy, and one
must wonder what outside forces or transformations of political configurations out-
side of the realm brought about these changes. At the outset of his reign the new
king was faced with a crisis in the far northeast and soon sent the forces of Ur north
for the first time, attacking Simanum, Habura, Mardaman, and other areas on the
Tigris north of the confluence with the Upper Zab (Sallaberger 2007: 442–44). This
region had never been under direct Ur III control, but the state had influence there
by means of allied, client, or even vassal states such as Assur and Simanum. In his
inscriptions, Šu-Sin claims that he was forced to act when a local revolt ousted the
ruling family of Simanum, which had been allied by marriage to the house of Ur
when the princess Kunši-matum was betrothed to one of the sons of Pušam, ruler
of the highland country (Michalowski 1975). Although the kings of Ur engaged
in many such diplomatic marriage alliances, this is the only known instance when
they intervened militarily to protect an allied ruling family, and one must suspect
that there was more to this affair than just a palace coup. This was the only military
campaign in the north; as far as we know, no Ur III army had ever moved into this
region, and this clearly marks a new dynamic in state strategy. It is during this cam-
paign that the Amorite polity of Tidnum is encountered—or at least mentioned in
the surviving documentation—for the first time. The events of the second year were
followed by the work on Muriq-Tidnim, which gave its name to two consecutive
years, namely, years four and five.
The evidence is murky at best, but there are indications that there were many
changes in strategy as well as organizational structure that took place in the second
and third years of Šu-Sin’s reign (Sallaberger 1999: 170). This was the time when
Muriq-Tidnim was nearing completion, and it was a time when the official state
calendar was reformed. As we have already observed, this is when Babati was given
expansive new responsibilities, as recorded in his seal inscription. There is another
interesting phenomenon that can be observed in this year that may be linked to the
same cluster of events.
In his seminal work on the taxes contributed by military personnel from the
border regions of the Ur III state, P. Steinkeller (1987) was able to describe in pre-
cise terms the obligations of various ranks of soldiers and officers that were due to
the crown, and he described them all as gun mada (gun ma-da), “frontier taxes.”
The taxation does indeed seem uniform from Šulgi to the early years of Ibbi-Sin, but
the actual term gun mada occurs only from the third year of Šu-Sin on; until then,
160 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 2

the actual name of the tax is never specified. It is always possible that this term was
used to label these taxes earlier; after all, the word appears in ŠAr1 (1), where it may
be anachronistic, as already noted by P. Attinger (apud Huber 2001: 204 n. 153),
but the fact remains that, in the Drehem administrative language, the term does
not appear before ŠS3. Maeda (1992) saw in this a new form of taxation, but this is
unlikely (Sallaberger 1999: 197). Earlier taxes—or perhaps, better, tribute—of this
kind from the border and frontier lands encompassed a whole range of places, from
occupied Susa and deeper into southwestern Iran, to allies or clients such as Nineveh
and Simanum in the north, as well as various areas beyond the Hamrin. But the taxes
from the time of Šu-Sin cover a much more limited territory; this may be a result of
political and military problems that beset the Ur III kingdom at the time, as Stein-
keller (1987) suggests, but it may also be a reflection of strategic readjustment and of
concomitant administrative restructuring.
The list of places that supply gun mada is not easy to analyze, because many of
them are unique or cannot be located at present. 76 The tablet that documents such
taxes from the first two years of Ibbi-Sin’s reign covers localities in the Diyala; with
the exception of Zimudar and Išim-Šulgi, they are all relatively small army posts (CT
32 19). Notably, many of them seem to be located in the lower Diyala Plain, and
places further north such as Maškan-šarrum, Kismar, or Abal are not included. Such
taxes during the reign of Šu-Sin were sent from other places, including Azaman, Dal-
tum, Išum, and Šu-Sin-idu, which are otherwise unknown, as well as Der, Urbilum,
Šetirša, and possibly Simurum, which lie outside of the plain in the highlands. It is
difficult to see any pattern here, but it may lead to the conclusion that while out­
lying posts were still holding on, settlements on both sides of the pass were no longer
under the control of Ur and that processes that would lead to the loss of Ešnunna
and other closer cities were already at work in the first two years of Ibbi-Sin’s reign
and perhaps even earlier.
To put this in a larger perspective, we must go back earlier and review some of
the military events of previous years. The intensive, seemingly uninterrupted warfare
of the last part of Šulgi’s reign seems to have continued into the reign of his successor,
Amar-Sin, when war with Urbilum resurfaced once again. After this, the new ruler
appears to have concentrated his military activity in the nearby Lower Zab region,
mounting campaigns against Šašrum and Šuruthum that are attested in documenta-
tion from his third and fifth year, and then against Huhnuri, far to the southeast of
the area attacked by his previous expeditions (Nasrabadi 2005). This was hardly a
time of peace, but it appears that many of the regions pacified or subjugated by his
predecessor remained calm. This is also the time of a remarkable increase in diplo-
macy, as evidenced by the presence in Sumer of ambassadors and envoys from vari-
ous principalities in Syria and Iran (Owen 1992; Sharlach 2005; Sallaberger 2007:
441). Many of them are undoubtedly independent of Ur, some bound by family ties
to the successors of Ur-Namma, while others owed various levels of allegiance and

76. For a chart of the texts and list of places, see Maeda 1992: 163.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 161

subservience. It is difficult to discern if all of these foreigners had traveled willingly,

and it is possible that some of them were actually hostages who had been sent to
Sumer to guarantee political and military arrangements. Some came from far-away
Ebla, Uršu, and Tuttul in Syria, or from Mari on the Euphrates. Others had trav-
eled from Simanum, Urbilum, Simurum, Harši, Šimaški, and Marhaši—that is, from
various parts of northern Mesopotamian and Iran. A glance at the tables in Tonia
Sharlach’s study of Ur III diplomacy (2005) reveals the clustering of these embassies
in the reign of Amar-Sin, although such relationships began much earlier, and would
continue in some fashion after his death. A more thorough investigation of the full
documentation raises more questions than answers, because the patterns that emerge
are difficult to interpret, and some of the clusters of information as well as silences
may be due to the chance nature of archival recovery and are therefore somewhat
illusionary.
While the concentration of information on diplomatic relationships is certainly
more abundant for the reign of Amar-Sin, it does carry over into the first years of the
next king, Šu-Sin. Some of the foreigners remained while others were replaced at
about the time the new king came to the throne, and it is impossible to determine
if there is any correlation between these events. The distinct possibility that Šu-Sin
was already running the state at some point before the death of his predecessor com-
plicates matters further. The case of the envoys of Harši serves as a good example
of the issues involved. In the period under discussion, a certain Marhuni first repre-
sented this polity; he first appears in AS1 77 and remained at his post until the sixth
month of AS8. 78 Three months later, at most, he was replaced by prince Iša-wer, the
son of Adda-gina, the ruler of the country, who may have only come for a short visit,
as we can only document a three-day stay in Sumer. 79 Then, in ŠS1, a new envoy ap-
pears once, and after that we have no record of any such delegation from Harši. We
are, as usual, at the mercy of the preserved fragmentary documentation and therefore
cannot establish if the data reveal something about the flow of events or if all of this
is but a reflex of partial archival recovery.
All of this diplomacy, if this is the correct term, appears to collapse in the sixth
year of Šu-Sin, the year that the Ur III state mounted a massive attack against Zabšali
and more than fifteen cities and territories that were part of the area of Šimaški
(Steinkeller 2007a: 216–17). A unique pair of documents from the time of the Zabšali
campaign records disbursement of flour and other commodities to various foreigners,
including ambassadors and their assistants. 80 The main text (Amorites 22) is dated to
day two of the sixth year of Šu-Sin, without mentioning the month, while the second

77. HUCA 29 (1958) 75 4:8–10 probably records his arrival at court: mu ma-ar-hu-ni, ù
érin mu-da-a-re-e-ša-a-šè, lú ha-ar-šiki-me, “on behalf of Marhuni and the troops that had
travelled with him, people of Harši.”
78. BIN 3 402:11 (AS8.6.10).
79. From AS8.9.13 (OIP 121 555:6) until AS8.9.16 (BCT 1 83:7–8).
80. I discuss here texts 4–6, which are listed above in the discussion on Iaʾmadium on
p. 114.
162 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 2

text, (  JCS 7 [1953] 106), which duplicates exactly the first two-thirds of the first
one, is undated. The goods are destined for people from Šimaški and Hurti, as well
as imprisoned messengers; from Banana of Marhaši and his translator, to Ari-buduk
(of Šašrum), as well as to others, including Abu-ṭab of Mari, the Eblaites Izin-Dagan
and Kurbilak, an Amurrum named Ipiq-reʾu from Iaʾmadium, as well as men of Aššur
and Urbilum. The very same people from Mari, Ebla, and Iaʾmadium appear in the
record only once again in a receipt dated two months later, to the eighth month of
the very same year, which records the disbursement of provisions that were loaded on
a boat when they returned to their homes (Amorites 21 [ŠS 6.8.14]). Only one other
person from the longer list of foreigners is ever heard from again—namely, Ari-buduk
of Šašrum, who seems to have returned a year later. 81 To put it more strongly, for rea-
sons that are impossible to establish but which must have had something to do with
the war that was being waged in the highlands, these envoys all appear in the record
for the last time, and it may be that most of them, if not all, had left Sumer for good.

The Zabšali Campaign

The seventh regnal year of King Šu-Sin was named
(a) mu dšu-den.zu lugal uri5ki-ma-ke4 ma-da za-ab-ša-liki mu-hul
The year: Šu-Sin, king of Ur, defeated the land of Zabšali.

But what exactly was Zabšali? The royal inscriptions that described these events
read, in part: 82
(b) u4-ba, šimaškiki ma-da ma-da za-ab-ša-liki, zag an-ša-anki-ta, a-ab-ba igi-nim-
ma-šè, buru5-gin7 zi-ga-bi
At that time Šimaški (as well as) the lands of Zabšali, from the borders of Anšan to
the Upper Sea, whose levy is like a flock of birds . . .
(c) u4 ma-da za-⸢ab⸣-ša-liki, ù ma-⸢da ma⸣-da, šimaškiki-ka, mu-hul-a
When he had defeated the land of Zabšali and all the lands of Šimaški . . .
The wording of (b) is somewhat ambiguous; Stolper (1982: 45), Frayne (1997: 303),
Potts (1999: 135), Steinkeller (2007a: 217), and others took this to mean that Zabšali
was part of Šimaški; indeed, they all accepted the translation of the opening words
of the passage, either literally or by implication, as: “at that time Šimaški (which
comprises) the lands of Zabšali. . . .” But it is seems more likely, on the combined
evidence of the year-name, of the last-cited inscription (c), as well as on the basis
of administrative texts that will be dealt with below, that in Ur III nomenclature
Zabšali was perceived as a separate polity that was contiguous with the area generally

81. JCS 57 114 1:2–3 a-⸢ri-du⸣-bu-uk ⸢lú ša⸣-aš-ruki, dub-sa uru-a ku4-ra-ni. He ap-
pears once again two years later, with the identical phrase (CST 455, ŠS9.12.14).
82. (b) Frayne 1997: 303 (E.3/2.1.4.3) lines ii 14–20, (c) Frayne 1997: 313 (E.3/2.1.4.6)
lines 5′–8′.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 163

designated as Šimaški by the scribes of Sumer. Indeed, throughout the descriptions

of Šu-Sin’s campaign, the territories of Šimaški and Zabšali appear as distinct geo-
political areas, not as synonyms.
The general location of the Zabšali lands, as perceived from Mesopotamia, is dif-
ficult to determine. Stolper (1982: 46), using the information embedded in Išbi-Erra
Hymn B, concluded that it “locates one of the Šimaškian lands, Zabšali, immediately
north of ‘Elam’.” I would read the passage in question as (Išbi-Erra Hymn B, Segment
C: 4–5, collated):
ba-ši-miki gaba a-ab-⸢ba⸣-[ta] zag za-ab-ša-[liki-šè]
a-ra-waki sa-kul elam[kima-ta] zag mar-ha-[šiki-šè]
From Bašime, on the edge of the sea, to the borders of Zabšali,
From Arawa, the lock-bolt of Elam, to the borders of Marhaši . . .

The interpretation of these lines as depicting, in rough terms, a south-to-north and

a west-to-east axis is bolstered by recent archival and archaeological work. There is
a good chance that Bašime/Pašime is to be located at or in the general area of Tell
Abu Shija, 66 km north of Amarah in Iraq (Hussein et al. 2010). Marhaši most likely
lay to the east around the Halil-rud alluvium (Steinkeller 2006), and if A-ra-wa,
which is otherwise unattested, is the same place as Urua (URU×A), it may have
to be located in the Deh Luran Plain, either at Tepe Musiyan (Carter and Stolper
1984: 212 n. 275) or more probably at Tepe Farukhabad (Wright and Neely 2009;
Michalowski and Wright 2010).
Recalling that Šu-Sin’s inscription describes his campaign as reaching the Up-
per Sea, it is reasonable to assume in conjunction with the evidence just cited above
that the lands of Zabšali bordered on the “Upper Sea,” which could be the Caspian
Sea or Lake Urmia (T. Potts 1994: 33). No other new evidence on the matter has
come to light in the intervening years, and such a hypothesis stands, to my mind, as
the best we can do at present. The supposed northern location of Zabšali lands, and
by implication of the parts of Šimaški attacked by the armies of Ur, has important
implications for the analysis of the general flow of military and political events dur-
ing the reign of Šu-Sin.
The possible breakup of long-nurtured diplomatic relationships, described ear-
lier, in concert with the drain that the war put on troops and other state resources,
may have had catastrophic long-term consequences for Ur, while Zabšali apparently
recovered and would now play an important role in international events. The in-
scriptions trumpet the great extent of the enemy lands, “from the borders of Anšan
to the Upper Sea,” and the king claims victory over a coalition of more than 13
polities or cities (Steinkeller 2007a). After much maiming and slaughter, the king
claims that he installed prisoners from Mardaman to work in the gold and silver
mines in the highlands and brought the rulers of the conquered territories to Sumer.
The mention of Mardaman prisoners is particularly suggestive, because they had to
have been taken during the raid on Simanum, ostensibly conducted five years earlier.
164 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 2

Here, once again, Simanum and Zabšali are referred to together, as in the documents
cited above, and it makes one wonder about the wars conducted against them, which
we separate into two distinct events on the basis of year-names.
The grand hyperbole of Šu-Sin’s inscriptions is impressive, but only four years
after the great victories that they describe, Zabšalian ambassadors received rations
in Umma on their way to or from Ur, and still another four years later, Ibbi-Sin gave
a daughter in marriage to the ruler of Zabšali (IS YN 5). 83 Whatever punishment
was meted out by Šu-Sin’s armies was not fatal, and the land recovered and thrived,
governed by a new leader loyal to Ur or by a local ruler who was strong enough to
force his enemy into diplomatic alliance.

The Issue of Šimaški

The name of Šu-Sin’s seventh year mentions only the defeat of Zabšali, but
the associated royal inscriptions also describe various principalities, towns, or even
villages as part of the lands of Šimaški, presumably its northern regions, as already
noted above. The geopolitical concept of Šimaški denoted both a geographical area
as well as a number of shifting polities, each led by individuals who were bound by
kinship ties. Many have analyzed the history and location of Šimaški, but all modern
work on the subject begins with Matthew Stolper’s (1982) synthesis, supplemented
by the discoveries and analysis of Timothy Potts (1994: 30–34), Daniel Potts (1999:
130–59, 2009), Katrien de Graef (2005: 113; 2006: 43–55; 2008), and Piotr Stein-
keller (1988, 2007a). An Old Babylonian “king list” from Susa registers the names
of twelve successive rulers of Šimaški, but as Stolper demonstrated, a number of
these rulers can be identified in the Ur III and Early Isin administrative record.
Steinkeller (2007a: 221) has recently collected all the information on this matter
and concluded, “since Ebarat I (Yabrat), Kirname, and Tazitta (Taʾazite) are named
concurrently in Ur III sources, the conclusion is unavoidable that they were con-
temporaries.” Stolper (1982: 48) already noted that two other Šimaškian rulers from
the list, Kindattu and Idaddu, are attested in a text from the time of Išbi-Erra (BIN
9 382). The details of all of this are of little consequence here, except to note, once
again following Steinkeller, that these rulers and the polities under their control do
not seem to have been targeted by Šu-Sin’s armies, which fought only against some
smaller Šimaškian polities that bordered on the lands of Zabšali.
The areas ruled by Ebarat and his kin survived this war without any apparent
damage; indeed, as Steinkeller (2007a: 227) has argued, their lands did not take part
in the war. We have no direct evidence for the immediate consequences of these
events, but only six years later Ebarat’s forces entered Susa and stayed there for at
least two years, if not longer (De Graef 2005: 99). Two decades later, Šimaškian
armies, apparently now led by Kindattu, would defeat Ur and occupy the city for a

83. UTI 5 3472:5–7 (IS1.12.-): lú-kí-gi4-a, an-ša-anki, ù za-ab-ša-⸢li⸣ki-[ke4-ne].

 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 165

decade. Stolper’s compelling analysis of the political situation of the time deserves
to be cited in full (1982: 51):
The war was not an isolated foray, but an escalation; Ur had been campaigning on its
eastern and northeastern marches almost incessantly since late in the reign of Šulgi.
Conflict stiffened local opposition and created communities of interest among Ur’s
adversaries. Loose political affiliations perhaps antedated the campaign. Šu-Sin’s
war stimulated or accelerated political or military liaisons among the several regions.

In the end, Šimaški merged with Anšan, and their combined forces were able to
challenge Ur (Steinkeller 2007a: 224). When this actually took place is impossible
to discern at present. A Mesopotamian document from ŠS8 can be interpreted as
treating Ebarat’s part of Šimaški and Anšan as separate polities (TÉL 46, ŠS8.12.-).
One text from Ur may refer to leather bags for the ruler of Anšan, perhaps meant to
hold previous items to curry favor with the growing power in the southeast. 84
The military and political actions of Šu-Sin’s reign are usually analyzed as dis-
crete unrelated events, but there may be profit in taking a different view, linking
them together into the flow of history. The wars and diplomatic contacts docu-
mented in the fragmentary record do not represent by any means a full portrayal of
what transpired during those years, and therefore any reconstruction of the times
can only be hypothetical, at best. And yet the clues already described above, which
connect the attack on Simanum, the construction of Muriq-Tidnim, and the assault
on Zabšali, suggest that these campaigns were part of some larger scheme, that new
forces were operating in the north and northeast that forced Šu-Sin’s government to
enact defensive measure of a completely novel kind.
At this juncture, it is important to draw attention to one striking fact: while
Šimaškian lands had been mentioned time and again by the scribes of Ur, her latest
enemy, Zabšali, is completely new in cuneiform sources. Like Tidnum, there is no
mention of this polity before the time of Šu-Sin, when it first makes an appearance
in inscriptions and in the name of his seventh year. In other words, there is not
a single text documenting any contact— diplomatic, economic, or military—with
either entity before hostilities began. The only possible exception to this is found
in two laconic and undated ration texts that may come from Umma, but the prove-
nience is uncertain: (a) Santag 6 382 (day 25) and (b) MVN 15 66 85 (day 30). Both
are accounts of beer, and among the recipients are: kaš 4 za-ab-ša-li ki (a: 4, b: 11)
lú za-ab-ša-li ki (a: 5, b: 13) and lú si-ma-núm ki (a: 7). 86 The longer text (b) also
mentions a “man” from Arrapha (6) and Sabum (ii 5). The peculiar spellings used in

84. Large number of animal skins to make kušdu10-gan for the lú an-ša-⸢an⸣[ki-šè], UET 3
1290 (IS15.2.-).
85. Collated (UM 72-25-03).
86. There is also one a-[ba-ar]-du-uk (b: ii 1), who must be the sukkal of the same name
who conveys (ìri) goods in connection with Kunši-matum, the princess married into the royal
house of Simanum in ŠS1.3.9 (MVN 15 216:17), or even a-[ri]-du-uk, an envoy from Šašrum,
who is known from tablets dated to the time of Šu-Sin (see the next paragraph).
166 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 2

these texts and the fact that none of the other individuals who appear in them can be
identified suggest that they come from an otherwise unknown archive, although it is
also possible that this tablet came from Umma but not from any of the major known
archives from the city. The lack of a date formula makes it difficult to draw any firm
historical conclusions from these documents, but the association of Simanum and
Zabšali is perhaps more than pure coincidence.
Prior to the Simanum expedition, Ur III records concerning conflicts with
Amorites mention only the nonspecific kur Amurrum, “Amorite highlands,” dis-
cussed earlier, and the only “Amorite” polity that maintains diplomatic relations of
some kind was Iʾamadium. The appearance on the scene of an additional Amorite
polity, Tidnum, which joins the latter in attacks on Ur’s armies marching toward Si-
manum may signal that the same processes that gave rise to the Zabšali confederation
also had the effect of pressing disparate Amorite tribal or kinship groups into some
larger political entity that, with greater numbers and unified tactical potential, cre-
ated some level of danger for the progress of Mesopotamian forces along the Hamrin.
The novel appearance of both Tidnum and Zabšali in the Ur III record prompted
strong actions on the part of the Mesopotamian kingdom. One can see in all of this
the work of outside forces, as did, for example, Maurice Lambert (1979: 38), who
blamed the crisis of these years on a massive Amorite invasion. Other interpreta-
tions come to mind, however. It is important to call attention to the fact that the
years in which Šu-Sin occupied the throne are characterized by intensive contacts
with the various leaders of Šimaški, in addition to the other events detailed above.
One hypothesis that comes to mind is that the temporary weakening of Ur during
the last few years of Amar-Sin’s reign may have provided an opportunity for the
revival and strengthening of certain Šimaškian polities to a degree that would have
been to difficult to deal with. Even so, more open revolt against the Crown in the
north and northeast, combined with the consolidations of the new powers invested
in the Tidnum tribes or tribal confederation around the Hamrin and in the new pol-
ity of Zabšali could not be allowed to stand and were dealt with accordingly. Other
forces, undetectable in the preserved record, may have been at play, of course, but it
is useless to press the data and speculate further on these matters. It does seem likely,
however, that the planning and construction of Muriq-Tidnim was not an isolated
episode but was connected to events that spread out over the whole reign of Šu-Sin,
although they were part of processes that began later and continued into the time of
his successor.
It is perhaps instructive that the authors of the Šu-Sin inscriptions repeatedly de-
scribed Šimaški, Tidnum, as well as Šimaski not as unified polities under the control
of a single sovereign but as “lands” with many rulers. For example, in one passage, the
prisoners of war are depicted as (Frayne 1997, E3/2.1.4.3 iii 22–29):
en-en bára-bára-bi ša aa mi-ni-in-dab5-dab5 énsi gal-gal ma-da ma-da za-ab-ša-liki ù
énsi-énsi uruki-uruki . . .
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 167

He took all their lords and leaders prisoner. And all the great rulers of all the lands
of Zabšali as well as all the rulers of all of (its) cities . . .

One should be wary of overinterpretation here, keeping in mind Robert Adams’s

strictures concerning the degree of cultural knowledge of the authors of such texts, 87
but on the rhetorical level, at least, it would seem that they wish to create a contrast
between the strictly hierarchical, centralized state of Ur, firmly ruled by a master of
the universe and the fragmented and inferior polities of the highlands. Is it possible
to speculate that this political language sheds light on some of the motivations that
lay behind the organization of the Zabšali invasion, which may have been designed
to interfere with and hinder processes of integration in the highlands, developments
that posed a serious potential threat to the lowland kingdom? If this was indeed the
case, the campaign, whatever its immediate effect may have been, was ultimately a
failure and may have even been counterproductive, hastening rather than impeding
the consolidation of highland polities.

The “Walls” Revisited

Let us now return to the subject of the fortifications built under Šulgi and Šu-
Sin. Although the surviving documentation impels us to think episodically, the
building of relatively important lines of fortifications cannot be reduced to two short
periods of building activity. Conceptually and organizationally, they were separate
undertakings, but from a broader point of view, one must see them as elements of
complex, long-term processes that began some time during the first half of Šulgi’s
reign and continued, off and on, well into the time of Šu-Sin. The idea may go back
to the time of the founder of the dynasty, judging by the focus of the Ur-Namma ca-
dastre text that charters the area protected by the Šulgi fortifications. The reason for
their construction and the consequences of the building activities are more difficult
to determine. On the preceding pages, I offered the hypothesis that the bad mada
of Šulgi’s time was designed to protect military staging areas and provide a central
mobilization point as part of an in-depth strategy that supported the more forward
military defenses on the marches of the state.
The name of Šu-Sin’s fortifications, one royal inscription, as well as the royal let-
ters all point to a more specific central theme: defense against Amorite infiltration.
As noted at the outset of this chapter, the idea of such a defensive line has often
evoked comparisons with the Great Wall of China. The analogy turns out to be
apposite but not for the reasons that usually come to mind, and the historical analo-
gies with border relations of early Far Eastern peoples can be instructive. The myths
about the Great Wall provide much inspiration to the imagination, but the fact is
that it is really a concatenation of various fortifications, not all of them continuous,

87. Adams 1981: 136; see p. 90 above.

168 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 2

built at different times for different purposes, and the wall did not, as is commonly
thought, isolate China from its neighbors. Recall, also, that Lattimore (1940) argued
many years ago that the wall actually served to consolidate hostile state formations
in the borderlands, eventually leading to the downfall of the ruling dynasty of China.
The constant Ur III military activities in the highlands over the course of more
than three decades may have led to similar results and only served to unite frag-
mented polities in the Zagros and different elements of the large polities or confed-
erations of Anšan and Šimaški, and these, in turn, eventually toppled the Mesopo-
tamian state. In the context of this broader historical picture, one may propose that
the true purpose of Muriq-Tidnim was not so much the protection of the homeland
from small Amorite raids but the securing of the agriculturally rich Diyala region
and surrounding parts of the eastern frontier, strengthening defensive as well as of-
fensive capacities against a broad range of highland principalities, and the prepara-
tion, provisioning, and establishing of the infrastructure supporting the attack on
Zabšali and on certain elements of Šimaški, as part of a chain of events that began
with the campaign against Simanum and perhaps even earlier but also as a result of
the encounters with Tidnum during that expedition. The fact that the name of the
fortifications is defensive can be viewed as an obvious tactical propaganda ploy; one
never announces one’s military intentions ahead of time, and military installations
are often described as defensive no matter what their true purpose might be. Frontier
constructions of this kind would have also served to discipline unruly local popula-
tions, to facilitate the exploitation of natural resources and labor sources of the area,
in addition to priming the local economy, thus assuring a more stable platform for
expansion into territories that lay beyond. However, it is a measure of our lack of
concrete information on these matters that one could equally well suspect that the
conflict with Zabšali grew out of a new and sudden danger that required swift action
on the part of Ur.
The broad array of complex diplomatic activities described above precludes any
overt aggressive military construction on the frontier, even if its purpose may have
been quite evident. It is possible that the name was linked to the fact that the build-
ing operations, as well as the resulting military activity, were expected to be harassed
by raiders from Tidnum, but nothing in the surviving documentation justifies a literal
interpretation of the name of the defenses or of the justification for their construc-
tion that is found in the CKU. If my reconstruction is correct, the fortifications
were much too long and the effort that went into them was much too extreme if
their purpose was to ward off such a low-level threat. Therefore, one has to imagine
Muriq-Tidnim not as a great wall but as a series of forts, army posts, and perhaps
even short walls that served as bases for support of the royal army. It was not, by any
means, conceptually an extension of the bad mada, although it might have begun
in the area that the latter shielded; the purposes of the two construction projects
were different, founded as they were in different times and in different political and
military contexts.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 169

According to older reconstructions, the Ur III fortifications not only divided

the state from its enemies but also cut the core of the state into two parts, separating
northern cities such as Sippar and Kish from the center (see, e.g., Gasche et al. 2002:
542–43). Although it has been claimed that these places were of secondary impor-
tance to the Ur III kings, there is little to support this conclusion, since we have
limited information about contemporary life in these parts of Babylonia at the time.
The reconstruction I have offered does not require such assumptions. According to
my hypothesis, the starting point was at Apiak, which lay on the Abgal, which was
not the western branch of the Euphrates system, so the fortifications did not reach
the Arahtum canal to the west, and thus if this reconstruction is correct, would
not have prevented access from Sumer to Dimat-Enlila, Kish, Sippar, Babylon, and
surrounding areas that belonged to the northern part of the core of the Ur III state.
Moreover, if Muriq-Tidnim were only a line of forts and not a continuous wall, then
these cities would have still been easily accessible from the south. The analogy with
the Great Wall, or rather with a certain mental model of the Wall, has made us think
of Muriq-Tidnim as a barrier, but it was undoubtedly more than that.
According to the reconstruction offered here, Šu-Sin’s fortifications were de-
signed, if not actually fully built, all the way up the Diyala/Ṭaban plain past the
Hamrin gates. This region was a true frontier zone, constituting one of the marches
of the Ur III state. Shepherds, herdsmen, tribute bearers, messengers, ambassadors,
traders, as well as native and foreign armies constantly traversed these areas. This
is also where different ethnic groups and different languages intermingled, where
cultural contact worked in all directions, and where settled and pastoralist dwellers
of the mountains and valleys exchanged goods and ideas. The defenses in this region
were built as much for moving armies as for stopping infiltrators. They may have had
defensive purposes, but, more important, they constituted a link to these places, both
as a staging route for the movement of troops but also as a two-way highway of ideas.
At the same time, they were part of a self-defeating military strategy, for the military
campaigns that began there only served to create opposition against Sumer in the
highlands, an opposition that would eventually topple the Ur III state.
J. L. Borges (1964: 3), who understood such matters far better than we do, once
wrote an essay on the Great Wall of China in which he observed that “burning books
and building fortifications is a task common to princes.” It would have pleased him
to know just how well our knowledge of Šulgi’s deeds, which probably included the
discarding most of the Early Dynastic literary tradition in addition to the construc-
tion of a “great wall,” confirms his prescient words.
 Chapter 7

The Royal Letters in

Their Historical Setting 3
Ur, Isin, Kazallu, and the
Final Decades of the Ur III State
(Letters 21–24)

The Ur III Collapse

The fall of Ur is one of the dramatic moments of early Mesopotamian times, if
modern historians are to be believed, but in many ways our received opinions about
the episode are grounded in a vision of history and politics colored by the celebra-
tion of nations, ethnic unity, and centered in the glory of large and powerful states.
We often depict the kingdoms of Akkad and Ur as classical moments of early Near
Eastern history, when in fact they may be better viewed as aberrations in a historical
flow dominated by localism and small political organizations. The picture of the last
decades of Ur is muddled by lack of sufficient documentation; as a result, speculation
and inference give license to the imagination, offering a broad field of play for the
philologist and historian alike.
The classic description of the fall of Ur still belongs to Thorkild Jacobsen (1953),
although he had already summarized his views a decade and a half earlier (Jacobsen
1941: 219–20):
Events around the fall of the Third Dynasty of Ur are gradually becoming clearer.
A rebellion in Babylonia around the tenth year of I(b)bi-Sin reduced that ruler to a
mere petty king who may not have controlled much more than the territory around
Ur itself. The rest of his empire broke up into similar small states; Nippur and north-
ern Babylonia fell to Ishbi-Irra of Isin, henceforth I(b)bi-Sin’s chief rival; the Diyala
region had won independence under Ilushu-ilija, and so forth. Elam, another former
vassal, took advantage of this breakdown in Babylonia. In the twenty-fifth and last
year of I(b)bi-Sin, with its allies and neighbors the Sua people, it launched a dev-

170
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 171

astating attack against both Ur and Isin. While Isin lived to fight another day, Ur
succumbed entirely. I(b)bi-Sin and most of his subjects were carried off captive to
Elam, and Ur itself was looted and destroyed. In the ruins or at a nearby spot part of
the invaders settled.

After more than 60 years, we can flesh out the narrative with new data and with
minor revisions of the chronological framework, but the picture remains jumbled,
fragmented, and there are large patches of empty canvas. 1 These blank spaces have
been filled in with suppositions based on meager evidence and by much speculation,
some of it based on preconceived notions rather than on facts. The standard pre-
sentation of the fall of Ur is that it was a catastrophe and invokes causes such as the
influx of foreign ethnic elements such as the Amorites, environmental determinism
in the form of climatic disasters and crop failures, or the rise of a bloated bureaucracy.
One of the main sources of information for all this is the CKU, in the incomplete
form that it has been previously available, as well as poetic texts such as the Lam-
entation over the Destruction of Sumer and Ur, The Ur Lament, later omens, and the
fragmentary hymns of Išbi-Erra (van Dijk 1978; Sjöberg 1993; Vanstiphout 1989–90;
Michalowski 2005b).
Catastrophic collapse may appeal to the imagination but has little historical
or sociological justification (McAnany and Yoffee 2010: 5–6). The fall of the Ur
III state apparatus was primarily a political and military affair, and the admittedly
meager information currently available does not suggest that it led to a collapse of
global civilization, which, as Marcella Frangipane (2009: 16) observes, is extremely
rare. As she notes,
Very often what is thought of as “collapse” was a merely a change, in other words
a few elements—even important ones—were transformed within the overall sys-
tem that fashioned a civilization, while other elements are simultaneously retained
and adapted to the new conditions representing the continuation of what are often
equally important aspects of traditional relations between the members of a given
society.

Frangipane’s apposite remarks, which echo may of the positions taken by contribu-
tors to Yoffee and Cowgill’s collection of essays on the collapse of states and civiliza-
tions, serve as an introduction to a discussion of events from the fourth millennium
b.c.e., but they serve equally well as a caution to the historian who looks at historical
processes that took place early in the second millennium b.c.e. 2 The consequences of
the fall of the House of Ur are difficult to gauge in any adequate manner because of a
lack of textual information from the period covering the last decades of the kingdom
and years subsequent to its fall. Ur was occupied by an eastern army, but in Nippur

1. New light on these events has been shed by Wilcke 1970; Gomi 1980, 1984; Lafont 1995;
and Steinkeller 2008.
2. Yoffee and Cowgill 1988; most pertinent to our discussion are the contributions of Ad-
ams, Eisenstadt, and Yoffee. See also Sinopoli 1994: 169.
172 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 3

and Isin life continued without any evidence of disaster. At Ešnunna and Susa, new
masters took over without any evident hiatus, but evidence is lacking from other
places. The main damage, insofar as one can determine, took place early during the
reign of Ibbi-Sin, but life in the south of the state, around the capital and in an area
the size of which is impossible to gauge, continued with few ill effects for another two
decades. From the long-term sociopolitical point of view, however, there is nothing
tremendously cataclysmic about the fall of Ur, even if part of the native tradition, as
preserved in texts such as the city laments, presents it in catastrophic terms. These
poems identify state collapse with the ruin of civilization, but this is the point of
view held by native proponents of centralized authority. It ignores, perhaps willfully,
the opening up of new sets of community relationships that come about with the
dissolution of rigid state apparatus and hierarchical social models that characterized
the highly bureaucratized Ur III kingdom (Adams 2009). Moreover, as Yoffee (2005:
137) observes, the most frequent consequence of state collapse was the rise of new
states that were often “consciously modeled on the state that had done the collaps-
ing.” In the case of the dissolution of Ur, it was Isin that performed this role, as Yoffee
undoubtedly had in mind when he wrote those words.

Explanations of the Ur III Collapse

Proponents of the kind of historiography that finds causation in ethnic move-
ments have ascribed much fault to the Amorites. As I have already described in
chap. 5, administrative texts from the time document but a small number of Amori-
tes within the country, most of them associated with the military, probably as elite
bodyguards. The documents also refer to low-level conflicts resulting from a hostile
Amorite presence on the frontier and beyond. The CKU letters refer to confronta-
tions with Amorite tribes in the northeast, but the economic texts as well as the
year-names make it clear that the Ur III government had bigger adversaries and more
pressing military problems to deal with and that their main enemies were the larger
polities in Iran that had little to do with Amorites. To be sure, hostile Amorites were
counted among the enemies of Ur, as we have already seen, but there is absolutely
no evidence outside of CKU that their presence in Babylonia was a significant factor
in the processes that led to the disintegration of central power.
Within CKU, the information from the Ibbi-Sin correspondence implies that
with the breakdown of Ur III control of the Diyala and the surrounding highlands,
Amorite tribal groups were able to descend into the valley and mount raids into
Mesopotamia proper. The situation described therein would have already resembled
what can be observed soon after the Ur III collapse in Early Old Babylonian letters
found at Ešnunna (Whiting 1987), but it is difficult to imagine that even if the CKU
portrait is accurate, such low-level threats could have had any sizable influence on
the process of the dissolution of the kingdom. To repeat the obvious once again, the
primary reason for imagining a major Amorite threat is the name of the fortifications
that were celebrated in Šu-Sin’s fourth year-name, Muriq-Tidnim, “The One That
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 173

Keeps the Tidnum (Amorites) at a Distance.” but too much weight has been given to
this name, as I have argued above, and one cannot base an entire theory of collapse
on a single name. Indeed, there is little to support “a model of intrusion, conquest,
and assimilation of Amorite foreigners into Mesopotamian society” (Yoffee 2005:
146). It is therefore more than likely that we must adjust the commonly held opin-
ion, summarized by the author of the most recent in-depth and most reliable history
of Old Babylonian times (Charpin 2004a: 57):
En ce qui concerne la fin du troisième millénaire, il est néanmoins certain que le
movement de peoples désigné conventionnellemnt sous le terme d’«invasions amor-
rites» a joué une rôle essentiel.
Environmental determinists argue that declining crop yields precipitated the fall
of Ur. In its milder form, this is seen as resulting from possible shifts in the course
of the Tigris (Sallaberger 1999: 177), but others speak of crop failures and “the col-
lapse of Ur III agriculture” due to climate change (Weiss 2000: 89). 3 The idea that
agricultural failures may have been important in the disintegration of the Ur III state
was first argued by T. Jacobsen (1953) and then further discussed by T. Gomi (1980,
1984). It is important to note that both Jacobsen and Gomi were very careful in their
analysis, and that neither blamed lack of grain as the sole reason for the collapse of
the state. The evidence they brought together is important, but it in no way sup-
ports the assertion of a collapse of agricultural production throughout northern and
southern Babylonia.
It has also been argued that the Sargonic and Ur III states disintegrated as a
result of an abrupt change in the climate of the region, which shifted to relatively
arid conditions beginning around 4000 to 4200 years ago and continuing for a few
centuries (Cullen et al. 2000; Weiss 2000). There can be no questioning the impres-
sive marshalling of hard evidence for aridification and changes in the water-flow of
the Euphrates around 2200 b.c. (Riehl, Bryson, and Pustovoytov 2008; Riehl 2008,
2009), but there are good reasons to be skeptical of the connections that have been
made between these physical factors and collapse of both society and state. As in-
teresting as these speculations may be, they tend to overlook a number of serious
problems. First, our absolute chronology of Mesopotamia is not precise enough to
allow correlation between scientific data on climate and specific historical events,
and, furthermore, the dating of the supposed climate crises are also imprecise. Sec-
ond, it is not clear how a lasting process of aridification can account both for the
collapse of two state formations, Akkad and Ur, as well as for the rise of the second
state on the ashes of the first. Moreover, as the argument goes, climate changes in

3. Older theories that ascribed the fall of Ur to agricultural failure caused by salinization
of the soil were strongly criticized by Powell (1985), although a full study of the problem is still
badly needed. Influential nonspecialists (e.g., Chew 2001: 37–38; Diamond 2005; Tainter 2006)
have continued to repeat unsubstantiated claims for resource degradation, overconsumption, and
overirrigation in ancient Mesopotamia, based on fanciful restating of older specialist literature
but without empirical substance.
174 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 3

Syria drove Amorite tribes south, forcing them to encroach on land in Babylonia;
as we have already seen, however, there is no evidence for such dramatic population
movements at the time. 4
One could argue that, in the wake of a serious agricultural crisis, Mesopotamians
adapted their growing techniques to the new conditions and managed short-term
successes, only to be defeated in the end by natural conditions. It may be reasonable
to speculate about such processes, but little evidence from Mesopotamian sources has
been marshaled to bolster these conjectures. Even if one were to accept the hypoth-
esis that Ur III times were characterized by extreme weather conditions, there is no
evidence that this had a significant impact on agricultural yield, because cultivators
still managed to obtain an impressive 1:30 seed to yield ratio in the Lagash province,
at least (Halstead 1990: 187), and the massive textual documentation from that area
shows no evidence of any developing agricultural crisis. It has been argued that “re-
duced Euphrates stream flow probably explains unique linearization of Ur III irriga-
tions canals (Adams 1981: 164) that attempted to counter stream channel meander-
ing” (Weiss 2000: 89), but this is an overstatement of the evidence; such a layout of
irrigation canals is linked to field shapes, and this type of field shape is not in any way
characteristic of the period but of a geographical location—the Girsu province—and
the data on Sargonic fields that is used in this comparison comes from farther north,
from the area of Kish, a very different physical environment (Liverani 1997: 173).
Ration lists and other administrative texts from Ur indicate a shortage of grain
in the capital starting at about the middle of Ibbi-Sin’s sixth year and continuing at
least into year nine (Gomi 1984). By this time, almost all the outlying regions of the
state were no longer under central control, and it therefore comes as little surprise
that the Crown had problems obtaining resources. As far as we know, this shortage
was a three-year crisis in a single city, but it is more a symptom than a cause of a po-
litical predicament, and one cannot conclude from this that there was a prolonged
multiyear crop failure in the whole of Sumer and Akkad. Unfortunately, we cannot
trace the grain situation in the capital beyond this point, because the archive that
provides this information stops in IS8, and for the following six years there are only
38 texts from Ur; when more abundant records resume, in the form of tablets from
IS15–17, they come from a different archive that deals mainly with precious met-
als (Widdell 2003: 98–99) and therefore provide no documentation regarding the
agricultural situation.
Ibbi-Sin’s eighth regnal year is probably coterminous with the beginning of Išbi-
Erra’s independent rule at Isin and Nippur to the north, and nothing indicates that
there were any agricultural problems in the area under the control of the new admin-
istration, but here once again we are hampered in our understanding by inadequate
documentation. The central government managed to maintain control over Ur and
its immediate environs for another 16 years. Up to this point I have avoided any ref-

4. A particularly fanciful and imaginative narrative of the fall of Ur, wrong in all details,
based on these ideas, can be found in Fagan 2004: 6–7.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 175

erence to the CKU, which in fact precipitated this entire line of inquiry, because it
was a reading of the letter of Išbi-Erra to Ibbi-Sin (IšIb1 [21]) that prompted Jacobsen
to produce his pioneering study. But this epistle has been somewhat misused, as we
will presently see, and provides no evidence of any large-scale agricultural disaster.
The theoretical ramifications of the Ur III collapse are as murky as the relevant
evidence. In a monograph that is perhaps the most detailed comparative analysis of
the fall of complex societies, Joseph A. Tainter (1988) argues that their inevitable
collapse cannot be ascribed exclusively to internal and external conflict, environ-
mental factors, including catastrophes and resource depletion, but results from the
pressures involved in maintaining complexity. Collapse tends to ensue when the in-
vestment of resources in such complexity maintenance becomes too costly, in terms
of cost–benefit ratios, so that a state can no longer maintain proper organizational
and other forces to resists stress surges. Although Tainter’s comparative work is fas-
cinating in many ways, it provides but another monocausal explanation of what are
usually extremely complicated historical processes (Trigger 1989: 375) and limits
“civilizational” collapse to political disintegration (Bowersock 1991: 120).
More recently, Yoffee (2005: 139) has returned to the subject and restated his
position, taking a position that differs substantially from that of Tainter:
Collapse, in general, tends to ensue when the center is no longer able to secure re-
sources from the periphery, usually having lost the legitimacy through which it could
disembed goods and services of traditional organized groups.

By shifting the trigger for collapse from economic cost ratios to ideology, Yoffee also
moves the explanatory focus to different moments in the historical process: loss of
legitimacy arises as a consequence of other social, economic, organizational, or mili-
tary factors, but there are always other complex forces at play that lead to such dis-
solution of central authority. 5 In the case of the Ur collapse, we have very few facts
to go on, so we cannot reliably discover and evaluate the various “stress surges” that
led to the fatal loss of legitimacy by the central government.
None of the monocausal explanations of the end of the Ur III kingdom have
proved convincing, and the reason for this may be that the affair was much more
complex and aleatoric than one would like to believe. The sudden loss of both Susa
and Ešnunna in IS3 suggests that the Crown did not have the military means to
head off such disasters, perhaps because all of the wars in recent years had drained
its martial resources. Unrelated to this may be the loss of the Umma and Girsu prov-
inces, which happened a few years later. The evidence is tenuous, to say the least, but
Maekawa (1989: 49) has shown that cereal production in parts of the Umma prov-
ince fell somewhat in IS3, although there is no reason to believe that anything like
this was happening in the Girsu province. Both areas were watered by canals that fed
from the Tigris, and perhaps we are witnessing here the beginnings of a process that

5. Yoffee (2010) recently returned to these issues in a somewhat different manner, concen-
trating on the end of Assyrian state power.
176 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 3

came to a head three years later. Sallaberger (1999: 176–77), referring to work done
by Heimpel (1990), already suggested that the change of the course of the Tigris may
have been a factor in the fall of Ur, and Robert Adams, who drew my attention to
the importance of this potential factor, notes that later Girsu information shows a di-
minished agricultural capacity, as documented by Richardson (2008). It is interesting
to note that after Ur III times there is no evidence of any life in Girsu and Lagaš be-
fore the time of the Larsa rulers Nur-Adad and his successor Sin-iddinam, and then
information resumes again in the time of Rim-Sin. All of this has been documented
by Richardson and need not be repeated here. This correlates well with information
gleaned from the year-names and inscriptions of these Larsa kings: both Sin-iddinam
and Rim-Sin claim to have dredged the Tigris (Steinkeller 2001: 31–32). Could it be
that, from the time of Ibbi-Sin until Nur-Adad or Sin-iddinam, the old channel of
the Tigris that fed the alluvium and therefore led to Girsu was running in a different
bed, or carried little water, and it was only in the time of these Larsa kings that it was
restored to some approximation of its former location?
As Adams (2006: 39) himself has observed: “alluvial river systems are charac-
teristically unstable, given to course changes through channel avulsion that would
naturally disrupt established patterns of human use.” 6 Alternatively, one may seek
human agency in this matter, either as a result of cumulative action on waterworks
or resulting from more deliberate interference; for example, a later Old Babylonian
king, Abi-ešuh, claimed to have damned up the river. 7 Whatever the causes, if the
“old Tigris” changed its course or carried lower water volume because of avulsions of
tributaries farther upstream, then we could understand why all the provinces fed by
its waters become silent. Many cities to the west and northwest of these areas, fed
by the branches of the Euphrates, continued to exist, even though some of them no
longer pledged their allegiance to Ur.
The end of the Drehem archives may perhaps be related to the loss of the fron-
tier; Nippur and Isin were taken over by Išbi-Erra—a person who in a different time
might have been called a warlord—who proclaimed independence, but seems not
to have been actively seeking the immediate collapse of what was left of the Ur III
state. If the CKU is to be believed, civic life continued in Kazallu, Girkal, Kish, and
perhaps Borsippa. At the same time, the rulers of Anšan and Šimaški, in the moun-
tains to the east, consolidated their political and military might and were eventually
ready to overwhelm the armies of the Mesopotamian alluvium. It is impossible at

6. For an overview of the history of avulsions of the Tigris and Euphrates river systems, see
Morozova 2005, with previous literature. “Avulsion is a process whereby a major river diverts
from an existing channel to a lower elevation on the floodplain, initiating a new channel belt”
(Morozova 2005: 407). Longer-term climatic factors may have also played a role in all of this, be-
cause there is evidence of long-term aridification around that time (Aqrawi 2001); nonetheless,
it is difficult to correlate climate and geological time with somewhat uncertain absolute historical
chronology, as already noted above.
7. YN O: mu a-bi-e-šu-uḫ lugal-e usu mah dmarduk-ka-ta íd idigna g̃ iš bí-in-
kéš-da, “The year King Abi-ešuh, by Marduk’s supreme might, damned up the Tigris.”
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 177

present to ascertain the connection between these various factors, and therefore our
understanding of the last decades of the kingdom founded by Ur-Namma remains
fragmentary and opaque. It may have been pure chance that all these different nar-
ratives converged at a time when the state was already weakened by military and
organizational overreach; God may not play with dice, but History often does.
On the pages that follow, I will survey some of the patchy information from the
last decades of the Ur III state. The focus will be primarily military and political, but
this choice is dictated by the nature of the surviving sources and by the context of
the present discussion, which is, after all, merely an extended commentary on the
literary royal letters and not a full history of the times. Therefore, the spotlighting
of these specific factors should in no way be taken to mean that they are the only
components involved in the processes that led to the fall of Ur. I will then proceed
with a discussion of the Ibbi-Sin letters in this historical context.

The Beginnings of Ibbi-Sin’s Reign

Šu-Sin did not live to see the end of his ninth regnal year, and the new king,
Ibbi-Sin, was immediately elevated to the throne, accompanied by ceremonies in
important cult places (Sollberger 1953; Sigrist 1989; Sallaberger 1999: 172–73; Katz
2007: 174–82). 8 The succession seems to have taken place without any obvious
strife; the new man on the throne of Ur was probably Šu-Sin’s brother, another of
Šulgi’s sons. 9 The consequences of the change of occupant on the throne of Ur are
difficult to gauge because it is impossible to discern the practical role of the monarch
and how much agency can be ascribed to his person. Under the influence of native
self-representational strategies, we tend to think of the history of these times as di-
vided into reigns, but, truth be told, we simply do not know how power was distrib-
uted within the state, nor do we understand the patterns of decision-making among
the elites. We are also in the dark about Ibbi-Sin’s social and official position, prior
experience, or community networks before he assumed the kingship of Ur.
Contemporary documents provide very little in the way of evidence of any
changes in administration or of any looming problems. At first, economic activity
seems to function as before, but taxes from the eastern periphery appear diminished

8. There is some question in the ancient sources as to whether Ibbi-Sin reigned 24 or 25

years. Here, a twenty-four-year reign is assumed, following the scheme presented by Sollberger
(1980) and Frayne (1997: 361–66). This conforms to the number recorded in the two Ur III/Isin
reign lists published by Sollberger (1954), now duplicated by still another list in Friberg 2007:
233. Manuscripts of the Sumerian King List contain different numbers: J: 24; P5: 25; Su1: 25;
Su3+4: 25?; WB: 24; Leilan: 23? (information kindly provided by Gianni Marchesi, who is prepar-
ing a new edition of the composition; sigla follow Jacobsen 1939; Leilan = Vincente 1995. The
numbers may change, because only the second source has been collated).
9. On the Ur III succession, see a forthcoming study by Jerrold Cooper and me; for the time
being, the latest discussion of the issue is in Dahl 2007: 7–32.
178 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 3

in the first two years of the new monarch, 10 and then, suddenly, records simply stop
in most places outside of Ur and the south so that, by his sixth year, Ibbi-Sin’s admin-
istration controlled only Ur, Uruk, Adab, Nippur, and surrounding regions. 11 There
are small signals that things had begun to go wrong earlier. At least three records
from the last year of Šu-Sin’s reign document that scheduled dues from the frontier
had not been received. 12
The archival situation is difficult to analyze because, outside of a few major cit-
ies, the documentation is relatively meager, but the consistency of the pattern tells a
story. There are no dated Ur III tablets from Kisurra, Sippar, or Išan-Mizyad after IS2.
The same holds true for the SI.A.A archive, which cannot be located at present. The
related Turam-ili group ends with IS3, as do the texts from Ešnunna, Susa, Garšana,
and Urusag̃rig. 13 Kish and Babylon are last mentioned in a Drehem text from IS2. 14
The situation is more complex in other cities, as discussed most recently by
Lafont (1995), with minor modifications by Sallaberger (1999: 175 n. 180). It ap-
pears that in Ibbi-Sin’s second year the central government still held Ur, Girsu, and
Umma, as well as Puzriš-Dagan, Nippur, and Isin—but not for long. Records from a
town close to Nippur that housed prisoners of war from Šu-Sin’s Simanum campaign
end in IS4. 15 The tax collection offices at Puzriš-Dagan still functioned normally
though IS2: although there seem to be eleven texts from IS3 and one from the fol-
lowing year (Lafont 1995: 7), for all practical purposes it had ceased to function after
IS2. 16 At Umma, texts stop after year IS5 and at Girsu after year IS6. In none of these
last-dated documents is there any clue to the end of the textual documentation, and
so the historian can only speculate regarding events that might have had such dis-
tinctive consequences. The end of the tax collections from the frontier, documented
by the disappearance of records at Drehem, indicates that something was going on
in the eastern borderlands in IS3, months before the loss of both Susa and Ešnunna.

10. An account of such taxes (gun ma-da), covering year one and the beginning half of
year two of Ibbi-Sin’s reign, lists only places in the lower Diyala and close to the Tigris (Kakku-
latum, Tutub, Zimudar, etc.) and none that can be securely located farther up the valley (CT 32
19, IS2.4.9).
11. The last mention of Uruk in an Ur III archival text is in UET 3 1133:6, which records
that 13 slave girls were sent to that city in the sixth month of IS5. Adab is last mentioned, in
broken context, in IS7.7.- (UET 3 1574).
12. TAD 66, Trouvaille 50, Santag 7 101 (nu-mu-de 6); all three dated ŠS9.-.-.
13. Information on Urusag̃rig courtesy of David Owen (personal communication).
14. Kish: MVN 10 144 r. iii:17 (IS2.9.3); Babylon: MVN 8:139: r. ii 8; and BIN 3 346 4,
both dated IS2.6.14.
15. This archive is still unpublished; information courtesy of Benjamin Studevent-Hickman.
16. Lafont mentions 11 Drehem texts from IS3, without any detail. Most of the documents
that have been ascribed to Drehem from this year are in fact from other places, such as Nippur or
date to the time of Šulgi. Those that may come from Drehem are mainly from the leather archive
(SET 290, month 4; MVN 13 594?, month seven; ASJ 4 [1982] 8, month broken; SAT 3 1998,
month 12).
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 179

It may be coincidence, but the end of these archives correlates with an expedi-
tion against the northeastern state of Simurum; its defeat was heralded in the name
of Ibbi-Sin’s third year. Simurum had been a perennial problem for his predecessors:
Šulgi campaigned endlessly against it, naming his forty-fourth year for the “ninth”
defeat of the city. Drehem accounts from AS8 to ŠS2 document the presence of
two “men” of Simurum, Kirib-ulme and Tappan-darah, followed by an énsi by the
name of Ṣilluš-Dagan, who is attested from Š42 through at least ŠS6 (Owen 2001b).
Given the ambiguity of Ur III terminology, it is impossible to determine if he was an
independent ruler or Šu-Sin’s governor of the area, although at least in Šulgi’s time
he was definitely an appointee of the Crown. It is interesting to note, however, that
he first appears just when, according to the Šarrum-bani letter, Simurum had joined
the hostile Amorites against the state of Ur (ŠaŠu1: 14 [19]). Whatever the outcome
of this event may have been, only four years after the last attestation of Ṣilluš-Dagan,
the king of Sumer once again went to war against Simurum and claimed victory,
as related in the name of Ibbi-Sin’s third year. But in the aftermath of this war, his
empire began to collapse, and one cannot but wonder if the events are not linked:
that this war in the northeast, coming only four years after a major war in the area
focusing on Šimaški and Zabšali, overextended Ur’s reach. More pertinently, it can-
not be excluded that the year-name masks a military disaster. Soon after, the Ur III
government negotiated a dynastic union with Zabšali in IS4, as documented by the
year formula for the following year. Why would Ur conduct diplomacy with a remote
highland polity, when most of the territories in between had dropped their allegiance
to the house of Ur-Namma? And yet, even after the documentation from Umma,
Girsu, and even Nippur had ceased, Ibbi-Sin’s chancellery insisted on proclaiming
victories over Huhnuri (IS9), as well as Susa and Adamdun (IS14), all in southwest-
ern Iran.

Military and Political Events of Ibbi-Sin’s First Years

The documentation preserved from the first two years of Ibbi-Sin’s reign shows
no evidence of any political, economic, or military problems, nor are there any signs
of impending crisis. As described above, after assuming the throne, Ibbi-Sin’s re-
gime was probably forced into war in his second year and claimed victory. Some of
the diplomatic relationships with lands to the east that appear to have been inter-
rupted at the time of his predecessor’s war against Zabšali were resumed, and taxes
continued to come in from the core of the state as well as from limited areas of the
frontier regions. To cite but some examples, vigorous diplomatic activity is suggested
by the testimony of a yearly account from Girsu (TEL 46) that records provisions
for highland guards and messengers from the Šimaškian ruler Ebarat, from Huhnuri,
Anšan, from a place named Barbarahuba, and from Beli-ariq, the governor of Susa,
disbursed in the establishment for messengers (é-kaš 4) in Guabba in the first month
180 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 3

of ŠS8. In the first year of the new king of Ur, envoys from Anšan and Zabšali are
attested in Umma documents. 17 Perhaps the best traces of diplomatic relationships
at the beginning of Ibbi-Sin’s reign are preserved in a Drehem account that makes
mention of rulers of the far-off southeastern and northern principalities of Marhaši
and Simanum, who seem to be present in person in Sumer, perhaps in order to affirm
their alliances with the new king (   JCS 10 15:15–20, IS1.3.25). As late as IS3, men
from Mari are attested in Umma (BPOA 1 387:3–8, IS3.-.10).
The messenger texts from Girsu, Umma, and Urusag̃rig tell their own story.
These documents record provisions and rations for envoys who traveled back and
forth between Ur and the various polities and governors resident in Susiana and in
the highlands, as well as to people moving around within the provinces and the cen-
ter of the state. 18 The dated Girsu texts of this kind cease during Šu-Sin’s last year,
but because so many are undated, it is difficult to know what to make of this, and the
document distribution may simply be due to circumstances of archival recovery. 19
In Umma, the messenger text archive ends almost precisely at the very end of IS2
(Nisaba 1 34, IS2.12.29).
The Urusag̃rig accounts record foodstuffs issued to envoys coming from and go-
ing to places such as Kimaš, Hurti, Šigriš, Šimaški, and Diniqtum, apparently through
Der, which is the most commonly encountered toponym. 20 These contacts continue
straight through the whole of IS2, although the records from that year have more
references to Der than to the places that lay on the routes beyond. The one currently
known messenger tablet from Urusag̃rig dated to IS3 mentions only Der. On the
basis of these texts, it appears that diplomatic passage into the highlands was still
unimpeded in IS2, although one is at a loss to explain why the messenger archives in
Umma and Girsu end earlier. Documents from different archival sources in Umma
and Girsu indicate that traffic with the highlands still occasionally went through
the city in IS3, but for all practical purposes, all information on such matters ends at
Umma in IS 2, as it does in Urusag̃rig. 21
These signs of trouble dovetail with information from the redistribution center
at Drehem; there are very few texts dated to IS3, and only one of them registers
animals, the main commodity processed there. 22 Then, in the fourth year of the new
king, the state suffers a sudden and debilitating defeat, losing control of the city of

17. Guards (elam) from Anšan (MVN 16 793:6 [IS1.7.-]), messengers (lú-kíg̃ -gi 4-a) from
Anšan, and Zabšali (UTI 5 3472:5–7 [IS1.12.-]).
18. A succinct analysis of the Girsu and Umma messenger texts, with previous literature,
can be found in Sallaberger 1999: 295–315.
19. The last known Girsu messenger text is TCTI 2 4708, dated ŠS9.10.-.
20. Once again, I am indebted to David I. Owen for information on Urusag̃rig.
21. Elam guards came from Adamdun to Umma in IS3.1.- (Nik. 2 340:5), and similar per-
sonnel came from Susa to Girsu in IS3.7.- (BPOA 1 126:2); see also SNAT 200:1–3, where the
same people receive dates a month earlier (IS3.6.-). People from Mari received rations over a ten-
day period during an unspecified month of IS3 (BPOA 1 387, IS3.-.-)
22. AOS 32 WO1 (IS3.9.11).
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 181

Susa to the Šimaškian king Ebarat. The final known dated Ur III text from the site
comes from IS3 (MDP 18 79) and from this time on, for two or three years at least,
tablets carry Ebarat’s year-names (De Graef 2005: 99, 2008). 23 The conquest seems
to have been rapid and unanticipated, because all indications are that relations with
Susa and beyond were normal right up to the moment of the takeover. The city still
delivered taxes to Ur in Ibbi-Sin’s second year, 24 highland guards from Adamdun
(beyond Susa) received rations at Umma at the beginning of his third year, 25 and
they received dates at Girsu in months six and seven. 26 In the sixth month, a boat-
load of grain was prepared for shipment to Adamdun. 27 One assumes that such a
transport would have been unloaded in Susa or in its vicinity for overland transport.
If Susa was besieged or had already fallen, the route to Adamdun would certainly
have been blocked, and no one would have risked sending a boat laden with grain
to the area. The violent end of the Ur III garrison in Susa may perhaps be traced in
the archaeological record; De Graef (2005: 107–8) suggests that the destruction evi-
denced at the end of Ville Royale B level VII may be attributable to the Šimaškian
takeover of the city.
But the fall of Susa was not the only calamity experienced by the Ur III state
toward the end of IS3. Approximately at the same time, the other entry into Iran,
through the Diyala Valley, was lost as well. The city of Ešnunna, which controlled
access from Babylonia to this vital military frontier area, declared independence,
and the local governor Ituria or his son Šu-iliya became independent rulers (Reichel
2001a: 56–57). The local elites, taking advantage of political and military condi-
tions that we cannot discern, threw off decades of control from Ur and resumed their
independent political existence. The last known Ur III text from Ešnunna is dated
to the ninth month of IS3 (Whiting 1987: 33 n. 3). At some time after this, the
city was no longer a part of Ibbi-Sin’s realm. This is usually viewed as just one more
symptom of the breakdown of central control, resulting in various cities splitting off
from the government at Ur. But the case of Ešnunna is by far more complicated and
significantly more important for understanding the process of breakdown of the state.
Let us recall that Ešnunna was the most important military and administrative
center in the lower Diyala. In essence, it controlled access to this frontier zone all
the way into the Hamrin Basin, which was the nerve center for one part of the Ur III
military corps and also the key to martial, diplomatic, and commercial access to Iran.
It is highly improbable that the elites of the city could have declared independence
if the military establishments up the Diyala, including the Muriq-Tidnim forts, were

23. The order of the month-names used at Susa cannot be reconstructed at present, and
therefore one cannot be more precise.
24. BCT 1 117:5 (IS2.4.7) lists sheep šà gun šušin ki ; strictly speaking, the taxes could have
been delivered at some time earlier.
25. Nik. 2 340:5 (IS3.1.-).
26. SNAT 200 (IS3.6.-) and BPOA 1 126:2 (IS3.7.-).
27. UET 3 1057. This shipment of grain was from Sumer and Babylonia to Susa and Adam-
dun; for other examples, see Steinkeller 1987: 33 n. 68.
182 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 3

still in the hands of the central government, but the sources are silent on these
matters. There is not much to go on, and it may just be pure chance, but recall that
the provincial taxes from the first two years of Ibbi-Sin’s reign do not mention any
cities beyond the lower Diyala plain. Perhaps Awal, Maškan-šarrum, and the other
military posts north of Ešnunna had already passed into the hands of the Šimaškian
Ebarat, keeping in mind that this would be only a few years after Šu-Sin’s claims of
great victories over parts of Šimaški. One can also imagine that Ebarat or his allies
had launched a double-pronged attack and had taken these areas as they prepared to
move on Susa; but other scenarios are equally possible. Whatever happened in the
Hamrin and the Diyala late in IS3 or early in the next year, the frontier was now
independent of Ur, and Ešnunna likewise declared its independence from the realm.
From the strategic point of view, Ešnunna was the equivalent of Susa: both con-
trolled the main routes from Mesopotamian into Iran, and now both were no longer
part of the Ur kingdom. The military and political policy that went back to the time
of Šulgi, anchored in almost endless war and complex diplomatic activity, was erased
and extinguished within the span of a few months. Seen in this perspective, it is
reasonable to assert that the collapse of the frontier and of access to the east dealt a
debilitating blow to the integrity of the Ur III state, one that triggered a variety of
consequences that lead to its ultimate political collapse. There must have been criti-
cal parallel military and organizational developments that weakened the state from
within, because all available evidence suggests that Ibbi-Sin’s armies could do noth-
ing to stop any of this or to take back the areas that had seceded from the realm. But
in light of current knowledge, it is reasonable to assume that most of the symptoms
of organizational and structural disintegration that are observable after IS3 came
about in direct consequence of the resurgence of Šimaški and of the dissolution of
the military defenses in Susiana and the Diyala. Amorites, the weather, hypothetical
developments in Syria—none of these had anything to do with this phase of the Ur
III collapse.

The Usurpation of Power by Išbi-Erra

To complicate matters further, a man by the name of Išbi-Erra declared himself
the independent ruler of the city of Isin and nearby Nippur. But although he figures
here and there in Mesopotamian historiography, his identity and the chronology
of his usurpation are not easily explained. He is mentioned only once in the entire
Ur III archival documentation, and then only after his assumption of the throne of
Isin (UET 3 1421:5, IS14.6.16). 28 We know of him from texts dated to his own reign,
from later copies of a small number of royal hymns, from CKU, from the Sumerian

28. The document records rations for ⸢puzur 4⸣- d šul-gi and puzur 4-lu-lu, the latter de-
scribed as lú-⸢kíg̃ ⸣-gi 4-[a] iš-bi-èr-ra, and they are both lú ì-si-in ki-me-éš (lines 3–5). The
tablet is in Baghdad and cannot be collated.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 183

King List, and from the anecdotal Tumal Inscription. 29 According to the letter of Ibbi-
Sin to Puzur-Numušda (PuIb1, 23), he seems to have come from Mari. A fragment
of a later copy of an Išbi-Erra hymn likewise proclaims his Mari origins (Michalowski
2005b). The rulers of this Syrian city had been closely allied with the house of Ur,
and there is circumstantial evidence suggesting that the troubles affecting both dy-
nasties may have been related, but this is admittedly highly speculative (Micha-
lowski 2004). Whatever his origin, Išbi-Erra was successful in his bid for independent
power, but the exact date and the circumstances surrounding this event are difficult
to establish from information outside of the CKU.
Old Babylonian school texts aside, the reign of Išbi-Erra is documented primar-
ily by a substantial group of illegally excavated accounts from a craft archive that
is presumed to come from the city of Isin, a handful of tablets from Nippur, and a
year-name list of unknown provenance, all of which have been analyzed by Van
De Mieroop (1987). The chronology of Išbi-Erra’s reign has to be reconstructed on
the basis of the date-list, broken on the top and bottom, that preserves 23 consecu-
tive year-names, to which must be added 12 additional year-formulas known from
economic texts (Baqir 1948). The problem is how to fit the additional year-names
at the beginning and end of the date-list; various schemes have been proposed and
are summarized by Van De Mieroop (1987: 120–28), who offers a new reconstruc-
tion, which seems to be the best that we can hope for, given the current state of
the documentation. According to him, the first-known year-name of the new king
was actually his fourth, and therefore we are still missing years one through three.
Moreover, he argues for a synchronism between IS8 and IE4—the last Ibbi-Sin year
documented from Nippur and the first year of the Isin craft archive, a position that
appears to have been generally accepted. 30
It is difficult to establish the exact moment when Išbi-Erra became independent
from Ur. In symbolic terms, independence would have been proclaimed by the insti-
gation of a dating system recognizing the reign of the new king, but it is more than
likely that for all practical purposes Išbi-Erra could have been acting independently
for some time before this happened. As already noted, the Isin documents begin in
what most scholars believe to be his fourth year, but there is no guarantee that we
have the whole archive, and this is surely a chance find from one of many in the capi-
tal city. The slightly earlier tablets from Nippur are more informative. They come in
two distinct groups: tablets dug up at the end of the 19th century from private houses
(PH) and the archives of the Inana temple (IT) excavated after WW II. 31 Tablets
with Ibbi-Sin dates extend to year seven, with a spike in year six and a decline in year
seven. The last such document from this area comes from IS7.5.7-12 (6 NT 378),

29. These have been discussed recently by Frayne 1982, Vanstiphout 1989–90, and Micha-
lowski 2005a.
30. See, for example, Lafont 1995: 9 and Charpin 2004a: 60.
31. Zettler 1992; Lafont 1995: 8–11. I have benefited from discussing these matters with
Richard Zettler.
184 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 3

and then there are two texts dated IE4 and 6, respectively, that also belong to the
same archive. 32 The situation is somewhat different in the private houses, where the
documentation appears to extend into IS8, spiking in years two and three (Lafont
1995: 9). The evidence for IS8 at Nippur is not very solid, however. Only two texts
from PH are dated to this year, NRVN 118 (month 2) and NATN 533 (month 3). 33
Both records are dated to early months of IS8, and one could assume either that
Išbi-Erra imposed his dating scheme in the middle of the year or that in a few private
archives the change of power was not yet acknowledged, by omission or by design.
Moreover, if Išbi-Erra’s control over Nippur was originally sanctioned by the Crown,
as is reported in CKU but cannot be otherwise confirmed, then it is possible that
Ibbi-Sin dates could have continued to be in use for a time, even though the city was
effectively under new rule.
Finally, one must say a word about the Ur III administrative tablets found at Ur,
which can be seen in a new light as a result of work done by Magnus Widell (2003).
It is now clear that all of them were found in secondary contexts and therefore came
from incomplete, disturbed archives. Nevertheless, some patterns can be discerned.
Widell (2003: 98) was able to demonstrate that the largest numbers of Ibbi-Sin texts,
found in the third season of excavations at Ur, derive from two distinct archives, one
containing tablets from IS1–8 (peaking between IS5 and 8) and another containing
mostly materials from IS14, with some from IS15 and IS16. The clustering demon-
strates the limitations of our knowledge about the last decades of the Ur III kingdom.
Is there anything to be learned from this accumulation of information, all of it
imperfect and from a limited range of heterogeneous sources? As described above,
the Nippur evidence, while not abundant, does not undermine the hypothesis that
Išbi-Erra began his own dating system in the city in the year corresponding to IS8,
but concrete evidence is sparse, and there may have been an overlap in dating by
both kings. But even if we assume that this synchronism holds, it still does not solve
all of our problems. The Ur III Nippur IT archives cease in IS7, but they also contain
two Išbi-Erra tablets, one dated IE4 and another dated IE6. 34 The former has the very
same year-formula that marks the earliest-known tablet from the Isin craft texts. One
wonders if this is simply coincidence or if this is really the first real year of Išbi-Erra’s
reign and his first three years are essentially a fiction, used locally somewhere before
he actually obtained control of Nippur and Isin. Almost everywhere one looks, there
is some disruption of archival activity around the end of IS2 or IS3 and again around
years IS7 and IS8. This supports the idea that there was some political or military

32. 5 N-T 77 and 5 N-T 656, see Zettler 1992: 42–43 n. 33. As Zettler informs me (personal
communication), all but fifty or so of the IT tablets come from a secondary context, from the fill
of the platform built as a foundation for the Parthian temple (SB Level II).
33. Not all texts that supposedly come from Nippur were actually written or even found
there. Nevertheless, NRVN 118 is from the city, because it is sealed by a scribe in service to the
governor of Nippur and Ur-Ninurta, son of Munimah, who sealed NATN 533, is known from
other Nippur texts, as is his father.
34. 5 N-T 77 and 5 N-T 656, respectively; see n. 23 above (p. 181).
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 185

set of events around the end of IS2 and then again approximately three or four years
later when year-names of Išbi-Erra—beginning with his year four—appear at Nippur
and Isin. These two tablets, which mention the same people who were in charge of
the Inana temple in the time of Ibbi-Sin, bear witness to the administrative conti-
nuity that reached into the reign of Išbi-Erra, unaffected by the change of sovereign
authority in the city (van Driel 1995: 396).
This first-attested year-name of Išbi-Erra—the one that is currently designated
IE4—commemorated a victory over Kiritab, a city in the marshy defense zone of
Akkad located not far from Marad and Kazallu, in the area that may have designated
the mada in Šulgi’s time, at least. This event, which would have happened just be-
fore the new king established himself in Nippur and Isin according to our scenario,
suggests that he had both an army and a nearby base of operations before moving
militarily on that city or that he already held Nippur before his own year-names be-
gan and already was operating from there. After his eighth year, Ibbi-Sin was boxed
in around Ur, with even Girsu and Umma having left the fold, and it is unclear just
how far up the Euphrates his control reached. The only military victories he could
claim in his year-names were over enemies in the east, Huhnuri (YN9), Susa and
Adamdun (YN14), and the “Amorites” (YN17), but the logistics of these victories
are difficult to discern, and it is possible that some of these battles may have been
fought in the alluvium, not in the highlands, and some may have been less successful
than the Crown would want us to believe. 35 After 24 years on the throne, he lost
his kingdom to armies from these very regions, and the house of Ur-Namma was no
more; 9 years later, Išbi-Erra drove out the last Elamite garrison from Ur.

The Ibbi-Sin Correspondence (Letters 21–24)

The last four letters of the CKU purport to come from the time of the last king
of Ur and consist of single epistolary exchanges between Ibbi-Sin and Išbi-Erra and
between the monarch and Puzur-Numušda, his governor of Kazallu. How does this
correspondence fit into the skeletal reconstruction of the political history of the
times presented above?
The fragmentary and confusing documentation for the last decades of the Ur III
state has tempted historians to reach for the RCU to illuminate the shadows, but
even if one takes into account the general transmission and redactional problems
of these literary letters already discussed earlier, the Ibbi-Sin epistolary quartet is
unique, and their value as historical sources is difficult to evaluate. The distribution
of the sources of the letters is uneven: two of the four letters have long and short
versions, and at least one scribe compiled them into a connected narrative that is
different from other epistolary collective tablets (A 7475, compilation tablet Xa).

35. Note the skepticism of Sallaberger (1999: 174) concerning the rhetoric of some of Ibbi-
Sin’s year-names. See also p. 191 below.
186 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 3

Let us take these issues one at a time, starting with the matter of source distribu-
tion, tabulated in the following chart:
IšIb1(21) IbIš1 (22) PuIb1 (23) IbPu1 (24)  36
3 Nippur 2 unknown 9 Nippur 4 Nippur  
5 unknown 2 Ur 1 Kish
1 Sippar 1 Sippar
1 Susa 2 unknown
5 unknown

Only the two letters addressed to Ibbi-Sin are attested in House F in Nippur, 37
and the overall number of sources for each is quite different, 8 for IšIb1 and 18 for
PuIb1—the latter the biggest number of manuscripts of any CKU item—but the
distribution of these sources is very different. In general, it seems that the Puzur-
Numušda letters are more broadly attested in the best-known scribal centers, and
Išbi-Erra epistles are better documented outside of them, written on tablets of un-
known origin. Moreover, the unprovenienced manuscripts of the first and final
epistles in this quartet belong to longer redactions that differ substantially from the
Nippur, Kish, and Sippar versions. All of these issues make it difficult to reconstruct
an ideal Old Babylonian reception context, because it is impossible to know if any-
one outside of the circle of the teacher and student involved in the writing of the
collective tablet Xa that contains all of these letters was ever exposed to the full
range of the epistolary history.

The Išbi-Erra–Ibbi-Sin Correspondence (Letters 21–22)

According to IšIb1 (21), Išbi-Erra had been dispatched to Kazallu to purchase
grain for the capital. This fits in well with possible shortage of grain in the city in
IS6–8, if we are to follow the evidence marshaled by Gomi (1984). By this time,
dated tablets from Umma and Lagaš had ceased, and one must assume that Ur would
have been unable to obtain food supplies from these provinces and therefore needed
deliveries from farther north. The letter also mentions Amorite incursions into
the area south of Kazallu and refers to a war with Elam. As A. Falkenstein (1950),
C. Wilcke (1970), and others have long observed, the Išbi-Erra correspondence must
date just before IS8 or early in that year, when Nippur passed into the hands of the
future king of Isin. This also explains why the year after the empire essentially col-
lapsed would be named after a victory over Huhnuri, “the bolt to the land of Anšan,”
and why Išbi-Erra had to defeat Kiritab in his third year (IE4), which would have

36. Strictly speaking, there are four tablets with this letter from Nippur, but N2 and N1 were
written in sequence by the same student and therefore should be counted as one manuscript for
our purposes.
37. Sources N1 of IšIb1[21] and PuIb1 [24].
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 187

been equivalent to IS7. Granted, it is difficult to know what was meant by the term
“Elam” (elam ki) in Ur III usage, but there is evidence that it designated the highland
regions to the east and did not include Susiana (Michalowski 2008b). By this time,
Susa was in the hands of Ebarat or Kindattu, but they would probably have been
referred to as rulers of Šimaški.
Any discussion of the historical inferences of CKU must disregard the answer
from Ibbi-Sin (IbIš1 [22]), which is undoubtedly an Old Babylonian fabrication
stitched together from elements of other letters. Moreover, there are only two extant
manuscripts, both unprovenienced, and both utilize very poor Sumerian that makes
little sense in places. The composition and transmission of this letter is curious, to
say the least, because the two versions differ substantially and yet share the same
overall disregard for many rules of Old Babylonian Sumerian grammar. The source
of much of the missive is not the epistle that it answers but the Puzur-Numušda
correspondence (PuIb1 [23] and PuIb1 [24]), which is refashioned, without much
historical sense, to fit the purpose. But although this letter seems to have been mar-
ginal in antiquity, today it is one of the most cited or paraphrased items of the CKU.
Many historians have interpreted the letter as a blackmail message wherein Išbi-Erra,
having been sent on a mission to purchase grain, wants to sell it back to the king
for twice the price. The only source available until now, OECT 5 27, was published
in 1976, but a somewhat imperfect hand-copy made many years earlier by Petrus
van der Meer had been in circulation for some time among Sumerologists. Samuel
Noah Kramer (1976: 9) realized well that the narrative deals with accusations of
cheating, not blackmail, but this seems to have escaped the notice of many. The
spurious nature of this text requires us to withhold all reference to it in the historical
reconstruction of Ibbi-Sin’s reign, even if it sheds interesting light on what some Old
Babylonians thought about such matters.
What is puzzling in the whole affair is the focus on Kazallu. One would not
normally expect this region to be a source of large amounts of grain and, therefore,
if the CKU were in any way to be believed, it seems likely that the harvest actually
took place farther upstream, perhaps in the Sippar region, and that Kazallu was only
a relay point at which the sale took place.
E. Robson (2002: 351) and, following her, W. W Hallo (2006: 98), have claimed
that IšIb1 (21) is likewise a school concoction, created in part to illustrate math-
ematical exercises. She writes:
The letter reads suspiciously like an OB school mathematics problem: the first para-
graph gives the silver-grain exchange rate and the total amount of silver available
(72,000 shekels); in the second the silver has been correctly converted into grain.
Next that huge capacity measure is divided equally among large. . . . As is typical
for school mathematical problems, the numbers are conspicuously round and easy
to calculate with. The numbers in the final, damaged part . . . are reminiscent of the
final multiplicands of a standard multiplication table or the sexagesimal fractions
1
⁄3, 1⁄2, [ 2⁄3], 5⁄6. The letter, at one level, is no more than a pretext to show simple
mathematics and metrology at work in a quasi-realistic context.
188 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 3

This is an attractive proposal, but it does not stand up to scrutiny; it is based on

incorrect older readings of the numbers. Moreover, elements such as figures were
undoubtedly redacted over time and would not, in themselves, discredit the whole
composition, even if some changes may have been motivated by instructional goals.
All the literary letters, including the Isin dynasty literary epistles (SEpM 2–5), use
simple, round numbers, primarily multiples of 600. In the case of this letter, the
fractions in the damaged passage are not in the composition as it is currently recon-
structed. Robson utilized the Oxford on-line edition of the text and read lines 13–16:
Let my lord repair 600 barges of 120 gur draught each; 72 solid boats, 20. . . , 30 bows,
[40] rudders (?), 50 . . . and 60 (?) boat doors on the boats (?), may he also . . . all
the boats.

This passage is admittedly difficult; my reconstruction of the text is different, and

although it is hardly secure, the fractions are not present.
The figures in the text have attracted attention because they may reflect school
mathematics more than practical and historical concerns. But there are other issues
at stake as well, ones that might reveal the motives or thoughts attributable to the
correspondents, or at least of one of them. Išbi-Erra reports that he has acquired
72,000 kor of grain; this, like 7,200, is a standard “very large number” in CKU, and
even if it did at one point represent a historical reality, it has been adjusted for didac-
tic purposes. Later in the letter, he declares (IšIb1: 28 [21]): “There is (enough) grain
in my city to provision your palace and all of its residents for fifteen years.” Note the
use of the noun šà-gal, “provisions, food, fodder”; in Ur III times, this term is “used
for barley rations for animals but also for captives and for the érin class of workers/
soldiers” (Gelb 1965: 232). Taking the standard Ur III ration of 60 liters per month
for a grown man, this would be enough to feed 2,000 workers for 15 years, but if we
take into account that the total figure refers to grain before it has been threshed, the
number of workers supported would be much smaller. However, this does not take
into account the unspoken assumption that the elites of the capital, and especially
of the palace, would require much better alimentary treatment. Presumably, Išbi-Erra
is claiming that he has even more grain on hand in Isin and is ready to save his king
from any shortages in the capital, but it is also possible that the numbers are meant
to be ironic or even threatening.
There are other problems with the text, however. Ever since Thorkild Jacobsen
(1953) edited the first 13 lines of IšIb1 (21), historians have used this letter and its
answer as evidence of nefarious blackmail that led to the loss of Isin and Nippur and,
eventually, to the downfall of the Ur III state: Išbi-Erra takes advantage of a grain
crisis in Ur to force Ibbi-Sin to pay him double for provisions that he was sent to pur-
chase with funds provided by the crown. A closer investigation of the narrative and
of the figures involved complicates matters and raises other questions. I should note
that this discussion is only concerned with the “short version” of IšIb1 (21), because
it is clear that the non-Nippurean additions of the “long versions” are without any
doubt Old Babylonian in date and have no historical relevance whatsoever.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 189

Išbi-Erra, whose role in the Ur III kingdom is never defined, writes to his king,
reminding him that his brief was to travel to Kazallu, in the old Šulgi defense zone,
to purchase grain, and he did so at the price of one kor (ca. 300 liters) per shekel of
silver. The line reads (IšIb1: 5):
šakanka 1 gur-ta-àm še sá-di/sá ba-an-dug 4
As the market price of grain was equivalent to one (shekel) per kor . . .”

Jacobsen (1953: 41) complicated matters in his commentary to the text, stating:
Assuming that . . . Ishbī-Erra’s grain-buying expedition, which bought at the exceed-
ingly favorable rate of two gur to a shekel, could only have taken place at harvest
time, we may with a fair degree of probability assume that he wrote early in Ibbī-
Suen’s sixth year.
But this is not what the text says. One can only surmise that Jacobsen confused the
letter from Išbi-Erra with Ibbi-Sin’s reply in IbIš1 (22). The king’s response, which is
reported in the spurious epistle, will be left out of the historical discussion, because
it only illuminates the manner in which some non-Nippurean school circles viewed
the affair, as noted above.
With Jacobsen’s commentary set aside, the central issue is that the numbers pre-
sented here do not testify, at first glance, to any grain shortage in the Kazallu region,
because Išbi-Erra reports that the price of grain there is one kor per one shekel of
silver, and this is the standard average rate encountered in most Ur III documents
(Gomi 1984: 231). A closer reading of what follows reveals that this is the price of
unthreshed grain—on the stalk—while the normal rate is always calculated in rela-
tionship to the grains of barley. The king claims that Išbi-Erra purchased the grain at
half the going rate, but delivered, or offered to deliver it, at the normal price of one
shekel per kor, as if it had already been threshed.
Išbi-Erra then informs the king that he wanted to transport his acquisitions to a
safe threshingfloor for processing but that hostile Amorites had entered the mada,
and therefore he has taken all of the grain into the city of Isin for protection. He
goes on to state that the Amorites have now entered the mada and have taken over
all of its fortresses. Previous translations have rendered mada by the neutral term
“country,” but in light of the discussion presented in chap. 4, I will assume here that
mada is a technical term referring to the defensive frontier territory, although it
also possible that the meaning here is closer to “countryside.” 38 If, for the sake of
the argument, we situate this letter in the historical reality of Ibbi-Sin’s early years,
we must assume that the Diyala Valley region has already been lost, and the military
would have retreated back to the old Šulgi defense zone around Apiak, Marad, and
Kazallu, and that this is the area once again designated as mada. The exact date may

38. For example, Jacobsen 1953: 47: “Reports that hostile Martus had entered the plains
having been received (lit., ‘heard’) 144,000 gur grain (representing) the grain in its entirety was
brought into Isin.”
190 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 3

be unclear, but the time of year is obvious: it must be during or right after the har-
vest, because there is not even time to thresh the grain. The urgency of the matter
explains the price, which is normal for the period, but only for threshed barley and
not for grain on the stalk. Up to this point, the author’s explanations make sense, but
then he provides further clarification of his situation: because of security issues, he is
stuck in Isin with the unthreshed barley; if only the king would provide him with a
flotilla of armed barges, he could send it all to a safe place for drying and processing.
Apparently there is no space in Isin to do this, which may seem to be a disingenuous
claim, but we lack any further clarification of the matter.
More disconcerting is the claim that the armed fleet is necessary because of hos-
tile Amorites. This implies that the enemy is actually threatening the areas between
Isin and Ur, and there is no way, at present, of establishing the veracity of this asser-
tion, since the historical record of the time is limited to year-names and a handful
of administrative documents. Moreover, Išbi-Erra proposes bypassing the hostiles by
means of two watercourses, the Idkura and the Palištum, but neither of these is at-
tested from any Ur III document. If Idkura is indeed located in the vicinity of Isin,
this may provide some indication of the geographical horizon that lies behind the
text, but the details escape us for the moment. 39 Finally, one might very well inquire
why he cannot deliver the barley in its unthreshed form to Ur and have it threshed
in the city. This may all very well be Old Babylonian fantasy, but the rhetoric reveals
a form of blackmail, albeit of a kind that is different from what has been assumed by
most historians: both correspondents know that none of this is true. The issue is not
really grain but royal sanction for Išbi-Erra’s control of Isin, which is already in his
hands, because that is presumably where his letter originates.
At this point, it is necessary to refer, if ever so briefly, to the spurious letter that
contains Išbi-Erra’s answer to the king of Ur. As already noted, for almost half a cen-
tury, this epistle has been cited as evidence that the usurper blackmailed Ibbi-Sin by
demanding to be paid a double price for the grain that he had obtained in Kazallu.
The history of various interpretations has been well summarized by Kutscher (1982:
585–86) and will not be repeated here. The veracity of IbIš1 (22) aside, the figures
in this text are not intended as a request for double payment but reflect school tradi-
tions of the kind addressed by Robson and cited above in connection with IšIb1 (21).
Because the amounts of grain reported by Išbi-Erra are weighed in an unthreshed
state, the person or persons who invented the response concocted an answer that
recognized the fact and addressed the issue in numerical terms.
In the final section of his letter, Išbi-Erra urges the king not to be discouraged
by the progress of a war with Elam. As already noted, the only conflict with “Elam”
that this could possibly refer to is the series of events that was commemorated in
the name of Ibbi-Sin’s ninth year, describing his defeat of Huhnuri on the borders of

39. See the commentary to IšIb1 (21).

 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 191

Anšan; this was already observed by Wilcke (1970: 54). 40 If the letter were in har-
mony with actual historical events, it would mean that the war with Huhnuri was
not going very well. The name of Ibbi-Sin’s ninth year is incomplete; at present one
can read it as (Steinkeller 2007a: 223 n. 31):
mu di-bí- d en.zu, lugal uri 5ki-ma-ke 4 hu-úh-nu-ri ki sag-kul ma-da an-ša-
an ki-šè (var.: elam ki) á dugud-(bi) ba-ši-in-DU [x] SUM? sa bí-in-g̃ ar
Year: Ibbi-Sin, king of Ur, brought massive (military) force to Huhnuri, the lock of
the land of Anšan/Elam (and) . . .

This formula marks the first of many hyperbolic year-names of Ibbi-Sin that have no
parallel anywhere, certainly not in Ur III times. These year-names make one wonder
if the grandiose claims are intended to mask minor accomplishments or even failures.
The road to Huhnuri was last traversed by Ur III armies in the time of Amar-Sin,
20 years earlier (AS YN 7), as far as we know, but with Susa lost after IS3, the way
could not have been easy this time. 41 Either Ibbi-Sin’s troops had to make their way
around the city and surrounding garrisons, or they had to retake it, and no evidence
for such an effort is presently known. It is therefore equally likely that the war against
the “Elamites” actually took place closer to home, not in Susiana and beyond. While
it is possible that the event that is described as a defeat of Huhnuri in the name of
Ibbi-Sin’s ninth year may have actually been an attempt to reconquer Susa, there is
no evidence that the Mesopotamians ever succeeded in doing so. 42
The letter of Išbi-Erra certainly makes it clear that Ur was in need of grain and
that it had to be procured from the northern part of the alluvial plain. It claims that
Amorites were raiding the area around Kazallu and had even descended into the
homeland, presumably into some of the areas that lay between Isin and Ur, and ex-
plains how Išbi-Erra obtained control of Isin and Nippur by sanction of the Crown.
As bad as the situation may have been, it was not fatal; if indeed these events took
place around IS8, then the kingdom still had a decade and half left before its final
demise.

40. Jacobsen 1953: 40 suggested that the letter reflects events referred to in the year formula
IS6.
41. The location of Huhnuri remains uncertain. Since the publication of an inscription of
Amar-Sin found at Bormi that may be from this city, it has often been assumed that Huhnuri was
somewhere in this vicinity (Nasrabadi 2005). As Henry Wright informs me: “It is unlikely that
this text attributed to Bormi is in its original place. The site was been surveyed three times in the
1960s and 70s by myself, Eliabeth Carter, John Hansman, and Pierre de Miroschedji. It produced
many ceramics, some inscribed bricks, and even an unbaked tablet fragment, but nothing earlier
than Middle Elamite, when it was quite an important town. I suppose it was dragged from its
original site, perhaps nearby in the unsurveyed eastern portion of the Ram Hormuz plain or per-
haps as far away as Izeh or Behebehan, by a Middle Elamite literati. François Vallat, however, tells
me that we do not have an eyewitness account of the recovery of the text, and it is possible it was
not actually found at Bormi itself.”
42. Sallaberger 1999: 173–74. For a different interpretation, see, e.g., Steinkeller 2007a:
223, who assumes that Ibbi-Sin’s armies may have been able to retake Susa.
192 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 3

Even if we discount Ibbi-Sin’s answer, there is nothing in the Išbi-Erra letter that
contradicts anything we know from the historical record, even if this does not in any
way guarantee its veracity. The situation is equally complex in the case of the Puzur-
Numušda correspondence, albeit for very different reasons.

The Puzur-Numušda–Ibbi-Sin Correspondence

(Letters 23–24)
It is a challenge to attempt to fit the bits of factual information contained in
the Ibbi-Sin–Puzur-Numušda epistolary exchange into any historical context. The
governor of Kazallu writes to the king, reporting a message he had received from
Išbi-Erra, who demanded that he abandon Ibbi-Sin and switch sides (PuIb1 [23]).
In the letter contained within the letter, the Isin king describes various events of
his reign, and it is clear that these events took place over a number of years. Follow-
ing Wilcke (1970: 57), many have dated this part of CKU to Ibbi-Sin’s nineteenth
year, but if my interpretation is correct, this correspondence—if it is not complete
fiction—must be placed a few years later, during the very last part of his reign, as was
already suggested by Jacobsen (1953: 44), possibly as late as the last year or two. 43
And yet, all of this strains credulity: how can one imagine that, late in the reign
of Ibbi-Sin, a dozen years after Išbi-Erra conquered nearby Kiritab, the king of Ur still
controlled Kazallu and Girkal? Granted, we know absolutely nothing about Kazallu
after the last known Ur III reference in ŠS 9.ix.18 (SAT 3 1892:8), and Girkal is
unattested in this period. Nevertheless, is it difficult to imagine a pocket of governors
loyal to Ur in this area late in Ibbi-Sin’s reign. The Isin texts are of little help here,
although texts dated to the reign of Išbi-Erra include sporadic references to Apiak,
Marad, Mur, and Kiritab, located in the same general area, as well as to Borsippa and
Kish farther upstream (Van De Mieroop 1987: 110), which suggests that Isin had
unimpeded contact with the region.
Puzur-Numušda to Ibbi-Sin (PuIb1, Letter 23)
This complex Puzur-Numušda letter is unique in the Sumerian literary epistolary
tradition. On the structural level, it is the only one that contains one letter within
another. Moreover, the text that follows is divided into two sections, so that after the
embedded letter the narrator twice asserts, “it was just as he had predicted (that is,
‘said’),” and in each case this is followed by an explanation of how Išbi-Erra’s predic-
tions came to pass. 44 I will return to these compositional devices, but first one must
discuss the historical context of the epistle.
In PuIb1 (23), the prediction phrase provides a way of asserting that Išbi-Erra
had fulfilled his boastful predictions while also commenting and expanding on his

43. For a somewhat different opinion, see Whiting 1987: 25 (“at the latest during Išbi-Erra
11”).
44. bí-in-du 11-ga-gin 7-nam (PuŠ1: 23, 42).
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 193

achievements, grouping them in two sections, because the events that are narrated
took place over a period of time. Išbi-Erra asserts that he has divine sanction to take
over Sumer and offers a litany of possible future actions, including the ominous
pledge to take over Kazallu, the very city of Puzur-Numušda, ending his own letter
with the boast to rebuild the outer wall of the city of Isin and to rename it in his
own fashion, establishing a tradition that would be followed by his successors on the
throne of Isin. Puzur-Numušda then reports to Ibbi-Sin his belief that these predic-
tions had come true (line 29), beginning his comments with the last promise, the
rebuilding of the walls of Isin, an event that is also known from Išbi-Erra’s twelfth
year-name, equivalent, according to the dating scheme adopted here, to Ibbi-Sin’s
eighteenth year.
Immediately after confirming the fulfillment of this particular promise, Puzur-
Numušda relates a series of political and military events (lines 43–46), including the
capture of Nippur, which took place at least 11 years earlier, and it is impossible to
ascertain if there is any chronological order or logic in this passage. After this sec-
tion, the narrator once again uses the phrase in question, this time relating back to
the first of Išbi-Erra’s predictions (lines 7–13), to take over the banks of the Abgal
and Me-Enlila branches of the Euphrates that lay south of Kish, and then once again
moves on to add new information about the enemy’s military progress. It is pos-
sible that the conquest of Kiritab in year three (YN 4) was part of this strategy. The
structure of Puzur-Numušda’s comments refer, in reverse order, to Išbi-Erra’s initial
and final predictions, thus using a complex trope to assert the veracity of everything
else that the man of Isin had predicted, adding even more detail to underscore the
seriousness of the dire situation that he now finds himself in. At the same time, he
lays the ground for the admission that he will not be able to resist Išbi-Erra’s coming
onslaught on Kazallu and will be forced by superior odds to abandon his post.
The complex rhetoric of the letter creates a multilayered discourse that is open
to many different interpretations, creating a “reality effect,” if one is permitted to in-
voke Roland Barthes’ (1968) much overused concept, by reciting specific names and
places that require comment, replicating historical narrative to imitate and establish
textual realism and to create a tension between implied reality and fiction. In lines
32–39 these are:
1. Nig̃dugani of Nippur
Puzur-Numušda reports that Išbi-Erra took control of Nippur and stationed his
own guard over the city and that he captured Nig̃dugani, temple administrator (sag̃ a)
of Nippur (lines 32–33). Although this is listed after the building of the wall of Isin,
in historical terms it had to have taken place a few years earlier. No such person has
been identified to date in the Ur III administrative record, although the name ap-
pears occasionally in accounts from Drehem, Umma, Girsu, and, most interestingly,
Nippur. There were at last three individuals by that name in the city: a “scribe,” son
of Lu-duga (NRVN 1 212:4 and seal, n.d.[restored]), a captain (nu-banda 3 NATN
468:9, ŠS6.7.13), and a high official who served both as “cupbearer,” and “gardener
194 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 3

of the god Enlil,” known only from the seal inscription of his son Ur-Meme, who
inherited his father’s position in Enlil’s gardens (NRVN 1 36, ŠS9.8.-).
During this period, the title sag̃ a designated the highest administrator of temples
or temple estates, and the association with a city seems to be out of place. Nippur was
administered by a governor (énsi), and this is what one would expect in the context.
There are, however, three examples of a sag̃ a of Nippur or of its god Enlil. The first is
an Old Akkadian seal, known from multiple impressions, of one lugal-níg̃ -zu énsi
of Nippur and sag̃ a of the god Enlil (RIME 2 E2.6.2.1). The second, likewise Old
Akkadian, is mentioned in an orchard sale document: JCS 35 151 no. 6:5; ur-g̃ idri
sag̃ a nibru ki. The third dates from the time of Šulgi—it bears no year-name— and
was published in RA 74 47 116:11 (the governor of the city is mentioned two lines
earlier).
The last Ur III references to a sag̃ a of Enlil and a governor of Nippur come from
IS2 and IS3, respectively. The first is in the form of a seal inscription of a servant of
lugal-á-zi-da sag̃ a den-lí l-lá (NATN 858, IS 2.3.8; the same man was pisag̃ -
dub-ba lugal sag̃ a den-lí l-lá on his own seal, JCS 19 28:3, IS1), and the second
is a tablet with a seal inscription of a servant of the governor Dada (MVN 3 116,
IS3.-.-). The office of the governor of Nippur was held, for most of the duration of
the Ur III period, by the descendants of Ur-Meme, which had connections with the
Inana temple (Hallo 1972; Zettler 1984; Hattori 2006), and the last of this line was
Dada, who is attested until IS8; a dedicatory seal of one of his scribes was used on
the penultimate Ur III tablet from the city, dated IS8.2.-. 45 This suggests that, even
if Dada was not physically present in Nippur at the time of Išbi-Erra’s takeover, he
was Ibbi-Sin’s last serving governor there. Given the paucity of information, it is not
impossible to imagine that, by the time Nippur changed hands, the governor had fled
and the city administration was in the hands of a sag̃ a, but at present this can only
remain speculation.

2. Zin(n)um and the Land of Subir (line 34)

Previous translations of PuIb1: 34 (23) identify Zinnum as the “governor of
Subir,” 46 but, for reasons that are explained in the philological commentary to the
line, I prefer to render it as “(His ally), the ruler/governor Zinnum, took prisoners
in Subir.” Certainly the notion of an énsi of Subir is difficult to accept, because
“Subir” serves as a general areal designation in early Mesopotamian usage and is
never used to refer to a political entity. The documentary evidence gives us no clues
as to the areas that might have been imagined as Subir in Ur III times; although the
geographical term occurs in CKU, it is not used even once in the surviving Ur III
documentation. Its appearance in some letters of CKU may be anachronistic; one

45. NRVN 118; see Zettler 1984: 5.

46. E.g.,Whiting 1987: 23; Wu 1994: 9. The normalization and linguistic identity of the
name are uncertain.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 195

assumes that the general orientation is in the Trans-Tigris area, north, northeast, and
northwest of the Diyala, but this is all that one can say. 47
As first noted by Whiting (1987: 26 n. 77), a person named Zinnum (zi-nu-um)
is the recipient of a diplomatic gift in an early Isin dynasty tablet, but even though
the fact that he receives such a bequest suggests that he is an important foreigner,
nothing more is known about him. 48 More important has been the claim, made by
J. J. van Dijk (1978: 199), that the Zinnum of PuIb1 (23) is also documented in the
final lines of the third kirugu of Išbi-Erra Hymn B. Here are the first preserved lines
on the first column of the reverse of CBS 14051. My readings and interpretations dif-
fer somewhat from van Dijk’s original edition and from the on-line ECTSL version,
but most of this is irrelevant for the purposes of our discussion:
1′. [. . .] ⸢im?-ma?-an?⸣- [. . .]
2′. [x x x x] x x x x-šub-dè ur5 mi-ni-in-⸢dug4?⸣
3′. [x x (x)]x ⸢níg̃ ⸣-gur8 gil-sa-a-bi barag-šè mu-un-dù
4′. [ti?-id?]-⸢nu⸣-um 49 lú šu-ta šub-ba-bi den?-ki? maškim-bi-im
5′. ídburanun-na ídidigna ídkir11-sig íd-kiški zag-bi im-mi-in-gu7
6′. eden bar-rim4 líl bu-bu-da enmen-e mi-ni-in-ug7
7′. ki-in-da-tu lú elamki-ma-ra inim-bi ba-an-na-de6
8′. an-ša-anki-e šimaški šeg11 ba-ab-gi4 kur im-ma-an-te
9′. ⸢ugnim⸣-ma-ni pu-úh-ru-um-bi inim mu-na-ni-ib-bé
10′. ki-ru-gú eš5-kam-ma

...
. . . . thus he spoke?(:)
. . . he placed (all) its goods and treasures into sacks,
And as for the scattered forces of Tidnum, Enki was their protector;
(Some) he fed at the banks of the Tigris, Euphrates, Kirsig, 50 and Kish watercourses,
(But ) killed (others) by thirst in the phantom-filled desert.
Word of this was brought to the highlander Kindattu;
Anšan and Šimaški screamed out (in horror); he approached the highland
And addressed his assembled armies.
The third kirugu.
I have collated the tablet a number of times. It is written in a very small hand and
is admittedly not easy to read. As much as I respect the knowledge and effort that it

47. ArŠ1: 3 (1) and ArŠ2: 6 (3, in association with Simurum). On the concept of Subir, see
Michalowski 1986, 1999a, 2008, as well as Steinkeller 1998. See now also Arkhipov 2002: 93–94.
48. BIN 9 332:18, dated IE9. The same name appears also in the undated tablet BIN 10
188:7.
49. This is, admittedly, a tenuous restoration, and there may not be enough space to justify
it. Note that ⸢ti-id⸣-nu-um ⸢ki⸣ is mentioned in Išbi-Erra Hymn Hymn A, in a very fragmentary
context (A iii 5).
50. On this watercourse, see above, p. 141.
196 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 3

took to offer the first edition of this difficult and fragmentary composition, try as I
might, I cannot see the traces of the first sign in the beginning word in line 4′ that
van Dijk read as [z]i-nu-um. 51 The second sign of his reading is not as clear as his
copy suggests, and while my own suggestion may not be much better, Zinnum’s name
is simply not present.

3. Hamazi (line 35)

The city or territory of Hamazi is first attested in a famous third-millennium dip-
lomatic letter from the Syrian city of Ebla (Neumann 2006: 2–3). Ur III documents
from the reign of Amar-Sin record the names of two persons who were designated as
énsi, Lu-Nanna and Ur-Iškur, but then in the latter part of Šu-Sin’s reign Hamazi
was part of the extensive border territories that were controlled, perhaps only nomi-
nally, by the grand vizier Arad-Nanna (Owen 1988: 116 n. 10). Ur-Iškur appears as
late as ŠS7.11.29 (PDT 1 475), when his bride, or daughter-in-law, Tabur-ḫaṭṭum,
traveled to Hamazi from Sumer. The Sumerian names of the two men may suggest
that they were governors appointed by the Crown, as do certain texts that suggest
that Hamazi contributed frontier taxes to the Ur III state. 52 There can be little doubt,
however, that Tabur-ḫaṭṭum was a royal daughter and, therefore, her marriage to the
ruling house of Hamazi suggests that it was a client state—though its status must
have fluctuated from independence to official incorporation into the kingdom of
Ur. 53 It is difficult to pinpoint where Hamazi lay, but the location could not have
been very far from Mesopotamia; all evidence points to the east, to the immediate
border region (Steinkeller 2010: 373 n. 19; see Appendix D).

4. Nur-aḫum (Nur-Ea), Ruler of Ešnunna (Line 36)

Ešnunna became independent of Ur at the time of Šu-iliya or perhaps even un-
der his predecessor Ituria, who was originally the appointed governor of the city
(Wu 1994: 2–11; Reichel 2001: 17). In true historical terms, Nur-aḫum was an in-
dependent ruler whose scribes used the Sumerian term énsi as a logogram for Akka-
dian iššiakum, “king,” although his predecessor Šu-iliya carried the Babylonian title
šarrum. At Ešnunna, the name is always written nu-úr-a-ḫu-um; curiously, in CKU it
is rendered as nu-úr-a-ḫi, just as in the only Ur III attestation of the name (TCCBI
2 35: 8, ŠS5.-.-, Nippur).

51. Van Dijk read the line as [z]i-nu-um lú-šu-ta-šub-ba-bi edin-bar-rim 4(maškim?)-
bi-im, and translated, “Quant à Zinnum, celui qui s’etait échappé, c’était dans la terre brûllée
de la steppe.” The ECTSL rendition is: “As for Zinnum, who escaped from them, Enki is their
maškim.” Vanstiphout (1989–90: 55) also accepted the reading of Zinnum’a name in the line.
52. E.g., JCS 31 166 A (AS8.5.8), or PDT 2 959 or MVN 15 179, neither of which can be
precisely dated but must come from late in the reign of Šu-Sin or early in the time of Ibbi-Sin.
53. Tabur-ḫaṭṭum, who is not always mentioned by name, is attested for almost a decade,
beginning with a cluster of texts from three successive days (17–19) in the eleventh month of
AS9, when Šu-Sin was already on the throne (BIN 3 382: 5; Ontario 1 160:2; Torino 1 261:2)
until ŠS7.11.29 (PDT 1 454: 3).
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 197

There is no better example of the difficulties of utilizing the CKU letters as

historical sources than the matter of the first years of independence of Ešnunna
in the waning years of the Ur III dynasty. Excavations at Tell Asmar, the modern
name of the city mound, have provided material and inscriptional data that provide
some information on these matters. In the first major publication of this material,
Thorkild Jacobsen (1940) provided a tentative reconstruction of the transition from
Ur III to independent rule in Ešnunna without mentioning the CKU, which was
then hardly known to the scholarly world. Subsequently, Falkenstein (1950) and
Jacobsen (1953) himself revealed the complex textual tradition of the Ibbi-Sin cor-
respondence, and since that time, all others who have studied the matter have used
this additional data in their analysis, adding them to the information gleaned from
the Asmar excavations.
Briefly stated, the currently accepted historical scenario can be summarized as
follows: In the latter half of Ibbi-Sin’s third year, Ešnunna’s governor Ituria, or pos-
sibly his son, Šu-ilija, turned his back on the king of Ur and declared autonomy.
Shortly thereafter, however, an invasion by “Subarians/Subartu” ended this experi-
ment in independence, but the situation was saved: Nur-aḫum, the “legitimate” ruler
of Ešnunna, was reinstated with the help of Išbi-Erra of Isin (Whiting 1987: 26; Wu
1994: 6; Reichel 2001a: 18; 2001b: 103; Saporetti 2002: 52). The supporting evi-
dence for this historical reconstruction consists of a year-name recovered from two
tablets from Ešnunna and of a passage from the Puzur-Numušda letter (PuIb1 [23]),
as interpreted originally by Jacobsen and accepted by all subsequent followers. The
pertinent lines of the epistle are:
34. Izi-in-nu-um énsi su-bir4ki-a šag̃aa i-ni-in-dab5
35. ha-ma-ziki nam-ra-aš im-mi-in-ak
36. Inu-úr-a-hi énsi èš-nun-naki
37. Išu-den-líl énsi kišiki-a
38. ù Ipuzur4-dtu-tu énsi bàd-zi-ab-baki
39. ki-ni-šè ba-an-gur-ru-uš
There are grammatical difficulties and ambiguities here that can result in differ-
ent translations; here is what I have settled on, justified in the commentary to the
edition:
34
(His ally), the ruler/governor Zinnum, took prisoners in Subir 35 (and) plundered
Hamazi. 36 Nur-aḫum, ruler of Ešnunna, 37 Šu-Enlil, ruler of Kish, 38 and Puzur-Tutu,
ruler of Borsippa 39 came over to his side.

Whiting (1987: 23), following Jacobsen, rendered it as follows:

He (Išbi-Erra) took captive Zinnum, ensi of Su-bir4ki, plundered Hamazi, (and) re-
turned Nur-aḫum, ensi of Eshnunna, Šu-Enlil, ensi of Kish, and Puzur-Tutu, ensi of
Bad-Ziabba, (each) to his place.

These events were then linked to the enigmatic year-name:

198 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 3

mu dtišpak lugal-e sag̃dux(SAG×DU) su-bir4-a-ke4 tibir2-ra bí-in-ra-a

The year that (the god) King Tišpak smashed the head of Subir.

Jacobsen (1940: 171) argued that this was the name of Nur-aḫum’s first year, and it
was the basis for the following observation by Whiting (1987: 24):
Since the Kazallu letter and the Eshnunna year date seem to agree on the fact that
Nur-aḫum came to the throne in the wake of a defeat of Subartu, it seems likely
that the two sources refer to the same event and that Nur-aḫum was placed on the
throne by Išbi-Erra. A corollary to this conclusion is that the reign of Nur-aḫum’s
predecessor, Šuilija, was brought to an end by a defeat at the hands of Subartu and
that the city of Eshnunna was in imminent danger of falling into its hands when
Išbi-Erra intervened.

More recently, Reichel (2001a: 18) claimed that:

Ešnunna’s powerful position seems to have ended around 2010 b.c. with an invasion
of Subartu, an event known from a letter written by Puzur-Numušda of Kazallu to
king Ibbi-Sin of Ur.

If my interpretation of the pertinent passage in PuIb1 (23) is correct, there is no evi-

dence for any “Subarian” intervention in the dynastic succession at Ešnunna, even if
a year-name from the city testifies to a military confrontation with some forces from
a region described as Subartu; all of these speculations on the history of Ešnunna
should be laid aside.

5. Šu-Enlil of Kish (Line 37)

Although a number of individuals having the name Šu-Enlil are known from
Ur III times, not one of them is a governor and none are connected in any way with
the city of Kish. The Babylonian city is first attested on Š43, but its governor is not
mentioned by name (Princeton 2 1 r. 5 i 2′). The city was still in the orbit of the Ur
kingdom in IS2.9.3 (MVN 10 144 r. iii 17) but disappears from the Ur III records
thereafter. An important individual named Šu-Enlil, unfortunately without any title,
appears in two texts from Ešnunna in texts that date from the time of Nur-aḫum, and
R. Whiting (1987: 23) suggests that he is “presumably the ensi of Kish mentioned
in the letter.” As with all other individuals mentioned in PuIb1 (23), with the pos-
sible exception of Girbubu, I have translated énsi as “ruler” rather than “governor,”
on the assumption that, by the time this letter was purportedly written, cities so far
north of Ur could not have been under the direct control of Ur, with the possible
exception of a small enclave around Girkal and Kazallu.

6. Puzur-Tutu of Badziaba (Line 38)

A governor of Babylon named ⸢puzur4-tu⸣-tu is mentioned in MVN 8 139 rev. ii
8 (IS 2.6.-). Frayne (1997: 379) identified this man with Puzur-Tutu of Badziaba of
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 199

the letter, noting that Borsippa is located only 18 kilometers from Babylon. 54 Other
than this, the name occurs only once in a text from AS7 (Ontario 1 70:6).
The place-name written as bàd-zi-ab-ba ki is unattested before the Old Baby-
lonian period, and the identification of Badziaba with Borsippa is uncertain. In later
times, it is well attested as a logographic writing for the name of the city, but it
is only a surmise that it was used for Borsippa in OB times or earlier. The writing
bàd-zi-ab-ba ki occurs only twice outside of CKU in OB: in a Nippur “forerunner”
to Hh XX–XXII (line 32, MSL 11 105), and in a school text dubbed The Slave and
the Scoundrel by its editor, Martha Roth (1983: 276 line 34). In documents and let-
ters of the OB period, the standard writing is bar-zi-pa, which is already attested
in texts from Isin from the time of Išbi-Erra (BIN 9 415 [IE25.3.16]; BIN 9 479
[IE25.7.-]; Rochester 243:24 [IE28.2.7]; BIN 9 391 [IE28.3.24]) and Šu-ilišu (BIN
9 452 [ŠI1.10.11?]). It is also mentioned in year-names of early kings of Babylon:
Sumu-la-el YN28 and Apil-Sin YN1c.
Following the repetition of the sentence “it was just as he had predicted” (line
42), Puzur-Numušda mentions two more proper names (lines 44–45).

7. Iddi of Malgium (Line 44)

The philological difficulties of line 44 are discussed in the commentary to
the text. Malgium, which lay somewhere on the Tigris close to the Diyala Valley
(Kutscher and Wilcke 1978: 101 n. 28), is not otherwise attested, to my knowledge,
before the time of Gungunum of Larsa (YN 19).

8. Girbubu of Girkal (45)

Until very recently, neither the personal name nor the city had been attested
in Ur III archival texts, but the general location of the latter could be deduced from
the introduction to the Code of Ur-Namma, where it is listed in tandem with Akšak,
Marad, and Kazallu. 55 According to Frayne (1992: 23), Girkal lay in the old Šulgi
defense zone, immediately adjacent to Apiak. In March, 2011, when this book was
already in page proofs, Piotr Steinkeller kindly informed me that the name occurs
in an Ur III tablet from the Schøyen Collection, MS 2643, which will be fully pub-
lished by Jacob Dahl; the photograph had been posted on the CDLI web site with
the number P251672. A person by the name of gir-bu-bu, who serves as ugula in
connection with workers from Adab, is listed on the last line of what seems to be the
reverse. The tablet is unprovenianced and undated, but it includes two individuals
with names that incorporate Šu-Sin’s name, and therefore it must have been com-
posed either in that ruler’s time or early in the reign of Ibbi-Sin. The document may
come from Umma, but because it mentions a number of otherwise unknown people

54. Modern Birs Nimrud, “located 17 km southwest of Babylon as the flow flies,” according
to Zadok (2006: 389).
55. See p. 130 above.
200 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 3

and waterways (in addition to the Tigris and íd-lugal), it is possible that it comes
from some other locality in the province, perhaps from the same place as the tablet
published by Michalowski and Daneshmand (2005).
As I understand Puzur-Numušda’s rhetoric, he is trying to convince the king of
Ur that his own situation is hopeless and that he must abandon Kazallu to Išbi-Erra.
All the major cities in the northern part of the kingdom have already allied them-
selves with the Isin monarch, as has Ešnunna on the other side of the Tigris. Only
neighboring Girkal tried to oppose Išbi-Erra’s man in Malgium, but its army was
defeated and its leader taken prisoner.
Ibbi-Sin to Puzur-Numušda (IbPu1, Letter 24)
The king’s answer to Puzur-Numušda pushes the limits of epistolary history-
making. The king chastises Puzur-Numušda for not confronting Išbi-Erra in tandem
with Girbubu, the governor of neighboring Girkal. Because he had just learned that
Girbubu had been captured by the Isin king, one must assume that this is a rhetorical
gesture, because the governor of Kazallu is now left without any allies in the region.
Among the issues raised is a war with Elam, which may refer to the final struggle
with eastern powers that led to the fall of Ur and to the subsequent battles that
Išbi-Erra fought with those very same forces—battles that appear to have been de-
scribed in poetic form in his Hymn B (van Dijk 1978) and can also be traced, albeit
imprecisely, in administrative records from Isin (Steinkeller 2008). According to
this letter, however, the easterners as well as the man of Isin are both portrayed as
enemies of Ur.
A long passage in the letter has a bearing on historical events and on the dating
of the missive itself. The crucial lines read as follows (IbPu1 [24]: 18–26, short ver-
sion A):
18
Enlil had earlier already come to hate Sumer,19 appointing a monkey descending
from its mountain (home) to the stewardship of the homeland. 20–21 But now Enlil
has handed kingship to a (mere) peddler of exotic spices, one who chases the wind, to
Išbi-Erra, who is not even of Sumerian descent. 22 Moreover, once the assembly of
the gods (decided) to scatter the (inhabitants of the) Sumer, 23 Father Enlil, having
conveyed his commands, proceeded to overthrow the homeland. 24 “As long as Ur is
imbued with evildoers, 25 Išbi-Erra, the man of Mari, will tear out its foundations, 26 and
Sumer will be measured out,” thus he spoke!

In lines 14–17, there is a contrast, as well as a disjunction, between two persons—

one unnamed but characterized in simian terms and the other, likewise represented
as foreign, who is specifically identified as Išbi-Erra. This is an important distinction;
there can be no doubt that in the semantic universe of this letter, the word “monkey”
does not refer to Išbi-Erra, as has often been thought, but must be a characterization
of someone else, undoubtedly “Elamites.” 56 Is it difficult to avoid the conclusion that

56. So, for example, Sjöberg 1993; Wilcke (1968: 60 n. 20) already suggested that this refers
to Elamites.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 201

this refers to events that provided the enigmatic name of Ibbi-Sin’s twenty-third, and
penultimate, year: mu di-bí.en.zu lugal uri 5ki-ma-ra úguugu 4-bi dugud kur-bi
mu-na-e-ra, “The year: The formidable/dumb monkeys struck out from its mountain
against Ibbi-Sin, king of Ur” (Sjöberg 1993: 211: n. 2). Note that the Gutians are
described as having the form of monkeys (ulutin ugu 4-bi) in the Curse of Agade
156, and the same expression is used to portray Amorites in the Marriage of Amur-
rum (line 127). Here it also characterizes highlanders, perhaps the Amorites, ac-
cording to IbIš1A 14′ (22), but the untrustworthy nature of the latter text makes it
highly unlikely. Therefore, one must conclude that the Ibbi-Sin letter, as well as the
year-name, refers to Kindattu and his cohorts, or to another Šimaškian leader. Most
important, if this holds true, it sets the Puzur-Numušda correspondence at the very
end of Ibbi-Sin’s reign; it also suggests that, in this epistolary universe at least, the
last king of Ur was at odds with both Išbi-Erra and with his enemies from the east.
The lines that follow further support the late setting of these letters. Lines 20–22
relate an oracle from the god Enlil, and the only way to make any sense of his words
is to assume that Ibbi-Sin was no longer in the capital, forced to withdraw to the
countryside, where he was still waging war against the enemy. If this were indeed the
case, it explains why there are no documents from Ur from the king’s last year. On
the other hand, such a historical reconstruction contradicts the poetic portrait of
Ibbi-Sin’s last days in Ur from the Lamentation over the Destruction of Sumer and Ur
(lines 105–106):
Ibbi-Sin sat in anguish in his palace, all alone,
In the Enamtila, the palace of his delight, bitterly he cried.

More specifically, an earlier passage in the poem describes the fate of the last king of
Ur, as decreed by the great divinities of Sumer (lines 34–37):
That its shepherd be captured all alone in his palace by the enemy,
That Ibbi-Sin be taken to the land of Elam in fetters,
That from the sand dunes of Sabum, on the edge of the sea, to the borders of Anšan
Like a bird that has flown his nest, never to return to his city . . .”
The historical record leaves us with little information that could inform a choice
between the two literary depictions of the last days of the last king of Ur. The frag-
mentary Išbi-Erra Hymn B, in its opening section, apparently described some of these
events, but only traces of the narrative remain:
He went south in splendor . . .
Like snake spitting venom he approached with evil intent,
[His army] wiped out the . . . of Sumer,
. . . in the desert of Ur
He killed many people. 57

57. Col. ii 3–7 (van Dijk 1978: 192; Vanstiphout 1989–90: 54). This composition is badly
preserved, and too many lines were restored by its first editor. I have collated the original tablets
202 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 3

The apologetic and self-legitimating nature of Išbi-Erra’s “historical” hymns caution

against taking them at face value. There is, however, some evidence that Išbi-Erra’s
armies fought with Elamites in the south at a time that must be correlated with the
very last year, or possibly the last two years, of Ibbi-Sin, as Piotr Steinkeller (2008)
has discovered. Three accounts from Isin, dated IE15 = IS24, refer to battles with
Elamites, and one of them relates that the army was at one point in Uruk during
these campaigns. 58 These events were used to name Išbi-Erra’s sixteenth year:
mu diš-bi-èr-ra lugal-e ugnim šimaški ù elam-(e) bí-(in)-ra
The year King Išbi-Erra defeated the armies of Šimaški and Elam.
If the chronology is correct, this suggests that at the last moment Išbi-Erra moved
south to save Ibbi-Sin or to protect his own kingdom from the enemy armies that
had attacked from the east. 59 In the epistolary universe of CKU, however, the rulers
of Ur and Isin were at odds to the very end, or very near it.
Whatever his motivations, Išbi-Erra only succeeded in saving himself; the Ur
kingdom fell to the armies from the east, and it would be almost a decade before the
forces of Isin would be able to drive the Elamite garrison out of the old capital. All
indications are, as much as one can be certain in light of such slight evidence, that
Išbi-Erra and Ibbi-Sin were forced to fight off elements of the same invasion from
the east, but while the former managed to come out on top, the latter was unable to
resist, was defeated, and, if later traditions are to be believed, was led off to Anšan
weeping, never to return. 60

Structural and Literary Aspects of the

Puzur-Numušda Correspondence
The epistolary exchange between the governor of Kazallu and the soon-to-be-
toppled last king of Ur is unique in the literary letter corpus—indeed, in all of Su-

more than once and find many of the restorations difficult to accept. Until new duplicates surface,
very little can be said about this poem, but my personal impression is that it mainly deals with the
aftermath of the fall of Ur and describes Išbi-Erra’s victories over the forces that were responsible
for the defeat of Ur.
58. BIN 9 152, 338; BIN 10 124 (the latter mentions Uruk).
59. Steinkeller reconstructs the events differently, preferring to see two separate encounters
between the armies of Isin and those of Kindattu. I see no reason not to assume that the texts of
IE15 and the name of YN16 refer to the same events. I am also assuming that Ibbi-Sin was on the
throne for 24 years; Steinkeller is more cautious and does not commit himself to a 24 or 25-year
reign.
60. According to a first-millennium astronomical omen, “if the Yoke Star in its appearance
faces towards the west, you watch the whole sky, and if no wind stirs, there will be famine, a di-
sastrous sign. (It is an omen) of Ibbi-Sin, who went to Anšan in captivity, weeping” (Koch-West-
enholz 1995: 35 n. 1). One text provides an alternative “stumbling (on the way)” for “weeping”
(Reiner 1974: 261). For similar portents, see Glassner 1997: 110. See p. 213 below.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 203

merian literature—for its structural and intertextual complexity. All of the RCU
was read with a considerable dose of hindsight in Old Babylonian times, driven, if
nothing else, by the very fact of its attribution to long-dead correspondents. The
drama of the last days of Ur, however, known to latter-day readers from a variety of
other poetic and mantic sources, provided a canvas for reflection and commentary on
historical and epistolary veracity, the reliability of messages from the divine world,
and finally, at the risk of considerable anachronism on my part, on the very nature
of fiction and discourse.
The letter to the king (PuIb1 [23]) begins—uniquely in all of Sumerian literary
epistolography—with an embedded first-person message from Išbi-Erra (lines 6–28).
This message, moreover, begins with a third-person summary of an oracle that the
ruler of Isin had received from the god Enlil (lines 6–13). All of this is presented as
the words of Išbi-Erra, as relayed by an envoy, but there can be little doubt that this
is intended to represent a prototypical scene of a sender’s messenger reading aloud
a letter at its destination. In this manner, a message is embedded in a letter that, in
turn, is dropped verbatim into yet another epistle.
These concentric referential circles reach a full climax in the king’s reply, in
which he references the full text of the previous letter, complete with all of its em-
bedded messages. This inclusio is accomplished in an unusual manner, by citing the
first and last lines of PuIb1 [23] (IbPu1: 6–8 [24]):
6
How could you send someone to me (with a letter beginning) thus: 7“Išbi-Erra has
presented his matter before me,” 8(and ending with) “and as far as I am concerned,
when he finally strikes, I will have to flee!”

But the succession of messages does not end at this high point; the text of IbPu1
turns back and becomes a narrative mirror image of the text that it quotes, as it
proceeds to narrate a rival communication from the god Enlil (IbPu1: 20–22 [23]),
but unlike the one described by Išbi-Erra, this message is reported as direct speech,
perhaps intended to justify the fact that it must supersede the previous one in this
multilayered narrative exchange.
The only other letters that refer directly to some previous correspondence are
the first two epistles of CKU, and by paraphrasing rather than directly quoting, they
offer two different perspectives on the instructions that motivated the preserved ex-
change but are not attested directly in any letter. In the first letter of CKU, the grand
vizier Aradmu reports to King Šulgi (ArŠ1: 2–8 [1]):
8
You commanded me, 3 while I was on an expedition to Subir, 4 to firmly secure the
taxes on the frontier territory, 5 to thoroughly investigate the state of (this) frontier,
6–7
to confer (with the elites of Subir) about the prefect Apilaša and have them
come to agreement, 8 so that he could bring to them (i.e., the Subir elites) up-to-date
instructions.

In his reply, the monarch summarizes his interpretation of his own instructions thus
(ŠAr1: 6–16 [2]):
204 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 3
6
As far as I am concerned, you were to make the frontier territory secure as my rep-
resentative, 7 to organize the people and keep them obedient, 8 and once you reached
the cities of the frontier, to discern their attitudes 9 and to learn what their dignitar-
ies are saying, 10 so that my battle cry would fill the mountains, 11 my mighty battle
weapons fall upon the foreign lands, 12 and my “storm” cover over the homeland!
13
“Drop (chasing) winds in the wilderness and robbers in the fields! 14 Until you have
reached my prefect Apilaša, 15 ignore all of this so that you can . . . your face before him
(without delay)!” 16 Thus did I command you!

This disagreement about interpretation, at the very outset of the school study of
CKU, sets the stage for an underlying questioning of textual authority that will be
taken up, more radically, at the very end, in the final section of the Ur III royal cor-
respondence, in the Ibbi-Sin/Puzur-Numušda letters.
The succession of letters within letters in the last items of CKU anticipates, mil-
lennia earlier, the device known to literary and film critics as mise en abyme, a term
originally adapted to literary analysis by André Gide in 1893 that was resurrected and
elaborated in various ways in the second half of the twentieth century. While there
are many works on the subject, including a well-known full-length work by Lucien
Dällenbach (1977) and an important essay by the same author, opinions differ as to
the narrative significance of this rhetorical device. 61 As Ron (1987: 434) summarizes
the latter, “mise en abyme always ironically subverts the representational intent of the
narrative text, disrupting where the text aspires to integration, integrating where the
text is deliberately fragmentary.” This is an issue that requires a much broader discus-
sion, and I will return to it in a different context, but for the present purpose it will
suffice to argue that the use of these mirroring devices in the two Sumerian letters
serves to undermine the illusion of closure imposed by the literary form and at the
same time underscore their artfulness. To take this even further, they subvert any no-
tions of historical veracity and point the reader steadfastly in the direction of fiction.
At the same time, this kind of structural mirroring and embedding brings attention
to what Patricia Rosenmeyer (2001: 172) has designated as the kinetic function of
letters in narrative, “actively causing and reacting to events.”
The artifice of the Puzur-Numušda letter (PuIb1 [23]) is further accentuated by
the exegesis of the embedded Išbi-Erra missive that is offered by the author. This is
done in two parts, both introduced by the formula “it was just as he had predicted,”
in lines 29 and 42. 62 The only other Sumerian literary composition that has such a
structural element is Gilgameš and Aga (line 93), although the sentence also occurs
in one nonstandard manuscript of Gilgameš, Enkidu, and the Netherworld from Ur.
63
The first passage in question reads, in translation (Gilgameš and Aga lines 69–81;
89–99):

61. For a slightly revised vision of his ideas, see Dällenbach 1980. An important and suc-
cinct critique of various approaches to the problem is presented by Ron (1987).
62. bí-in-du 11-ga-gin 7-nam, literally, “it was just as he had said.”
63. UET 6/1 60: r. 14′; see Cavigneaux and Al-Rawi 2000a: 8; Gadotti 2005: 302. The con-
text is difficult, and both offer very different interpretations.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 205

“Slave—that man, is he your king? ”

No, that man is not my king!
If that man were my king,
If that was his furious brow,
If those were his bison eyes,
If that was his lapis beard,
If those were his beneficent fingers (pointing blessings), 64
Would not millions fall, would not millions rise,
Would not millions . . . in the dust,
Would not all the lands submit,
Would not the entrance to the frontier be filled with dust,
Would not the prows of barges be cut off?
Would not Aga, king of Kish, be taken prisoner in the midst of his own army?
...
Then Gilgameš peered over the city wall:
Upon seeing him, Aga fixed his eyes (on Enkidu, and said):
“Slave—that man, is he your king? ”
“Yes, that man is my king!”
It was just as he had predicted:
Millions fell, millions rose,
Millions . . . in the dust,
All the lands submitted,
The entrance to the frontier was filled with dust,
Prows of barges were cut off,
And Aga, king of Kish, was taken prisoner in the midst of his own army.

There are good reasons to believe that Gilgameš and Aga is an Old Babylonian cre-
ation, quite possibly composed as a parody lampooning the whole Ur III divine-king-
ship tradition, and therefore one must wonder if there is any intertextual connection
between the Puzur-Numušda epistle and this particular Gilgameš story. 65 But while
the Gilgameš passage provides a simple contrast between rhetorical question and
answer, between hypothetical negative and assertion, using precisely the same topics
with different grammar, the letter uses the phrase “it was just as he had predicted”
in a more complex and subtle manner. The Gilgameš and Aga passage rips into the
heart of the image of charismatic divine kingship; the very appearance of the ancient
hero, emanating godly aura, his fingers on the parapet and only his head showing, is
enough to make the world tremble and the enemy king to surrender with his army.
The ironic mode is signaled here, as in the Ibbi-Sin letters, by the mirroring mise en
abyme of the passage.
In his letter, Puzur-Numušda echoes the very words of Išbi-Erra but then pro-
ceeds to explain the man’s actions further in his own words. The use of the same
phrase here is not identical, but it serves similar narrative reception purposes.

64. I owe this interpretation of šu-si sa 6 to Jerrold Cooper.

65. Wilcke (1998) already argued for an OB date of this composition, but he based his pro-
posal on grammatical criteria that I do not find convincing; see p. 216 below and Rubio, in press.
206 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 3

A very different set of references to the historical/literary tradition is embedded

in the long version of the letter of Išbi-Erra to Ibbi-Sin. In a section that comprises
words of supposed encouragement by the once and future usurper to the king whose
place he will soon take, we find the following words (IšIb1 [21]: 35–55):
35
Ur, city of wisdom, linking the upper and lower regions; 36having been built
by Great Prince (Enki), the exorcist, (it is a city) whose façade is precious (to the
people), 37one endowed with cosmic rites, whose foundations and ground plans are
secure (among all the) lands, south to north,38 it will surely be spared and its (favorable
divine) decision announced!
39
(Temple) Ekišnug̃al, shrine that envelops the upper and lower regions, without
rival—40the Elamite, an evil vicious dog, 41will not defile it, nor render asunder its
guardian deities! 42My king, all the loudest noisemakers have run away.
43
Ibbi-Sin, beloved by the gods as he came out of the womb—44An, Enlil, and
Enki, looked so favorably upon him! 45Established . . . so that its front be secure. 46As
long as the gates of Ur stay open, 47. . . will be saying, “Who is really king? ” 48But it
is you who are the king to whom Enlil gave no rival! 49So do not. . . , so be of good
spirits! 50(He/they) has/have taken revenge, and secured its foundations for you. 51Not
being . . . may your spirit be happy! 52As long as my king is alive, he will exercise
kingship over Ur, 53and (I will do) for him whatever my king might command me
to do! 54Please, I will not neglect (your orders)! 55By Utu, I will not change my
allegiance!

There are no direct quotations, but the poetic language used by Išbi-Erra may be
imagined to invoke, albeit in reverse, the diction of the two compositions that had a
strong presence in the school curriculum, The Lamentation over the Destruction of Ur
and The Lamentation over the Destruction of Sumer and Ur. Moreover, the expression
“Who is really king? ” is taken verbatim from The Sumerian King List, making a direct
allusion to the last days of the Akkad dynasty. 66
The appeal to literature itself situates these two letters, and by implication the
whole range of school epistles, in the realm of fiction, as I have already suggested.
At the very least, it questions their value as historical witnesses, creating a semiotic
web of indeterminacy and undermining the illusion of narrative closure as implied by
the “reality effect.” If so, this may be still another marker, in native Mesopotamian
terms, of the fictionality of the Puzur-Numušda correspondence, although readers
would react to this differently, depending on their attitude toward the verisimilitude
of these literary compositions. That is not to say that the letter “is not true,” in prag-
matic positivistic terms—only that some Old Babylonian readers would have reasons
to read the text on a variety of levels if they caught the internal signals by which the
two letters undermined their own narrative authority.
The author, or authors, of the tradition represented by the longer versions of
IšIb1 (21) and IbPu1 (24) exploited these complex textual strategies further. The
most important surviving witness to this dynamic process of reinterpretation is the

66. See the commentary to the letter.

 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 207

collective tablet of unknown provenience that contains all four items of the Ibbi-
Sin correspondence, including the long version of the first and fourth letter and
one of only two surviving manuscripts of the second letter (IbIš1 [22]). This tablet,
which is dated to the twenty-seventh year of Samsu-iluna, represents a tradition
that developed outside of Nippur, Ur, and the other cities that used similar instruc-
tional materials and was written just as Nippur was being abandoned by many of the
elite. 67 All the other tablets with longer versions of this correspondence are likewise
un­provenienced; it is possible that two of them are from Larsa, but the reasons for
thinking so are not very convincing and there is a remote possibility that the tablet
with the full collection was written in Sippar, although this does not necessarily mean
that its conceptual innovations originated there (Michalowski 2006a: 254–55).
It is impossible to know, given gaps in our present knowledge, if this particular
collective tablet is but one token of a broader textual tradition, the solitary work of
one student, or a one-of-a-kind exercise created ad hoc by an inspired teacher. What-
ever its origins, the end result is an exceptional narrative: the concatenation of four
letters created a connected story about certain aspects of the final moments of the
last king of Ur, constituting what can be justifiably called the first epistolary novel.
The plot centers on the contentious relationships between the king and two indi-
viduals: the man who would succeed him as the next ruler of Sumer and the last of
his loyal provincial governors. But this version of the story takes the contradictions
concerning textual authority and shifts them to a slightly different area, amplifying
certain aspects to focus on divine sanction that is invoked by the protagonists.
The long version of IbPu1 (24) contains a novel section that is absent in the
short version from Nippur and elsewhere. In these new lines, Ibbi-Sin describes in
detail a divine message he had received in the form of a liver omen (IbPu1: 33–45
[24]):
33
Father Enlil, by means of his angry commands, has overthrown the homeland.
34
Come now, he has returned to my side! 35My complaints were submitted by humble
prayer, 36and Great Lord Enlil heard me out; 37he cast his favorable glance upon me,
38
set his holy heart on mercy, 39and established for me my favorable omen. 40And
after I had the follow-up reading made concerning his pars familiaris and my pars
hostilis, 41the weapon-mark on my right side, its trunk is straight, and that (good
news) gave me joy; 42on the weapon-mark on his (i.e., Išbi-Erra’s) left side a filament
is suspended, it is placed (against) the other side. 43(The message was:) “My enemy
shall fall into my hands, he shall be killed, 44the people will come out of darkness
into the light, and lie in peaceful habitations.” 45Utu, lord who makes the decisions
of the heavens and the earth, has provided (this) omen.

This remarkable passage contains the only Old Babylonian liver omen in the Su-
merian language, and it clearly represents a clever attempt to create a whole new
vocabulary, since all of the technical extispicy terms were Akkadian. Moreover, the
form of the omen, with a protasis and apodosis, mirrors the learned omen compendia,

67. A 7475; described above on p. 56 as compilation tablet Xa.

208 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 3

not the practical concerns of the omen reports of the time, and thus all of this points
to the world of learned speculation and scholarship rather than to Sumerian school
literature or to everyday mantic practice. 68 Indeed, there are good reasons to believe
that extispicy became a dominant form of divination only during the Old Babylo-
nian period and that prior to that time the main form of predicting the future from
animals was from their behavior, not from their organs. Most important, extispicy is
completely absent from the intellectual horizon of Sumerian poetics, and therefore
the insertion of an imaginary Sumerian omen, complete with invented Sumerian
technical terminology, marks the oppositional and polemic nature of this textual
insertion. 69
There are many fascinating aspects of this passage, but in this context one stands
out above all others: the reader, armed with historical knowledge and the resulting
hindsight, knows that the omen, as reprised and interpreted by Ibbi-Sin, was false,
because the Old Babylonian readers were well aware, as are we, that it never came
true and that the last descendant of Ur-Namma was led into captivity, his kingdom
in ruins. This is also true of the Nippur versions, but in them the matter is only noted
in passing without the explicit amplification of the issue. The invocation of extispicy
is important here, because it serves to displace the blame for the fall of Ur and Sumer
to foreign forces from the mundane world of both Ibbi-Sin and Išbi-Erra and to situ-
ate it in the transcendent sphere, as I shall argue below; but for now, I would like to
stay with the matter of the omen.
Does this text undermine faith in divine messages and in their interpreters or
does it question royal veracity? Does it subvert belief in epistolary narrative or just
play games with different versions of history? One can only speculate on the answers
to these questions, but there can be little doubt that the author or authors of the long
version were very much concerned with the power of textual authority—both with
tablets inscribed by humans and with exta inscribed by gods—in a new intellectual
universe that was concerned with the process of interpretation and the very mean-
ing of signs. In the self-congratulatory literature from the court of Išbi-Erra, Enlil
is frequently invoked as the patron of the new master of Sumer, most ominously in
Hymn B, where a broken passage at the beginning seems to imply that the end of Ur
was decreed by the high god: 70

68. I discussed this passage in Michalowski 2006a and do not repeat most of that analysis
here. The transliteration and translation offered here, based on new collations, differ in small de-
tails. Other than this literary fabrication, the earliest known Sumerian omen comes from Kassite
Nippur (Veldhuis 2000: 74).
69. I discussed this in a paper entitled “Observations on Divination and Extispicy in Early
Mesopotamia” at the Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale in Paris, July 2009; it will be pub-
lished in the near future.
70. Išbi-Erra Hymn B col. i 4′–7′ (van Dijk 1978: 191; Vanstiphout 1989–90: 54). The Su-
merian (collated) reads: 4′ [. . .]-ib-dug 4 5′ [. . .] uru ki du 6-du 6-da šed-e-dè 6′ [. . .]-dè nam
im-ma-ni-in-tar 7′ [. . .]-bal den-lí l á-dah-bi-im.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 209

. . . was decreed, by the command of Enlil

. . . to count the city as ruins,
. . . to . . ., he decreed it fate,
. . . was overturned, and Enlil assisted in these (events).

Perhaps this text was too obscure to matter, but to any reader, this passage could not
but invoke a very different literary composition that was better known in antiquity, a
poem that describes the death and journey to the Netherworld of the founder of the
Third Dynasty of Ur (Ur-Namma Hymn A 8–9):
The god An altered his sacred established words, . . .
The god Enlil deceitfully changed established destiny. 71
This literary association, which could have been triggered by both the short and long
redactions of IbPu1 [24], creates a form of semantic closure that dialectically pushes
against the open semantic indeterminacy pursued by other narrative strategies in
the Ibbi-Sin correspondence. In this literary universe, the parallelism between the
destinies of the first and last kings of Ur, both deceived by their divine master Enlil,
mirror the historical focal points of the dynasty, bookended by highland invasion
and occupation.
These thoughts bring me back to some of what I wrote in the introductory chap-
ter on Sumerian letters, where I invoked the subversive—and I would also say ki-
netic—image of letters in texts such as Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta and in the
Sumerian tale about Sargon and Ur-Zababa. In both poems, letters function as strong
movers of plot, and in both they subvert the existing order of things. The Sargon
story, in which a letter, unknown to its carrier, contains an order for his very own
execution, is particularly significant, because it focuses attention on the deadly im-
plications of epistolography. 72 The composition is known from only two manuscripts,
one of which was found in House F in Nippur, which also contained exemplars of
the CKU. 73
The fictional and world-creating semantic and structural aspects of the Puzur-
Numušda correspondence fit in well with views about epistolary exchanges that sur-
face in these stories. Indeed, if I may be permitted to cite Claudio Guillén (1986:
78) once again:
In the history of our civilization letters have signified a crucial passage between
orality to writing itself—or a practical interaction between the two. As écriture,
it begins to involve the writer in a silent, creative process if self-distancing and
self-modeling, leading perhaps, as in autobiography, to fresh knowledge or even to
fiction.

71. The lines are difficult; for the Sumerian, and for a slightly different translation, see
Flückiger-Hawker 1999: 102.
72. See pp. 20–21 above.
73. Both are edited in Cooper and Heimpel 1983, but it is not at all certain that both tablets
belong to the same composition (see now also Attinger 2010: 1 n. 2).
210 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 3

Mesopotamian Perceptions of the Fall of Ur

I began this chapter with the statement that the fall of Ur was one of the dra-
matic moments of Mesopotamian history. For us moderns, this is certainly the case,
if for no other reason than it provides a rhetorically apposite ending for chapters in
history books. As an example of prevailing opinion, I cite the combined opinion of
two major scholars, A. K. Grayson and W. G. Lambert (1964: 9), even if it was writ-
ten almost half a century ago:
Although Ur was captured by an enemy many times throughout its long history, the
occasion which impressed the Babylonians most was its fall under Ibbi-Sin at the
beginning of the second millennium.

But was this event truly important in antiquity? Were there significant memorial tra-
ditions concerning Ibbi-Sin and the collapse of his kingdom in Mesopotamian writ-
ings? In answering such questions, one must be careful not to select data from various
texts from different times, taking them out of context and assembling them into a
seemingly coherent narrative. A brief survey of the pertinent information, starting
with the surviving Old Babylonian materials, sheds important light on the matter.
As already described above, the Ur III collapse is the subject of four distinct
textual traditions: the CKU, the city laments, hymns of Išbi-Erra, and divination
compendia. As we have seen earlier in this chapter, the different elements of the
Ibbi-Sin correspondence are unevenly distributed and do not coalesce into a coher-
ent consistent narrative. The city laments are a poetic genre that differs radically
from the prose of the literary letters, although their secondary context, as school
literature, places them alongside the CKU. What sets them apart from the letters,
however, is their central standing in the curriculum, as measured by the compara-
tively large numbers of duplicates of both poems, which contrasts with the relatively
marginal educational use of the letters, which are known in a much smaller number
of copies. Moreover, they differ in their origin. Many years ago, Thorkild Jacobsen,
writing about the Lamentation over the Destruction of Ur, suggested that laments were
related to other cultic texts such as balag̃s and therefore were recited at ceremonies
associated with the reconstruction of temples. 74 Such a hypothesis places their com-
memorative poetics within the context of the immediate present, where the past is
only a matter invoked to provide a legitimating background for the glory of the mon-
arch whose patronage allows the rebuilding to move forward. Since poems of this
genre focus on the destruction of temples and on the interruption of cultic activities,
their metaphorical language, geared toward collapse and renewal, is by definition
catastrophic. But even if the laments can be analyzed together from a generic point

74. “When we consider that the balag formed part of the service at the rebuilding of tem-
ples, that the present composition aims directly at the rebuilding of Ur and its holy places, and
that the date of its composition can be narrowed down to the time before that rebuilding began,
there seems little reason to doubt that we are here reading the very balag written for and used at
the restoration of Ur by the Isin kings” (Jacobsen 1941: 223).
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 211

of view, only one of them—The Lamentation over the Destruction of Sumer and Ur—
actually mentions Ibbi-Sin by name and refers directly to the various enemies who
were thought to have taken part in the final assault on his kingdom. I shall return to
the Lamentation below, but first it is necessary to take a brief look at the other Old
Babylonian texts that focused on the events surrounding the fall of Ur.
Two poems, Išbi-Erra Hymn A and Išbi-Erra Hymn B, describe events linked to
the fall of Ur from the perspective of the administration of the ruler who contributed
to its collapse but who represented himself as the avenger and heir to the throne of
Sumer and Akkad. Unlike other compositions of this type, they uniquely describe
historical events with some specificity, even if their fragmentary state of preservation
hides much of the detail. But not only are these poems different from other royal
hymns, they are also known from only one manuscript each, both from Nippur, and
are undoubtedly marginal in the Old Babylonian school curriculum. This is hardly
surprising, because the same holds true for all of the hymns of both Ibbi-Sin and his
rival, Išbi-Erra.
Unlike his father Šulgi, whose self-praise was drummed into the memories of
aspiring scribes with unrelenting lines of poetry, the last king of Ur was hardly known
to the schoolboys of Nippur. Of the five existing hymns in the name of Ibbi-Sin, only
one is attested in more than one exemplar.
Išbi-Erra, even if he was the founder of the Isin dynasty whose kings commis-
sioned many hymns that were subsequently incorporated into the curriculum, was
also but a shadowy figure in Old Babylonian schools, rarely encountered by students
outside of their work on portions of CKU. Of his five hymns, only two are docu-
mented by more than one source—Hymn C and Nidaba Hymn C, which mentions
his name but is usually not classified as one of his hymns. The former, a short tigi in
honor of the goddess Nanaja, is preserved on one Nippur tablet and two of unknown
origin. The latter is the only relatively widely distributed hymn that mentions Išbi-
Erra’s name, if only in passing. 75
One cannot avoid the conclusion that literary texts concerning Išbi-Erra were
very rarely utilized in Old Babylonian schooling and that this contrasts markedly
with the strong presence of his latter-day successors Iddin-Dagan, Lipit-Eštar, and
especially Išme-Dagan, who is represented by no less than 21 royal hymns (Ludwig
1990; Tinney 1995). The poetry of these Isin rulers looks back for its inspiration to
the works written in the name of Šulgi, not to the short-lived literary innovations
of Išbi-Erra.
The Lamentation over the Destruction of Sumer and Ur allocates no culpability for
the collapse of the state to any Mesopotamian mortal, unhesitatingly assigning all
responsibility to the transcendent sphere. Ibbi-Sin, Išbi-Erra—who is never men-
tioned in the poem—and even the highland forces that carry out the destruction are

75. The hymns of Ibbi-Sin have been edited by Sjöberg (1972); for the Išbi-Erra hymns,
see Michalowski 2005a. Nidaba Hymn C had broad distribution but few manuscripts, attested
in single exemplars from Uruk, Kish, Isin, and three from Nippur (see my forthcoming edition).
212 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 3

only actors in a drama orchestrated by higher powers: the gods and goddesses, fate,
and history.
How different this all is from the Lamentation’s generic prior text, the Curse of
Agade. In the latter, the collapse of the state is the direct result of the hubris and
impetuous impiety of the king of the land, Naram-Sin, but behind all of this one
can detect the manipulative hand of the god Enlil, whose provocative silence pushes
Naram-Sin into action. The poem begins with a description of the heights achieved
by the Agade regime and of the riches that fill the temples of its gods. But all of this
apparently did not please the god Enlil, and the “words from the Ekur (temple) were
as silence.” 76 The gods and goddesses withdraw their protection of the city, and then
the king has a dream forecasting its fall. After seven years, he apparently decides to
rebuild Enlil’s temple in order to obtain favor but cannot obtain favorable omens
to undertake the task. Finally, aggravated by divine silence, he destroys the sacred
shrine of Sumer, thus assuring divine retribution and the end of his kingdom. By
contrast, Ibbi-Sin is never accused of any misdeeds and is merely an actor in a drama
directed from on high, deprived of any meaningful agency. This is understandable
because the Sumerian language texts in which he appears belonged to the school cur-
riculum that had Ur III roots but was reconfigured during a time Išbi-Erra’s successors
on the throne of Isin ruled Nippur. These kings claimed to be the rightful successors
of Ur, and their legitimating strategies would not have been well served by dwelling
on the collapse of Ibbi-Sin’s kingdom.
Finally, there is the matter of the so-called “historical omens.” I shall disregard
the issue of their historical veracity, which is irrelevant to the present discussion
(Reiner 1974; Cooper 1980). Omen apodoses mentioning Ibbi-Sin and Išbi-Erra are
known from Old Babylonian omen compendia, and the former is already mentioned
in the earliest surviving extispicy texts, the Early Old Babylonian liver omens from
Mari (Rutten 1938). Although Reiner (1974: 261) has rightly described these types
of apodoses as “historiettes” rather than “history,” the narrow focus of the omens that
recall the last days of Ur undoubtedly reflect the limited memories of these events
that resonated through time. The Ibbi-Sin apodoses most often refer simply to disas-
ter, those of Išbi-Erra to his routing of the Elamites who had occupied Ur. The Old
Babylonian omen apodoses concerning these rulers are:

Ibbi-Sin 77
Early Old Babylonian Liver Models from Mari
a. a-mu-ut, ṣú-ḫa-ra-im, si i-bi-den.zu, ba-táq, ma-ti-šu i-ba-al-ki-ti-šu, “omen of the
diminishing (of the land) pertaining to Ibbi-Sin, the end of the country, they? will
rebel against him” (Rutten 1938 no. 6)

76. Curse of Agade 57: inim é-kur-ra me-gin 7 ba-an-g̃ ar.

77. See already Jacobsen 1953: 38–39 n. 18. Omens concerning Ibbi-Sin have been col-
lected by Weidner 1929: 236–37; Nougayrol 1945; Goetze 1947: 261–62; Glassner 1997: 109–10.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 213

b. i-nu-mi, i-bí-den.zu, ma-su, i-ba-al-ki-tù-šu, a-ni-u-um, ki-am i-sá-kin, “when the

land revolted against Ibbi-Sin, this is how (the liver) was constituted” (Rutten
1938 no. 7)
c. a-mu-ut, i-bí-den.zu, sá u-ra-am, elamki a-na ti-li, ú kàr-me5 iš-ku-un, “omen of Ibbi-
Sin, under whom Elam turned Ur into ruins” (Rutten 1938 no. 8)

Old Babylonian Omen Compilations

d. a-mu-ut, i-bi-den.zu ša ma-tum ip-ḫu-ru-nim, “omen of Ibbi-Sin, against whom the
land gathered (in revolt)” (YOS 10 36 i: 1314)
e–g. a-mu-ut i-bi-den.zu ša ša-aḫ-lu-uq-tim, “omen of Ibbi-Sin—of disaster,” (YOS 10
13: 1; 14: 10–11; 22: 12)
h. a-mu-ut i-bi-den.zu, ša-aḫ-lu-uq-tum. “omen of Ibbi-Sin—disaster,” (YOS 10 56: i
40-41)
i. te-er-tum ši-i, ša ša-aḫ,-ma-as-ti, i-bi-den.zu, “this is an omen of the turmoil (during
the time of) Ibbi-Sin,” (YOS 10 31 xiii: 2–5)

Išbi-Erra
Early Old Babylonian Liver Model from Mari
j. a-mu-ut, iš-bi-èr-ra, sá elamki, da-gi!-íl-šu, ú elamki íl-ga-a, “omen of Išbi-Erra, who
(first) put his trust in Elam, and then captured Elam,” (Rutten 1938 no. 9)

Old Babylonian Omen Compilation

k. giš.tukul Iiš-bi-èr-ra, ša e-la-am-tam is-ki-pu, “weapon-mark of Išbi-Erra, who drove
out Elam,” (YOS 10 46 v 5-6)
The sample is admittedly quite small, but within it one can observe that the Mari
livers and the later Babylonian omens share general perspectives on the two rulers
but differ in detail. Omens (a) and (d), as well as (j) and (k) express similar view-
points, but the wording is significantly dissimilar. Ibbi-Sin, in the Old Babylonian
tradition, seems associated quite simply with “disaster,” and these apodeses (e–i),
find strong echoes in canonical omen compendia, as in the following two examples:
šaḫluqtu (níg̃.ha.lam.ma) amūt (bà-ut) i-bí-d30 šar uri (⸢lugal uri5⸣ki), “disaster; omen
of Ibbi-Sin, king of Ur ” (CT 20 13 r. 12)
amūt (bà-ut) Ii-bí-d30 šá šaḫluqti (níg̃.ha.lam.ma), “omen of Ibbi-Sin, of disaster”
(TCL 6 1: 35)

The celestial omen series Enūma Anu Enlil included four omens concerning Ibbi-
Sin, three of them relating how he was led in tears—or stumbling—into captivity to
Anšan (Glassner 1997: 110–11; see also n. 60 above, p. 202). 78

78. The literary tradition expands this motif in the cultic sphere. According to the Emesal
Damu lament eden-na ù-sag˜ -g˜ á Ibbi-Sin was buried in Anšan; see Jacobsen 1997: 78. The la-
ment must go back to the Ur III period, if not earlier (Cooper 2006: 42), but was revised in Old
214 The Royal Letters in Their Historical Setting 3

Although the figure of the last king of the House of Ur-Namma is present
throughout the history of the Babylonian omen tradition, the same cannot be said of
his rival, Išbi-Erra. There are only two Old Babylonian omens concerning the king
of Isin, as transliterated above, and, as far as I can discern, there are only two more
in the later tradition, only one of which is complete: 79
amūt (bà-ut) iš-bi-dèr-ra šá maḫira (gaba.ri) la (nu) irši (tuk-⸢ši⸣), “omen of Išbi-Erra
who had no opponent” (Leichty 1970: 83 l. 105)

The cultural significance of these omens is difficult to evaluate, however, because of

uncertainties concerning the textual context of Old Babylonian compendia. Almost
all of them are unprovenienced, and while it has been speculated that some may
have originated in Sippar or Larsa (Glassner 2009), the evidence is circumstantial
at best. The fact that the only well-provenienced compendia appear to come from
contexts distinct from that of standard Sumerian school tablets is indicative of the
difficulties we have in understanding the place of these compositions in Old Baby-
lonian written culture. 80 Glassner (2009) argues that they are instructional materials,
but even if he is correct, they must have come from environments that were very
different from the Sumerian-language-based teaching establishments known from
eighteenth century Nippur, Ur, and even Sippar, in which Akkadian-language ex-
tispicy was not only absent but rarely, if ever, even mentioned. This other context—
which must remain hypothetical for the time being—must have also been the place
where the long version of IbPu1 (24), with its extensive Sumerian “omen” in lines
33–45, was elaborated, expanded, and adapted for a worldview informed by the new
semiotic system of divination from the organs of sacrificial animals.
Whatever the case may have been, these omen texts come from very different
cultural environments than the laments, the CKU, or the royal hymns of Ibbi-Sin
and Išbi-Erra that were marginal even within the Nippur curriculum. It is important
to keep in mind, moreover, that the very notion of “historical omens” is a modern
idea that may not have been recognized in Old Babylonian times, because these
omens are scattered among the various compendia and are never brought together
in antiquity. If, rather than viewing them as a group, we contextualize them in their
proper settings among the thousands and thousands of omens that have survived

Babylonian and later times, when the resting places of Ibbi-Sin, Išbi-Erra, and his followers on
the throne of Isin as well as the rulers of the first Babylonian dynasty were added.
79. The second is CT 30 10: rev. 4, which preserves little apart from the name (Weidner
1929: 238).
80. This is difficult to establish, because exemplars that are supposed to be from Larsa and
Sippar have no specific provenience. But even if some of the British Museum exemplars are from
“Sippar,” it is clear that there were many different physical environments there that yielded
non-archival tablets and that omens did not necessarily come from the same places as Sumerian
school texts. Those from Tutub, Nerebtum, and Tell Yelkhi are not associated with other school
texts (for bibliographical details see Jeyes 1989: 7–8). Koch-Westenholz (2000: 21 n. 48) says that
the Susa tablet MDP 57 no. 4 is Old Babylonian, but it is definitely Middle Babylonian in date.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 215

from ancient Mesopotamia, their cultural and literary impact is considerably re-
duced. The four celestial omens concerning Ibbi-Sin are embedded in the series
Enūma Anu Enlil, which consisted of no less than seventy tablets, not to mention
excerpts and commentaries (Reiner 1995: 12). Viewed in their proper environments,
they melt into the mass of other omens and disappear from our view.
It is only in the latter part of the second millennium, or perhaps even later,
that historical omens become important enough to be utilized in different literary
contexts, most notoriously in the Chronicle of Early Kings, which appears to have
been created out of such apodoses (Grayson 1966; 1975: 45). But such intertextual
relationships take place in a very different literary context in which omens, rituals,
and liturgical texts, all of which are almost completely absent from the Nippur and
related school curricula, assume an essential and perhaps even a central place in the
Babylonian literary tradition. As Maria deJong Ellis (1989: 162) wrote:
In terms of literary interrelationships, clear connections exist between oracles, his-
torical omens, prophecies, royal autobiographies and “pseudo-autobiographies,” and
the other classes of literary-historical texts. In content, many oracles show the ter-
minology of the omen apodosis, which should not be surprising since on a practical
level omens are at the very least to be connected with the manipulation of the divi-
natory mechanisms. On the most basic level of literary analysis, if a text is incom-
plete, it is often difficult to tell the difference between a “prophecy” or a “chronicle”
and a compilation of omen apodoses. . . .

Although other literary-historical figures known from the omen compendia turn up
in the Chronicle of Early Kings, neither Ibbi-Sin nor Išbi-Erra make an appearance in
this composition. The last king of Ur does turn up in another late composition that
has links with the omen tradition, the so-called Weidner Chronicle, which is actually
an artfully constructed fictitious royal letter, ascribed anachronistically to Old Baby-
lonian times, but the text is not well preserved at this juncture, and it is impossible
to know what Išbi-Erra stands accused of here. 81
When one steps back and looks over all of this material, it becomes evident that
I have put together a heterogeneous assembly of data from various times and places
that creates an illusion of a uniform tradition. But once one takes this all apart and
then recontextualizes the scattered and badly documented material back within the
flow of Mesopotamian writings, one sees that the subject of the fall of Ur is more
conspicuous by its absence than by its presence; the issue that comes to the fore is
the suppression of the broader aspects of its memory, rather than the collection of
diverse philological references.
81. Rev. 33 (al-Rawi 1990: 13) ḫi-pí dšul-gi i-pu-šú a-ra-an-šú im-bi-d30 dumu-⸢šú⸣ i-⟨ ⟩.
The source used by the Sippar scribe who left us the only text that preserves this line was already
damaged when it was copied, as indicated by ḫi-pí.
 Chapter 8

Afterword

The preceding chapters of this book offered surveys of the Sumerian literary let-
ter tradition and the manuscripts and school settings of the CKU and attempted to
relate the information contained in the royal correspondence to historical informa-
tion gleaned from Ur III documentary sources. The main point that I have tried to
stress throughout this book is the tenuous nature of CKU as a “corpus,” so that even
in Old Babylonian times we have to assume that only a small core of these letters
constituted a regular part of schooling in Nippur and in places that used a similar
set of teaching tools around the time of Samsu-iluna. Others were either composed
ad hoc by schoolmasters or teachers or were part of traditions that were preserved
outside of the central educational syllabus. Even in Nippur, however, the CKU let-
ters were not used as often as were the other core literary texts of the loosely defined
curriculum. And although there are indications that, when the royal letters were
taught, they were often used in groupings and not individually, it is clear that the
very notion of The Royal Correspondence of Ur/Correspondence of the Kings of Ur
as a corpus is modern and cannot be projected into ancient times.
The consequences of such an approach are somewhat messy, but philologists—or
at least some of them—prefer clearly defined groups and principles, recoiling from
fuzzy sets and open definitions. At this juncture, all the uncertainties of the liter-
ary letter collections resurface and cloud our interpretive perspectives. How did the
texts that we have come into being? Were some or all actually created under the Ur
III kings or were they all composed later, and if so, when? The provenienced copies
at our disposal were written during a narrow time-frame between reigns of Rim-Sin
(1822–1763 b.c.) and Samsu-iluna (1749–1712 b.c.), but we have no way of knowing
when, hypothetically, some letters might have been taken out of archives and incor-
porated into the literary tradition or when the imitations were composed. The very
historicity of these texts has been a matter of some concern because they have been
used by modern historians as primary sources for the reconstruction of events of the
Ur III and early Isin periods (e.g., Jacobsen 1953; Rowton 1969; Wilcke 1969, 1970).
Over the last decade, two authors have made very different statements about the
“authenticity” of the Ur III royal correspondence (Huber 2001; Hallo 2006). I should
say at the outset that I am troubled by both of their positions, on methodological
216
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 217

grounds, because I cannot accept the very notion of authenticity as an ontologi-

cal and heuristic concept; but this is not what I want to focus on in these pages. In
defense of both authors, I note that they were working with inferior versions of the
texts and with an undifferentiated notion of the CKU as a “corpus.”
Fabienne Huber (2001) provocatively asserted that the royal correspondence
was apocryphal, that it was all composed in the Old Babylonian period and should
therefore be banished from all discussions of Ur III political history. She was appar-
ently following the direction established by her teacher, Pascal Attinger, during a
seminar at the University of Geneva in 1995 (Huber 2001: 170). I am sympathetic
to her point of view, which has injected a salutary element of skepticism into the dis-
cussion, but I cannot accept the main lines of argument presented in her study, even
if certain individual points are well taken. Huber uses three arguments to establish
the late origins of the letters. Her first point is “philological”—that is, she identifies
certain Sumerian morphological and syntactic features that she claims are Old Baby-
lonian in origin and therefore point to a late creation of the letters. I find this uncon-
vincing on a number of levels. We must take into account the fact that the literary
letters as a whole comprise the only extensive set of Sumerian-language prose writing
outside of the highly stylized and syntactically limited genre of royal inscriptions. As
such, the comparison with royal hymns and other poetic texts or inscriptions, for
that matter, cannot reveal very much about the issue at hand. Moreover, this kind
of “dating by grammar” largely ignores the fact that all Sumerian-language texts
were redacted and reformulated on the graphemic, phonemic, morphological, and
even the semantic levels, most probably again and again, to conform to an artificial
Standard Old Babylonian Sumerian that was used in the teaching establishments of
the eighteenth‑ and seventeenth-century Mesopotamia and even beyond its borders.
Some of the features she discusses are found primarily in texts that are clearly mark-
ers of late composition. But the use of enclitic ‑ma, the incorrect agreement-makers
in verbal forms, and other elements are easily explained as elements introduced in
the redactional process; other features, including certain “Akkadisms,” could equally
well have been already present in hypothetical Ur III versions. 1
Huber’s second line of reasoning against the authenticity of the correspondence
rests on the recognition of “plagiats” between individual compositions. Some of
these are clear indications of late composition, as is her first example, a compari-
son between ArŠ1 (1) and UrŠ1 (11); the latter is undeniably post-Ur III in date.
Some of her other examples, however, are less convincing, as when she points to the
repetition of elements that may be constitutive of epistolary style and to redactional
contamination from one letter to another to make her case.
The third argument is based on prosopography/toponymy and is, to my mind,
equally unconvincing, because the data that she uses entirely comprises names of
persons and places found in various Old Babylonian manuscripts, including imagina-
tive variants that clearly should not be considered in this kind of analysis. Moreover,

1. The “dating by grammar” issue has been addressed by Hallo 2006 and by Rubio, in press.
218 Afterword

we differ in our assessment of the careers of some of the officials, including those of
Aradmu and Apilaša, as documented in Ur III texts and described in the preceding
chapters of this work, and, once again, in the value of textual contamination, as is
the case with the anachronistic insertion of the name of Lu-Nanna, governor of
Zimudar under Šu-Sin, in letters purporting to be from the time of Šulgi. Details are
found in the appropriate places in earlier chapters; here I would like to summarize
my own views on the matter.
First, I would exclude from the debate all obvious variants that are conditioned
by later forces, as for example, Lu-Enki for Lu-Nanna, or Šu-Marduk for Puzur-
Numušda. Once this is done, the situation becomes rather clear: of the twenty-nine
persons mentioned in CKU, only eight cannot be identified with actual people who
lived in Ur III times. To recapitulate, these people are:
1. Aba-indasa. The author of AbŠ1 (4), and a protagonist in four other letters (5–9), of
which at least one ArŠ5 (9) is undeniably post-Ur III.
2. Ur-dun. The author of UdŠ1 (11), and mentioned in ArŠ7 (12), both of which are
undoubtedly apocryphal.
3. The four officials mentioned in PuŠ1 (13), Puzur-Numušda, Lugal-melam, Ka-kugani,
and Takil-ilissu, who are discussed in detail earlier. It is interesting that not one of the
members of this cluster can be identified at present, but if the letter concerns repairs of the
fortifications that are named bad mada, the letter could have been composed sometime
around the year Š37 and therefore may have been earlier than the foundation of Puzriš-
Dagan, which was commemorated in Šulgi’s thirty-ninth year-name, that is, from a time
in which such officials would not appear in the preserved documentation.
4. Nig˜dugani, sag˜a of Enlil, and Iddi of Malgium. Of the 7 persons mentioned in the letter
from Puzur-Numušda to Ibbi-Sin (PuIb1 [23]), only these two officials cannot be identified
in the Ur III and early Isin documentary record. 2 In light of the relative paucity of sources
from the reign of Ibbi-Sin, this is hardly an argument for late invention.

In summary—and I must stress that this is only an overview of Huber’s main points—
it is impossible to prove that all the surviving letters of the CKU were complete fic-
tions fabricated in Old Babylonian times. Unfortunately, I find myself equally at odds
with W. W. Hallo’s (2006) strong defense of their authenticity, even if he is willing
to admit that a few of the CKU compositions are definitely not Ur III.
So where do I stand on this issue? In purely practical terms I argue that, at a
certain point in the development of the Nippur Old Babylonian teaching materials,
some elements of authentic Ur III letters were incorporated into the curriculum, but
that it is impossible to discern the various levels of redaction that transformed them
into the school texts we are familiar with. Teachers were at liberty to concoct new
letters on the patterns of existing letters or to ask their students to do so, but only in
a few cases can we unequivocally recognize the new creations. This process is more
evident outside of the areas that used the Nippur teaching corpus, since we see much
less reliance on fixed texts in peripheral copies. I should also add that the hypotheti-

2. For a possible occurrence of Girbubu, see p. 199 above.

 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 219

cal originals might not have all been purely archival letters; it is equally possible that
some of them were elaborate epistles created as reports for semipublic consumption
at court. We may never be able to reconstruct the history of this correspondence, but
until we recover the royal archives of the kings of Ur, which may still lie in one of
the palaces outside of the capital city, any further speculation on the subject is futile,
as are most speculations about moments of pure origin in culture.
In my estimation—and this is admittedly a subjective personal impression—it is
easier to say which letters are clearly Old Babylonian than to identify those that have
a good chance of being derived from Ur III originals. Of the 25 items edited here, 7
are definitely late: ArŠ1a (1a), ArŠ5 (9), ArŠ6 (10), UrŠ (11), ArŠ7 (2), ŠIš1 (15),
and IbIš1 (22), as are the long versions of IbIš1 (21) and IbPu1 (24). I am agnostic
about 4 of the 5 letters that make up what I have called the Aba-indasa affair (letters
4–9; 9 is definitely late), and the same holds true about the Amar-Sin correspon-
dence (letters 16–17). It seems fairly certain that many of the fabricated letters were
answers to existing letters, because some teachers or scribes, most of them outside
of Nippur, strove for symmetry on the pattern of the first three items of the “core”
and on the Isin correspondence embedded in SEpM (items 2–5), where a letter to
a king is followed by a royal response. Once one has set all these epistles aside, one
is left with CKU letters 1, 2, 3, 13, 21, and 23—that is, essentially, the Nippur core
with the addition of the Šu-Sin letters (18–19). I do not state categorically that all of
these letters ultimately derive from authentic documents—only that there is a good
probability that some of them might be descended, although filtered in a variety of
ways, from Ur III documents of some kind. The fact that this judgment happens to
correspond to the core use of these same texts in some Old Babylonian schools may
or may not be coincidence, but more than this one cannot say.
The discussion about the authenticity of literary letters, perceived as a form of
historical verisimilitude, is rooted in certain traditional philological notions of textu-
ality, history, genre, and truth, but one could argue that epistolarity points us beyond
such presuppositions. Letters, real or imaginary, have a unique semiotic status, with
potentially endless chains of readings and misprision. In evaluating such texts, one
has to take into account the primary act of the composition and its eventual decod-
ing at its ultimate destination. But one must also presume that such texts may have
new lives beyond the primary communicative act; some letters may be written with
further readers in mind, as was the case with many Classical authors, or a letter may
be lost or intentionally derailed, leading to other acts of reading. At each point, the
text acquires new contextual meaning, leading to further communicative acts, some
of which may not be epistolary at all. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that
some of the CKU letters may have actually been taken out of some royal archive and
eventually reedited for instructional purposes. Does such a scenario result in texts
that we might consider to be genuine historical sources and guarantee any degree of
authenticity? As I see it the answer must be negative, as much as one would like to
plead otherwise, because in being ripped from their archives, rewritten to conform
to later standards, and recontextualized with new literary neighbors, the letters were
220 Afterword

semantically deformed and the stories they tell are Old Babylonian to a large degree.
Even if we were to brush aside such considerations, we must still take into account
the potential emotive and factual distortions embedded in them by their authors or
by their scribes, distortions that are difficult if not impossible to identify in single or
coupled letters that are only a small part of a larger conversation that is forever lost
to us.
The effort to achieve historical certainty must also take into consideration that
letters seen as literature confront the very nature of fiction, mimicking their own
practical standing in the world, straddling the divide between private and public
discourse, between writing and orality, and between the imagined and the real. It is
no wonder that, in many different literary and cultural traditions, letters are thought
to be crucial in the development of genres such as the novel. Some of us want the
royal literary letters to be literally “true,” because without them the stories we tell
about Ur III and Isin times would be less interesting. But the fact is that even if one
accepts a certain notion of historical proof, for reasons already mentioned above, we
can never unravel the strands of choice, abandonment, revision, perdition, and in-
vention that produced the textual corpus at our disposal. These issues are not unique
to our area of study. Already half a decade ago, the Finnish scholar Heikki Kosken-
niemi (1956: 50), in the introduction to his survey of Greek letter-writing, rejected
much received wisdom, observing that for all practical purposes one cannot make a
distinction between real and fictitious Greek letters.
The CKU can be read in the context of school instruction, as discussed in
chap. 3, or as literary artifact, as, for example, in the preceding chapter, where I
briefly discussed the development of poetic prose in the direction of more complex
united storylines. But the move toward something that we could call narrative fiction
was a dead end, and the story of the combined four letters of the Ibbi-Sin correspon-
dence is unique in Sumerian literary history. The importance of poetic literary let-
ters, as well as the concomitant move toward epistolary prose narrative peaks in Old
Babylonian times, but seems to lose its momentum, and drops out in later periods.
The Old Babylonian period is also when Akkadian-language letters become ubiqui-
tous in both royal and private communication; this is also when Akkadian begins to
rise in status as a literary language. It is ironic, and perhaps not coincidental, that
once epistolary communication becomes commonplace, the literary equivalents be-
gin their eclipse, although recent publications provide evidence that literary letters
made a comeback of sorts in much later times.
During the Old Babylonian period, Akkadian-language letter-writing was taught
to some students as part of schooling, perhaps in places where writing instruction
was focused on pragmatic issues and not on the old classics. 3 In Sumerian, letters of

3. See Michalowski 1983a: 222–27, with earlier literature. The whole issue needs to be
studied anew in light of the recent publication, in photograph only, of 22 new Old Babylonian
Akkadian-language school letter-exercises, some of them duplicates, most of which seem to come
from the same archive (Wilson 2008: nos. 5–7, 10–12, 35, 45, 71–73, 161–66, and 168–72).
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 221

petition to deities and kings are couched in elaborate poetry, but the Old Babylonian
“letters to gods” are written in simple prose and are inscribed in the documentary,
not in the literary, hand. Six texts of this kind are known at present from Babylonia,
as well as two royal letters to gods from Mari (van der Toorn 1996: 131). Occasion-
ally, the divine world reached for the letter as a means of communication. A rare
example of such an instance is found among tablets from the archive of the admin-
istrator of the Ištar Kitittum temple in Ishchiali (ancient Neribtum or Kiti), which
include two epistles from the goddess to her king, Ibal-piel II of Ešnunna, composed
in a complex, difficult language and filled with rare words and expressions (Ellis
1987, 1989: 138–40). The verbal complexity of these letters contrasts markedly with
the prosaic nature of the contemporary Akkadian letters to gods, so that it is unlikely
that the two text types are in any way pragmatically related.
There are at present only four elaborate Old Babylonian epistles that can be
classified as “literary letters.” 4 The first is an unusual literary letter addressed from
Sin-muballiṭ, brother of King Rim-Sin of Larsa, who was apparently in charge of
Maškan-šapir. Andrew George (2009: 117) in his edition noted: “the composition
makes much use of balanced structures typical of Babylonian poetry and can be cat-
egorized as a highly elevated prose.” The second is a bilingual letter of petition ad-
dressed to the Mari king, Zimri-Lim, found in the palace of the Syrian city and is
therefore probably a genuine appeal to the ruler rather than a teaching tool; but it
demonstrates a full command of Sumerian as well as Akkadian literary conventions
and is the work of a scribe who was familiar with the southern tradition of literary
letters of petition. 5 The third is an Akkadian letter of petition that seems to have
been deliberately patterned on the matrix of the Sumerian letter-prayer (Kraus 1983:
207; van der Toorn 1996: 134); it even uses the Akkadian equivalents of the Sume-
rian opening formula, addressing the recipient three times with terms derived from
the lexical tradition. 6 The phraseology is so close to what one finds in Sumerian that
it is not out of the question that this poem may have been originally composed in
Sumerian and translated into Akkadian. The fourth is a missive, found in at least
four duplicates, from king Samsu-iluna to various high officials in the subdivisions
of the city of Sippar (Janssen 1991); unless the letter was originally sent in multiple
copies, this epistle may have entered the scribal curriculum at the time. To these
must be added the two much simpler, genre-bending letters of Sargon of Agade that
are combined with lists of professional names (J. G. Westenholz 1997: 141–69). The
Nippur and Ur exemplars may be variants of the same composition.
The scribes of the latter part of the second millennium and first-millennium
Assyria and Babylonia copied older royal letters and even composed new fictions in
this form, including a satirical missive from Gilgameš (Gurney 1957; Kraus 1980)

4. Add to this, perhaps, the unaddressed Akkadian letter published by George (2009:
114–15).
5. Letter to Zimri-Lim.
6. See above, p. 30.
222 Afterword

and an elaborate historiographic text that was known, for many years, as the Wei-
dner Chronicle. It now turns out that this was a letter, purportedly written by an Old
Babylonian king of Babylon to a king of Isin (al-Rawi 1990). The letter circulated
in Akkadian, but at least one manuscript was written as a Sumerian and Akkadian
bilingual (Finkel 1980: 72–74). Another late creation purporting to be addressed by
Samsu-iluna to one Enlil-nadim-šumi is known from three duplicates, two of which
were discovered in Assurbanipal’s libraries (al-Rawi and George 1994: 135–39).
These belong to a substantial list of literary letters of Babylonian and Assyrian kings
that are now known from copies that range from approximately the eighth to the
second centuries b.c. that have been brought together and studied in a preliminary
manner by Eckhart Frahm (2005). 7 In addition to the missives ascribed to Samsu-
iluna, there are items that claim to have an origin in Kassite, Neo-Assyrian, and
Neo-Babylonian times. As Frahm observes, some of them are clearly spurious, while
others may be copies, or adaptations, of real letters, and many of them are character-
ized by high literary diction. Since the author has announced his intent to provide
a more detailed study of these compositions, I shall say no more about them, except
to observe that they are much more heterogeneous than the CKU, in origin, style,
and time of copy. They also surface in a very distinctive literary world, in which re-
dactional activity, royal, temple, and private tablet collections, as well as educational
processes all combined to provide a very different semantic and pragmatic context
for the royal literary letters. 8
The literary letter of petition was not dead, however. Sometime during the last
decades of the Assyrian Empire, a scribe by the name of Urad-Gula composed a long,
immensely elaborate example of such a composition to his king, most likely Assur-
banipal, full of allusions and quotations from literary texts (Parpola 1987). Although
later schoolboy copies of royal correspondence are known, this text is perhaps the
last grand example of innovation in the Mesopotamian literary letter tradition. 9
From all of this, one may conclude that, while the concept of letters as literature
seems to crop up at various times, after the Old Babylonian period, it is never as-
sociated with the kings of Ur, although we must keep in mind the still unparalleled
bilingual Middle Babylonian CKU tablet from Susa, which may be a solitary witness
to a tradition that remains hidden to us for now.
The picture that emerges from all of this conforms, if only in general contours,
with what we observe in the later Mesopotamian literary tradition: outside of the
omens (Cooper 1980), the Ur III dynasty has been narrowed down to one king only,

7. See also Llop and George 2003: 9–11.

8. Ronnie Goldstein (2010) has now proposed a novel interpretation of the Seleucid con-
text of the pseudo-epigraphic letters of Assurbanipal that concern the collecting of tablets for his
libraries. She observes (2010: 207): “Wishing to recall their own cultural heritage, and threatened
by the strong Hellenistic culture in Seleucid times, these scribes evoked the days of Ashurbani-
pal’s great library, stressing the important place of Babylonia in it, so claiming their important
place in the history of knowledge.”
9. For more details on literary letters, see Hallo 1981.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 223

namely, Šulgi. 10 The whole dynasty is mentioned in the so-called Weidner Chronicle,
but otherwise only Šulgi’s name lives on in the great libraries of the first millennium,
most notably in the text Assyriologists have labeled the Šulgi Prophecy (Grayson
and Lambert 1964; Borger 1971). The date of composition of this fascinating text is
not easy to determine (Ellis 1989: 148 n. 104), and some have suggested that it goes
back to the end of the second millennium (Borger 1971: 23). Although its generic
identity is a problematical issue, there seem to be observable connections between
this composition, as well as similar ones, and the astronomical omen tradition (Biggs
1985). The name of Šulgi has cropped up in fragments from the Neo-Assyrian Nabu
temple in Nimrud (Wiseman and Black 1996: nos. 65, 65, 69); the three pieces may
be part of the same tablet, but this has not been confirmed. Robert Biggs (1997: 174),
who first analyzed these pieces, cautiously suggests that they may belong to the Šulgi
Prophecy. More recently, a fragment of a related Neo-Babylonian pseudoepigraphical
Šulgi “inscription” from Ur has come to light (UET 6/3 919; Frahm 2006). Finally,
there is also a unique late first-millennium copy of a letter addressed to the second
Ur III king, excavated at Babylon, written in an imitation of Ur III script (Neumann
1992a; Michalowski 1993: 117–18; Neumann 2006: 19–20). According to its colo-
phon, it was copied from a tablet found in the temple of the moon-god Sin in Ur, but
the veracity of this statement is difficult to evaluate. These late traditions concerning
the second king of the Ur III dynasty have their own dynamic and are unrelated in
any way to the earlier Sumerian language literature about this monarch.
Of the more than 70 literary letters that have survived from Old Babylonian
teaching rooms and courtyards, only 3 or 4 survived into later times. CKU items
14 and 15 are preserved in the fourteenth-century bilingual Susa tablet; the first,
from Šulgi to Puzur-Šulgi, is probably apocryphal but is attested in Old Babylonian
versions, while the latter, a ridiculous, possibly comical missive from Išbi-Erra to
Šulgi, is as yet unduplicated and had all the marks of post-Old Babylonian composi-
tion. The final item of SEpM, which deals with scribal matters, crops up in bilingual
Middle Babylonian form in Boghazköy and Ugarit and in later garb in Assur and
Neo-Babylonian Babylon (Civil 2000: 109–16). The only early royal epistle that
appears to survive into the first millennium is the letter-prayer of the Old Baby-
lonian Larsa king Sin-iddinam, addressed to the sun-god Utu, known at present
from early unilingual manuscripts from Nippur, Sippar, and elsewhere, as well as in
a bilingual version from Emar and Kuyunjik. 11 Of the CKU there is not a trace after
the fifteenth-century tablet from Susa.
The CKU, in its various incarnations, was a constituent of Old Babylonian edu-
cation in Nippur, Ur, Uruk, Isin, Kish, Sippar, Susa, and elsewhere. During the Kas-
site period these texts became obsolete, as did much of the literature that was created

10. An early first-millennium astronomical compendium even refers to the whole dynasty as
the palû (“reign, dynasty, time in office”) of Šulgi: MUL.APIN II ii 18 (Hunger and Pingree 1989:
96; see already Finkelstein 1966: 104 and, most recently, Heimpel 2003: 14 n. 32).
11. Letter of Sin-iddinam to Utu.
224 Afterword

in Ur III and early Old Babylonian times, and with minor exceptions, was lost for
millennia, only to be recovered by modern archaeologists and looters. The present
edition, imperfect as it may be, is dedicated to bringing this Sumerian royal epistolary
prose literature back to a new life.
Appendixes
 Appendix A:
The Reading of the Name of the
Grand Vizier

The name of the great official of the Ur III state is conventionally rendered “Arad-
Nanna” or “Aradmu”; the latter is written with the signs ÁRAD (ARAD×KUR) and
MUHALDIM, and is conventionally read as árad-mu or, in more modern fash-
ion, as urdu-g˜u 10 . The Sumerian “pronunciation” of the first sign, which stands for
“slave, servant,” has been rendered variously as /arad/, /urdu/, or /urda /. There are
two reasons for this discrepancy: the data from lexical texts as well as the evidence
from etymology. All of the pertinent information has been gathered together by I.
J. Gelb (1982) and J. Krecher (1987), who reached very different conclusions, and
it will not be repeated here. I only note that I would not take seriously the writing
ur-du-um-gu in MDAI 57 1, since the mid-second-millennium Susa scribe of this
tablet was hardly an authority on Sumerian pronunciation and was more concerned
with playing syllabic games than with linguistic authenticity. 1 Gelb viewed the word
as a loan from Akkadian, but Krecher provided a tortuous Sumerian etymology that
I find unacceptable. 2
A perusal of the information from the lexical texts suggests that, in the first mil-
lennium lexical tradition, primarily in the syllabaries, the received interpretation of
árad was both /urdu/ and /arad/. The Old Babylonian documentation is clearer on
the topic: ProtoEa offers the reading /arad/.
ur-du : ⸢ARAD×KUR⸣ (Proto-Ea 790 [MSL 14 61])
ur-du : ⸢ARAD×KUR⸣ = [wa-ar-du-um] (Proto-Aa 790:1 [MSL 14 102])
ur-du : ARAD = wa-ar-du-um (Secondary Proto-Ea/Aa no. 1.3 iii 16
[MSL 14 134])

1. This is the Susa source for ŠPu1 (letter 14) and ŠIs1 (letter 15); the specific writing of the
name is in lines 21 and 37 of the former (ŠPu1MB). On the peculiarities and date of this tablet,
see p. 56.
2. See Steinkeller 1993: 121 n. 38, who also rejects this argument. Others have accepted
this analysis; see, for example, Wilcke 2007: 53.

227
228 Appendix A: The Reading of the Name of the Grand Vizier

First-millennium syllabaries offer the readings /urda / (/arda /) and /arad/ :

ur-da : ARAD×KUR = MIN(ar-du) (Aa VIII/2 218 [MSL 14 502])
ur-da : ARAD×KUR = MIN(ar-du) (Ea VIII 145 [MSL 14 481])
[á]r-da : ARAD = ar-du (Aa VIII/2 213 [MSL 14 502])
[á]r-da : ARAD = ar-du (Ea VIII 140 [MSL 14 481])
arad = á[r-da] (Lu fragment; MSL 12 142])
a-rad : ARAD = MIN(ar-du) (Aa VIII/2 216 [MSL 14 502])
MIN(a-rad) : ARAD×KUR = MIN(ar-du) (Aa VIII/2 217 [MSL 14 502])
a-rad : ARAD = MIN(ar-du) (Ea VIII 143 [MSL 14 481])
a-rad : ARAD×KUR = MIN(ar-du) (Ea VIII 144 [MSL 14 481])
[a-rad] : arad = [ar]-du (Sb Voc. II 345 [MSL 3 150])
This suggests that the pre-Sargonic version of the word, written HAR.TU, should
be read ur 5 -tu or àr-tu, but forms that are followed by a sign beginning with the
consonant /d/ point to u/arad when the form contains a bound morpheme. 3 It is
possible that the discrepancy in readings is due to the two different Akkadian forms
of the word for “slave, servant,” Babylonian (w)ardu(m) and Assyrian urdu(m). It
may be that the loan in Sumerian originally came from a Semitic dialect in which
the lexeme was similar to the later Assyrian rather than the Babylonian form, but in
later times the word was either loaned again or simply adjusted to correspond to the
contemporary Babylonian (w)ardu(m).
The second sign in the name, MUHALDIM, has the syllabic readings mu as
well as g˜ u 10 . The latter is used almost exclusively for the non-oblique form of the
first-person singular bound possessive pronoun. I suggest that, lacking any direct
evidence for Ur-III-period pronunciation, one chooses -mu because the name does
not mean “My Slave,” but is instead a hypocoristic form of Arad-Nanna. It seems
improbable that people would refer to the person who was second in status only to
the king in such a manner. It is therefore most likely that in Ur III times, at least, the
name was read as something like “A/Urdumu,” but one cannot be certain of how Old
Babylonian students and teachers interpreted the name, which was no longer used
in the culture, and it is possible that some of them would have playfully rendered
it as Uradg˜u or Aradg˜u, as did the scribe of the Susa tablet hundreds of years later.
Therefore, to steer clear of confusion and to avoid disharmony with the received
folk tradition of Assyriological literature, I consistently refer to the grand vizier as
Aradmu. This is a conventional modern rendition, similar to Tiglath-pilesar or As-
surbanipal, even if he was somewhat lower in rank.

3. For examples, see Krecher 1987, although he reaches different conclusions and creates
an unlikely form u r d u d . For other discussions of HAR.TU, with earlier literature, see Stein-
keller 1989: 130 n. 389 and Steible 1993: 209–11.
 Appendix B:
The Title galzu unkena

Although the title is unattested in any document prior to the Old Babylonian pe-
riod, two officers are designated as gal-zu unken-na in CKU: Apilaša and Šarrum-
bani. In one lexical text, it is translated as rab puḫru/i, “chief of the assembly,” and it
is usually listed after the zabar-dab 5 and the gal unken-na, Akkadian muʾirrum. 4
To my knowledge, its only literary attestation is in a hymn to Ningišzida, known from
a solitary manuscript, which reads (Ningišzida Hymn A: 27):
palil gal-zu unken-na g˜árza-e hé-du7
“Member of the vanguard/foremost, g., fit for high office/to be a high officer.”
It is possible that this line refers to the martial qualities of Ningišzida, but the nouns
are ambiguous.
It is obvious that the title has nothing to do with the “assembly,” although per-
haps the original etymology might have been somehow connected with unken. 5
The same holds true for the title gal unken-na = muʾirrum, a designation for an
agricultural official or more generally a “commander director.” 6 In fact, these two
titles seem to have nothing in common except for the similarity in the way they were
written, and therefore they were listed next to one another in the lexical texts. 7
There are three occurrences of gal.zu unken.na as a logogram in Old Baby-
lonian archival sources: (a) YBT 5 163, (b) UET 5 247 and (c) AbB 13 119:10. Of
these, (a) is the most informative; in this Rim-Sin period document, rations are
provided for people who may or may not be part of the personnel of the Ekišnugal
temple in Ur. 8 The first four are: the g., the zabar.dab 5 , the pisag˜.dub.ba, and only

4. Proto-Lu 15 (MSL 12 33) and Lu I 17 (MSL 12 96, bilingual).

5. The role of “assemblies” in ancient Mesopotamia continues to be a contested issue; see for
the present Seri 2006: 159–80.
6. Thus CAD M/2 178. See Yoffee 1977: 83 and Seri 2006: 171–74. Charpin (2007: 180)
summarizes his own earlier statements on the issue, taking a different approach, linking the title
to the “assembly.”
7. See CAD M/2 180. The Sumerian reading of g a l u n k e n . n a is problematical; see Sjö-
berg 1969: 96–97.
8. For this text, see Charpin 1986: 234–35.

229
230 Appendix B: The Title galzu unkena

then the sag˜a—that is, the chief administrator of the temple complex. During this
period, the functions of those who held the second and third of these titles is not
always clear, but in many contexts they appear as high military officials. As Charpin
(1986: 236) noted, the title under discussion here is also found in (b), from the time
when Rim-Sin occupied Ur, in which a g. together with several judges renders a legal
decision. The letter (c) is less informative, because the immediate context is broken,
but the general topic concerns a “tax field” (a.šà gú.un), and it is possible that we
are dealing with military colonists. All of this suggests that in Old Babylonian times
the g. was a rather high-ranking military officer, in the south at least, but the scarcity
of references makes it unlikely that this was a commonly encountered position and
therefore perhaps the title was only given to officers assigned for special tasks.
None of these references, however, are of help in establishing the meaning of the
title during the Ur III period; indeed, it is possible that it was not even used at that
time. Although the evidence is insufficient at this time to provide a definitive expla-
nation of the title, it appears that in CKU it designated a special envoy appointed
by the king for the performance of specific tasks. Both Apilaša and Šarrum-bani held
the title šakkana, “general/military governor,” prior to their appointment as gal-zu
unken-na. 9 This, in connection with the nature of their missions, suggests that the
title was one that remained within the sphere of the military establishment of the
Ur III state. On the surface, the situation seems very much like what we encounter
during Old Babylonian times, but all of the evidence is indecisive and more than this
one cannot say. In the translations, I have rendered the title in English as “prefect,”
but this is only a conventional approximation of its true meaning.

9. It is only conjecture that Apilaša was a general before his appointment as g a l - z u u n-

k e n - n a . Šarrum-bani served as a general after he was governor of Apiak and prior to his tenure
as g a l - z u u n k e n - n a . See pp. 70–72 above.
 Appendix C:
“Facing (the) Hursag˜”

The designation igi hur-sag˜-g˜á may be interpreted as “facing the Hursag̃” or as

“facing the mountain ranges.” In actual documents, the designation appears only in
two contexts outside of CKU. The first occurrence is in a year-name of Sumu-la-el: 10
mu ég igi-hur-sag˜-g˜á mu-un-si-ig
The year: Sumu-la-el piled up the irrigation embankment facing Hursag̃.
And, the second is in the name of the nineteenth year of Hammurabi:
mu bàd mah igi-hur-sag˜-g˜áki
The year: (Hammurabi built) the great fortification(s) facing Hursag̃.
In neither case could this designation refer to the Hamrin or any of the major Zagros
mountain ranges. While it is difficult to establish the precise parameters of Sumu-
la-el’s kingdom during the course of his reign (Goddeeris 2002: 347–49), it seems
unlikely that he would be digging anything in the mountains, but he did control
Kazallu and Marad and could have done work in this region. As far as Hammurabi
is concerned, his kingdom could not even come close to the Hamrin, because the
powerful state of Ešnunna would have stood in his way at the time of his eighteenth
and nineteenth regal years. Therefore, wherever his “great fortifications” may have
been, they were not literally facing the mountains. But his year-name has additional
significance for this edition: there is always the possibility that there never was an
Ur III Bad-Igihursag˜a and that Old Babylonian scholars inscribed the name of Ham-
murabi’s constructions into the CKU.
The designation “facing the mountains” is known from the lexical tradition,
more precisely from the composition HAR-ra = ḫubullu.
(a) tir-ga igi hur-sag˜-g˜á ki (Hh XX-XXIV OB Forerunner 1 vi 41 [MSL
11 133])
(b) te-ir-ga igi hur-sag˜-g˜á (Hh XX-XXIV OB Forerunner 9 rev. i 6
[MSL 11 144])
(c) tir-qa-an igi hur-sag˜ki = pa-ni ša-di (Hh XX-XXII Ras Shamra Rec.
A ii 44′ [MSL 11 45])
10. Sumu-la-el 32/33. The name also crops up in the Emar “forerunner” to Hh XXVII as ég
u 4 -ki igi hur-sag˜ -g˜ á; see Civil 1994: 114.

231
232 Appendix C: “Facing (the) Hursag˜”

(d) [tir-ga-(an) igi hur-sag˜ki ] = ⸢šá pa-an KUR-i⸣ (Hh XXI Section 10
1 [MSL 11 18])
(e) tir-qa-an igi hur-sag˜ki = tir-qa-an šá-di-i = šá dbu-la-[la] (Hg E to Hh
XX-XXIV rev.! 15 [MSL 11 35])
(f) [t]ir-ga-an igi hur-sag˜ki = ŠU MIN šá IGI KUR-i = ár-man; PA-din
(Hg B V to Hh XX-XXIV iii 6 [MSL 11 36])
In the two late HAR-gud commentaries (e) and (f), the entries are accompanied by
additional listings:
(g) tir-qa-an igi gu-ti-um ki = tir-qa-⸢an⸣ šá pa-an gu-ti-i = URU LU-ti
(Hg E to Hh XX-XXIV rev.! 14 [MSL 11 35], before e)
(h) [ti]r-ga-an igi gu-ti ki = ŠU MIN šá IGI gu-ti-i = ḫar-ḫar (Hg B V to
Hh XX-XXIV iii 7 [MSL 11 36], after f)
Goetze (1964: 118), who commented on these passages, provided an explanation of
(f): “The gloss Arman Hattin would locate it in the vicinity of Arman/Halba and
the Hattin(a) of the Assyrians.” Whiting (1976: 181 n. 21), citing Goetze, identi-
fied the Terqan facing Gutium with the Ti-ir-qa of Early Old Babylonian texts,
which he located east of the Tigris. It must be kept in mind that the HAR-gud
explanations are quite late and may reflect geographical speculations that are of
little relevance to earlier usage, but the association of the Tirqa facing Gutium with
har-har in (h) seems to agree with an Old Babylonian letter that mentions the city
together the Karkar (Whiting 1976: 181 n. 21). D. Charpin (2003a: 29 with n. 144)
has drawn attention to this passage and also provides additional information on the
eastern Tirqa, which he places in the vicinity of Simurum.
There is one possible Ur III occurrence of the eastern Tirqa in a fragmentary
account from Drehem that lists taxes from a number of places east of the Tigris
(Trouvaille 54). Line 3 of the first preserved column of this text reads, according to
the copy, érin ti-ni-qaki, but Gelb (1938: 83) proposed to read the second sign as
ir, and this has apparently been accepted by other scholars—for example, by Whit-
ing (1976: 180–81, with earlier literature), Owen (1997: 389), Luciani (1999: 3), as
well as in Steinkeller’s (1987: 28 n. 56) list of cities that paid provincial taxes, which
includes Tirqa. However, collation of the tablet, which is in Istanbul, apparently
shows that neither de Genouillac’s drawing nor Gelb’s emendation are correct: the
line now reads [érin ti]-sa!-gaki (Yıldız and Gomi 1988: 20).
All of this demonstrates that the phrase igi hursag˜a was used in Old Babylonian
times twice in a manner that may have to be translated as “facing Hursag˜,” but, if
truth be told, this is simply a supposition based on circumstantial evidence. The in-
tuitively more proper notion “facing the mountains” is only known as a descriptive
phrase in lexical texts and pertains to only a single toponym. If one were to make
a connection between Bad-Igihursag˜a and the Tirqa that faced the mountains, one
would probably have to locate the fortifications in the vicinity of Dašil and Awal, in
the Hamrin plain. In this case, one would have to assume that the CKU letter PuŠ1
(13) is mostly if not completely spurious.
 Appendix D:
The Location of Hamazi

The governor Puzur-Numušda, in his letter to King Ibbi-Sin, recounts that Išbi-
Erra, having taken over Nippur and Isin, had, among his other achievements, plun-
dered the land of Hamazi (PuIb1: 35 [23]). He also describes Išbi-Erra’s claims that
the god Enlil had promised him dominion over the homeland (kalam) and that it
would stretch (line 5),
ma-da ha-ma-ziki-ta en-na a-ab-ba má-gan-naki-šè
from the land of Hamazi (down) to the Sea of Magan (i.e., the Persian Gulf)
The location of this land or city, which Piotr Steinkeller (1998: 79) justly describes
as “rather mysterious,” has been much debated over the years, but without new infor-
mation the matter will undoubtedly remain unresolved for some time to come. The
geographical name occurs in Early Dynastic dedicatory inscriptions, in a letter from
Ebla, in the Sumerian King List, in lexical texts, and in two literary “epics” about En-
merkar of Uruk, but none of these references are of any use in precisely localizing the
place, althought they all point to the east. 11 Jacobsen (1939: 98 n. 166) was certain
that it should lie “in the mountainous regions of Kirkuk, near modern Sulaimani-
yyah.” Part of his reasoning was based on references in the Old Akkadian texts from
Gasur (Nuzi). Someone named Šu-Eštar of Hamazi is mentioned twice (HSS 10 143
rev. 7′, 153 rev. ii 7–8), and one Ititi from there occurs in still another document
(HSS 10 155: 24–25), but the latter text also includes someone from Assur, which
demonstrates that place-names in these texts are not necessarily very close by.
Steinkeller (1998: 85), in his thorough review of references to Hamazi,
speculates that it might have been the older name of Ekallatum, which he locates
north of Assur or Qabara, on the Lower Zab. Unfortunately, he provides no more
solid evidence for this than his predecessors have, and these suggestions, while tan-
talizing, are still hypothetical. But if we are to take seriously the claim that Hamazi
was ravaged by Išbi-Erra early in his reign and that it constituted the northern limit
of his kingdom, a location north of Assur, while not impossible, seems somewhat
improbable.

11. For references, see Edzard 1972, Astour 1987: 8, and Steinkeller 1998: 84–85.

233
234 Appendix D: The Location of Hamazi

After the three Gasur references, the only occurrences of Hamazi in docu-
ments come from Ur III times. Most of them are of not geographically helpful but
five texts point to a trans-Tigridian location. All of them record taxes or dues from
frontier regions: in PDT 1 171, Hamazi is followed by Der; in MVN 15 179 (n.d.),
Hamazi is followed by Maškan-Dudu and Ešnunna; in JCS 31 166 A (AS8.5.8), it
is in the company of hamlets that may lie in the Diyala and beyond, including Ar-
rapha and Lullubum, and the same holds true for PDT 2 959 (n.d.). In AUCT 1
93:22 (AS5.4.10), deliveries from the city are precede by those of Ṣilluš-Dagan and
Hašib-atal, who must be the commanders or even rulers of Simurrum and Arrapha,
respectively. 12 All of this suggests but does not prove that Hamazi lay in the vicinity
of Arrapha and Gasur, south of the Lower Zab, much in concert with the ideas of
Jacobsen (1959), Edzard (1972), as well as Edzard and Farber (1974: 73). 13

12. On the former, see Owen 2001b; on the latter, see Goetze 1963: 5.
13. “Grose Lokalisierung im Osttigrisland zw. Oberem Zab und Diyala.”
 Introduction to the Text Editions

This section contains editions of all 24 letters of the CKU. The presentation for
the most part follows, with minor deviations, the matrix system first used by Jerrold
Cooper in his edition of the Curse of Agade (Cooper 1983: 72) and further developed
by Miguel Civil in his publication of The Farmer’s Instructions (Civil 1994: 207).1
A reconstructed ideal text is followed by matrixes that provide maximum clarity in
the representation of the individual witnesses and allow for the immediate percep-
tion of similarity and difference. It must be stressed that the reconstructed text is a
redactional fiction created for analytical, citation, and translation purposes that does
not correspond to any actual version of the composition that existed in antiquity.
The issue of how to edit cuneiform texts has never been seriously debated, and it is a
matter that is far too complex to be dealt with here in a satisfactory manner; only a
few observations pertinent to the present edition will be noted.
The theory of textual editing has made much progress in recent decades, and the
traditional methods of reconstruction, which attempt to strip away levels of textual
changes in order to arrive at a pristine hypothetical original that would fully repre-
sent the author’s intent, has largely been abandoned in many disciplines. The classic
presentation of newer thinking about the materiality of textual traditions is that of
Jerome McGann, whose 1983 monograph, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism, has
influenced a whole generation of scholars. Susan Cherniack offered a succinct sum-
mary of the theory followed here in the introduction to a study of Chinese textual
transmission (Cherniack 1994: 8):
[T]he goal of the critical edition, contemporary textual theorists argue, is under-
mined by the scholarly apparatus attached to the edition’s reading text. The use of
the apparatus changes the reading experience. As we move between one version of
the work and another, the shape of the text shifts. What we encounter is not the
work as the author wrote it but what Jerome J. McGann calls a “shape-shifting” en-
tity—an ever changing work of composite authorship, which reveals itself as an on-
going social project, with contributions from sundry readers, editors, collators, print-
ers, and booksellers. From this perspective, the variations among the versions may
be seen to mark events in the life of the work, like rings on a tree. . . . Whether or
not the critical text succeeds in fulfilling the author’s intentions (and this is usually
unverifiable), we can say with McGann that it is certainly “not a text which ever
existed before.” It is not the author’s text reconstituted somehow. Like all previous

1. See also Michalowski 1989: 21–27.

237
238 Introduction to the Text Editions

versions, it is a new text, which emerges in a particular historical context but carries
with it the entire history of its evolution.

Various ways of dealing with texts have been proposed, some of them attuned toward
postmodernist visions of editing that would erase any intentionality on the part of
the editor, but as Small (1999: 56) observes, this kind of activity “is inescapably
value-laden, simply because editing deals not with text but with relevant or identi-
fied text, that is, with works and versions.” Even hypertext and other technological
solutions cannot overcome this problem, and “different editorial and critical orienta-
tions would generate different narratives from which to hang the facts of the textual
situation” (P. Cohen 1996: 736). It is therefore possible to make a very different edi-
tion of the CKU that might reveal new insights, but at a certain moment one has to
choose one’s methods and proceed accordingly.
These theoretical observations pertain to certain types of manuscript cultures,
but their general tenor applies to the Mesopotamian situation as well, as long as one
takes into consideration pertinent culture-specific ramifications. In the case of Old
Babylonian literature, the historical depth is difficult to gauge, and the tree-ring
metaphor invoked by Cherniack only takes one so far. My main reason for invok-
ing these postulates is to make certain that there are no misunderstandings about
the critical texts presented here. The issue of variation, however, is another matter
altogether.
Letters turned into literature constitute a perfect example of what Roland
Barthes (1968) famously called the “reality effect,” if I may be permitted to invoke
this expression once again. In everyday practice, letters are one-of-a-kind elements
in a communicative chain; hence, they are by definition unique. Multiple copies
of epistles mark them as members of a different code and, as a result, their semiotic
status is altered as they are removed from their own web of meaning and are entered
into a different intertextual universe. But real or not, because an epistle reproduces,
imitates, or riffs on a specific communicative act, one expects the text to be fixed and
unalterable, ever the more so when royal authority is involved. To be sure, when let-
ters are used in cuneiform schooling, one expects a certain level of textual deviation
that is similar to what one finds in other pedagogic material—that is, variation that
can be ascribed to the way in which texts were dictated, written from memory, and
copied from instructors examples. The results of such processes, using the so-called
decad, have now been exhaustively studied by Paul Delnero (2006), following upon
the more limited investigations of Gene Gragg (1972) and Pascal Attinger (1993:
95–139). Even if we still do not fully understand the many sources of textual varia-
tion, we now do have a fairly good picture of the kinds of ways in which manuscripts
of the same Old Babylonian literary composition may differ one from another. I have
not provided a full listing of all such variants in CKU because it would be pointless;
these texts should be considered with all other prose letters for any meaningful analy-
sis of these kinds of phenomena in Sumerian literary prose.
But even without an exhaustive tabulation, it is clear from the textual matrixes
that there is an unusually high level of variation in some parts of the CKU, so much
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 239

so that one has to inquire as to why epistolary literature would exhibit such levels of
difference, contrary to all generic expectations. Some texts from the CKU “core”—
for example, the first three letters, ArŠ1 (1), ŠAr1 (2), and ArŠ2 (3)—look no dif-
ferent than the texts of the Decad, as far as textual variation is concerned, with the
usual array of grammatical and orthographic disparity. But once we progress to the
fourth letter, AbŠ1 (4), the disparity between witnesses is striking; indeed, I know of
no other Sumerian literary composition that is characterized by such a large degree
of textual dissimilarity. Each and every manuscript has a different set of lines, so
that the composite text as reconstructed here is an utter fiction. Some of them are
so short as to even omit the name of the sender of the letter of petition altogether.
One could argue that this letter is composed in poetry, not prose, and that this may
at least partially account for the lack of textual stability. But the next letter in the
“core,” PuŠ1 (13), also exhibits a textual fluidity that is unexpected in an epistle: in
a passage describing parts of fortifications that are need of repair, each manuscript
has a different line order, and the names of officials in charge of each segment are
often different from one exemplar to another. When one looks outside the “core”
and beyond Nippur and the places that used a similar curricular set, the textual tradi-
tion becomes even more unstable. This is particularly true for the royal responses to
letters from officials—that is, for the letters whose historicity is most suspect, such as
ŠPu1 (14) and IbIš1 (22), for which each preserved manuscript has to be considered
a different recension. Perhaps the most acute example of such a cavalier attitude to-
ward textual stability are the “non-Nippurean” long editions of two of the letters of
the Ibbi-Sin correspondence, which add extensive poetic passages that are not found
in provenienced manuscripts.
How are we to explain this state of affairs? In view of the fact that the distri-
bution of tablets with CKU does not differ substantially from that of other school
compositions, there is little likelihood that this can be attributed to chance. It is also
unlikely that the large degree of variation can be attributed to place in the curricu-
lum. There may be unrecoverable generic forces at play that affect literary epistles
precisely because they imitate real ones, but there is little one can say about such
matters without more insight into native genre theory. Perhaps this is a function
of the fact that the CKU may have been added to the curriculum relatively late: as
already discussed above, it is impossible to trace the existence of these letters before
the time of Rim-Sin, but this is also the case with a large portion of Old Babylonian
Sumerian literary texts. It is interesting—and this has also been discussed earlier—
that although the SEpM is documented at Mari there is apparently no trace of CKU
among the recently discovered Old Babylonian school texts from the Syrian city, but
the date of these tablets is not clear at the present time. If the CKU had not been
part of the curriculum in earlier Old Babylonian times, then perhaps the textual
instability reflects the fact that the textual tradition was not considered truly fixed,
especially outside of the Nippur-centric scribal areas. While this is certainly possible,
I find it highly unlikely.
Because these are students’ exercises, the level of variation reflects a wide range
of professorial preference as well as varying degrees of individual student competence.
240 Introduction to the Text Editions

Ideally, each manuscript of each letter should be transliterated and translated sepa-
rately, but such a treatment of 115 different tablets would be impractical and self-
defeating. In a few cases, when the nature of the texts required it, I have edited
texts in different manners for practical purposes, and if this alarms seekers of perfect
consistency, so be it. The symbols in the matrixes, for the most part taken from Civil
(1994: 207), are as follows:
+ sign is fully present
o sign is not present due to damage to the tablet
. sign is broken but recognizable
- sign is omitted
x sign is unidentifiable
* line is omitted
: line continues
The sigla of individual manuscripts are coded by provenance: I = Isin, Ki = Kish,
N = Nippur, Ur = Ur, Uk = Uruk, Si = Sippar, Su = Susa, X = unknown.
For convenience, the letters are numbered sequentially for internal purposes of this
volume and are also identified by a name and abbreviation that includes a separate,
open-ended numbering scheme that allows for future additions. This is followed by
other names or numbers that have been applied to the letter in the past, as well as
by the unique number assigned in Miguel Civil’s unpublished catalog of Old Baby-
lonian literary texts, which is also used by The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian
Literature (ETCSL; online: http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/). Because there are differ-
ences between the new edition and my out-of-date RCU, a concordance of the two
is provided below (see p. 246). Following the list of sources, previous editions and
selected translations are mentioned. Fuller bibliographical information is provided
by ETCSL and is not repeated here. I have not made use of the ETCSL composite
editions, which do not provide a full list of variants, were made with few collations,
and without access to most of the unpublished sources. I say this not to criticize this
resource, which has its uses, but only to signal the fact that the new editions were
made on the basis of the direct examination of the majority of the manuscripts,
concentrating on the original materials rather than on previous work on the subject.
I personally collated almost all of the 115 manuscripts of CKU on the originals;
in the editions this is the unmarked category. With very few exceptions, all other
tablets were either checked against photographs or were collated by colleagues, as
noted under the list of sources for each letter. Only five items could not be accessed
in any manner.
The accompanying disc contains digital photographs or scans of all the tablets
utilized in the reconstruction of the CKU, with the exception of the nine mentioned
below under no. 1. Most were taken by the author. I am indebted to the kindness of
colleagues who graciously provided me with digital pictures; other acknowledgments
are found in the preface to this book.
1. Not included on the disc are the following nine tablets: IM 13347 (TIM 9 38), IM 13712
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 241

(TIM 9 39), IM 44134 (TIM 9 40), MDP 27 87, 88, 207, 212, Ni. 4586, and NYPCL 334.
2. I have not been able to obtain photographs or collations of five tablets: Relph 16, IM
13712 (TIM 9 39), as well as MDP 27 87, 88 and 212.
3. Photographs of thirteen texts were taken by others: Aw/n and A 7457 (courtesy of the
Oriental Institute), AN1922-163 (OECT 5 26, E. Robson; the tablet is too fragile for
photography), Cotsen 40832 (Wilson, Education 159 [p. 251]), Cotsen 52157 (Wilson,
Education 158 [p. 250]),2 HS 1438, HS 1456 (TMH NF 4 42–43, J. Cooper), HS 2394
(M. Krebernik, K. V. Zand), MM 1039 (M. Molina), MDAI 57 1 (M. Ghelichkhani),
MDP 18 51 (P. Damarshand), Ni. 9866 (ISET 1 133 [191]), Si 420 (Scheil, USFS 134,
both G. Beckman) and Cornell 63 (L. Kinney-Bajwa). My own photographs of the three
Schøyen Collection tablets are supplemented by official photographs from the Collection
provided by Andrew George.
4. Ten texts were collated on photographs, and I did not have the opportunity to work
directly with the originals: HS 1438, HS 1456 (TMH NF 4 42–43), LB 2543 (TLB 3
172), IM 78644 (IB 733), MM 1039 (AuOr 15 36), W 16743 gb (Cavigneaux, Uruk
143), Cornell 63, Cotsen 40832 (Wilson, Education 159 [p. 251]), Cotsen 52157 (Wilson,
Education 158 [p. 250]), as well as NYPCL 334.3
5. Three published were texts collated by others: MDP 27 207 (M. Malyeri), IM 13347 (TIM
9 38, P. Steinkeller) and IM 44134 (TIM 9 40, J. Black).
6. I could not obtain digital images of three tablets; two of these are presented here as digital
scans of paper photographic prints: IM 78644 (IB 733) and W 16743 gb (Cavigneaux,
Uruk 43). The third, Relph 16, was scanned from a hand copy by T. G. Pinches, discovered
by Irving Finkel, but the current location of the tablet is unknown.
No hand-copies are appended to this edition. Some years ago, I began to copy the
unpublished sources of CKU, but the purchase of my first digital camera allowed me
to set these rather imperfect drawings aside and use the new technology to its full
advantage. By then I had already come to accept the fact that, unlike some of my
more talented colleagues, I am not a very good copyist. Inaccurate hand-copies may
satisfy formal requirements, but they are of little practical use; unless they are very
precise, they can be misleading as far as paleography is concerned, as are, to my mind,
all “regularized” drawings of tablets that do not preserve the exact shape of signs as
well as other features such as lining and “ten marks.” Such drawings are, in essence,
nothing more than subjective transliterations expressed by other means and are of
little assistance when readings are in doubt. In such moments, only precise, expertly
drawn representations are of any use. Most Assyriologists can easily identify the copy
hand of the great scholars of the past just by looking at a page, and this testifies
to the personal nature of this work. But even the best copies are ultimately two-
dimensional representations of three-dimensional reality and are never truly precise.
For more than a century, they have been a necessary part of our endeavors, since
traditional photography was expensive to reproduce and there were no other practi-
cal alternatives. I share the opinion of those who argue that the advent of affordable

2. Photographs kindly supplied by Ivy Trent.

3. Photograph: http://cdli.ucla.edu/cdlisearch/search/index.php?SearchMode=​Text&txtID_
Txt=​P342755.
242 Introduction to the Text Editions

digital photography allows for a much better presentation of most cuneiform texts
than does the traditional hand-copy, one that also offers a better chance to make
many more texts available in a less time-consuming and more affordable manner.
Moreover, photography, while never perfect, allows for better study of cuneiform
paleography, a highly neglected area of Sumerology. Having said this, I should nev-
ertheless acknowledge the wonderful paleographical handbook of Old Babylonian
Sumerian produced by Catherine Mittermayer (2006), which has quickly become
indispensable.
The transliteration system followed here is a fairly traditional one that is meant
to represent the manner in which the texts were written and not approximate an ide-
alized phonological transcription—hence the use of standard sign values, although
I have bowed to current conventions and have indicated the “nasal g” by means of
g˜. The cuneiform writing system used conventional rules to represent the Sumerian,
rules that do not attempt to provide a precise phonological and morphological rep-
resentation of the language. Therefore, a transliteration is not a transcription and
is meant to provide the modern reader with a transparent way of perceiving which
signs are used in the text and how the editor understood them. Recently, attempts
have been made to introduce new “readings” of signs in a more-or-less systematic
manner (P. Attinger apud Mittermayer 2006; Attinger 2007: 36–37). Attinger is
undoubtedly correct that our transliteration system is unsystematic and inconsistent;
I sympathize with some of these views, but I cannot accept this new way of represent-
ing Sumerian texts for a number of reasons, and I think it unnecessary at this time.
His proposals amount to a revision of a large percentage of the commonly accepted
readings but is presented, for the most part, without full evidence or any analysis of
the documentation, and some of them are based on questionable assumptions about
historical phonology and about the way in which lexical texts encode Sumerian. I
have no doubt that many of his renditions are more correct, on some level, than the
ones we currently use, but this is not the way to implement changes in the way a
field works. There are many different problems in the decipherment of the phono-
logical shapes of Sumerian words. To provide but one example: if, as M. Civil (2007:
13) observes, the graphic syllabification may not match the phonological shape of
words in cuneiform writing: “thus ŋi-ir ‘foot’ alternating with ŋi-ri may in principle
represent /ŋir/, /ŋri/, or /ŋiri/; ka-la-ak ‘strong’ can be /kalk/, /klak/, or /kalak/, and
so on.”
There are many other similar problems with the understanding of the manner in
which a logo-syllabic writing system was used to represent the long-dead Sumerian
language, and therefore we cannot expect to create a transliteration system that will
accurately represent the phonological shape of utterances. In a sense, such projects
are ultimately futile and misguided because they create the illusion that the cunei-
form system used to write Standard Old Babylonian Sumerian accurately represented
the language as it was read aloud, but this misses the conventional nature of cunei-
form writing, which was constantly changing as it was applied to languages other
than Sumerian, even occasioning feedback into the way it was used to represent the
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 243

source language (Cooper 1999). There is no assurance that the kind of uniformity
sought by scholars existed in the teaching establishments of Mesopotamia. To be
sure, there were elementary “pronunciation” guides, such as the Proto-Ea syllabary,
but this composition was only used in Nippur (Michalowski 1983c: 151), and one
must assume that there existed in antiquity a broad range of variation in the percep-
tion of Sumerian, subject to local and individual teacher/student idiosyncrasies and
received traditions. Any attempt at revising our current, admittedly inconsistent
and inadequate system of transliterating Sumerian texts must result from a detailed,
linguistically informed graphemic investigation. In the end, I am of the opinion that
the role of the editor is to represent texts the way they were written rather than to
make assumptions on how they were read. Transliteration is a convention, and any
new set of such conventions that is unsupported by such analysis will only serve to
defamiliarize the texts and make it more difficult for others to read, without adding
any new information.
Finally, I would like to comment on the translations of the letters. Epistolary texts
are by their very nature highly idiomatic (Charpin 2008). Moreover, they compress
complex information into a limited textual space and are often sketchy and ellipti-
cal, assuming knowledge of prior letters in the communicative chain, as well as oral
commentary from the persons delivering the tablet. Our inadequate understanding
of complex prose syntax of the language further hampers the understanding of Sume-
rian letters. After all, letters comprise the only large corpus of Sumerian prose, but
our understanding of the grammar of Standard Old Babylonian Sumerian—highly
contested as it continues to be—is based to a large extent on poetry. In addition,
there is a detectable high percentage of interference from Akkadian in these texts,
which is most apparent in the large number of idiomatic calques. Indeed, it often
seems that at some level of deeper structure, the underlying abstract constitution of
the letters is indeed Akkadian. This tells us nothing about the period in which they
were composed, because interference of this kind could have already taken place in
Ur III times. Even those who believe that Sumerian was the main spoken vernacular
in the south in that period—and I do not share this view at all—will admit that some
forms of Akkadian were widely spoken as well, at least in some parts of the areas
controlled by the kings of Ur.
Some readers may be struck by the fact that I have avoided any discussion of the
linguistic aspects of the CKU. I have purposely avoided providing any “grammar” of
these letters for a number of reasons. The heterogeneous nature of the whole “cor-
pus” and of the manuscripts of each individual composition makes it impossible, to
my mind, to provide a consistent grammatical description. Each and every variant
is dependent on too many different individual student and teacher decisions for any
statistically-valid morphological study. It is obvious that many of the grammatical
forms, particularly observable in the verbal morphology, are “incorrect” if viewed
from our reconstructions of Standard Old Babylonian Sumerian. It would be equally
fallacious to correct such forms or, in many cases, to translate them literally accord-
ing to our idealized reconstructions of the language. Perhaps when all the other prose
244 Introduction to the Text Editions

letters are properly edited, someone may be tempted to offer a syntactic analysis of
Old Babylonian literary Sumerian prose, as distinct from the more circumscribed and
stylized language of poetry.
Because translation is not a value-free act and is dependent on so many fac-
tors, including one’s own opinions about the Sumerian lexicon and grammar, on
knowledge of cultural practices, on intuition, and on a feel for the target languages,
there will always be unlimited alternative renditions of any ancient text. In the case
of the letters, the situation is complicated by a number of factors that have been dis-
cussed on these pages, among them the problem of a multileveled alterity, as well as
redactional and editorial problems. Moreover, the translator is constantly vexed by
concerns over semantics and reference in relationship to different periods of Meso-
potamian history. Should one understand words and concepts in a manner that is
in harmony with Ur III usage, or should one strive to recover meanings that would
resonate better in Old Babylonian times?
One short example will serve to illustrate the many challenges that open up
endless possibilities of rendering these compositions in a modern language. In the
first letter of CKU, the grand vizier Aradmu reports that a high officer by the name
of Apilaša, stationed on the far frontier, had usurped many symbolic and practical
trappings of royalty and had insulted the king in the person of the high official who is
writing the letter we are reading. To illustrate Apilaša’s threatening stance, Aradmu
informs the king that “he had stationed no less than five thousand of his choice guards
to his right and left” (ArŠ1: 21 [1]). The word that I have translated as “guard,” is
àga-ús. There is some debate as to the meaning of this term: Lafont (2009: 9–11)
has recently proposed that it refers to the soldiers of the “standing army,” much as the
corresponding Akkadian term redûm does in Old Babylonian texts—that is, at the
very time when the versions we are reading were being used in schooling. I remain
unconvinced, based partly on the conviction that military organization differed over
time and hold to the older notion that such people were special elite guards, distinct
from ordinary soldiers/workers of the Ur III state (de Maaijer and Jagersma 2003/4;
Allred 2006: 57–61; Michalowski 2008: 111). But in Old Babylonian times readers
may have interpreted the word in precisely this manner. To them it implied that
Apilaša is being accused of standing at the head of his own private army, an army
that answers only to him and not to the Crown, ready to menace the grand vizier.
The horror!
Of course, my interpretation of the word àga-ús could be wrong, but that is not
really the issue here. What matters is that we have absolutely no way of knowing
whether some or all of the teachers and students who were involved in the produc-
tion of the surviving manuscripts of this letter understood it in contemporary terms,
as referring to conscripted soldiers, or if they comprehended the historical shift in
meaning. If they did not, shall we translate it they way we imagine some of them
might have understood it or stick with reconstructed Ur III meanings? The letters,
even though they are often arranged in pairs—a letter to a king and an answer—are
only small parts of conversations. Mired in the multifaceted alterity of purported
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 245

time of origin, progressive redaction, and reception, leading into the eighteenth cen-
tury b.c.e., and then into the twenty-first century c.e., their meaning is not fixed in
the clay but becomes a constantly shifting ground for analytical reading. Therefore, I
have tried to render these texts in contemporary English, avoiding the literal render-
ings of compound verbs and of idiomatic expressions that often crop up in modern
presentations of Sumerian texts. Others will offer different translations, not only
because of disagreements over readings of signs, lexicography, and grammar but also
because of differences in the conceptualization of ancient history, literature, and
epistolography. I was guided here by the words of the poet Jerome Rothenberg (1981
[1969]: 91), a proponent of “total translation:”
Translation is carry-over. It is a means of delivery & of bringing to life. It begins
with a forced change of language, but a change too that opens up the possibility of
greater understanding.

More than two decades later, Rothenberg (1992: 65) observed that translation is not
a reproduction of, or stand-in, for, some fixed original, but that it functions as a com-
mentary on the other and itself and on the differences between them.

The Correspondence of the Kings of Ur:

List of Letters
1. Aradmu to Šulgi 1 (ArŠ1, 3.1.1, A1, RCU 1)
1a. Aradmu to Šulgi 1a (ArŠ1a)
2. Šulgi to Aradmu 1 (ŠAr1, 3.1.2, A2, RCU2)
3. Aradmu to Šulgi 2 (ArŠ2, 3.1.3+3.1.11, A2a, RCU 3+4)
4. Abaindasa to Šulgi 1 (AbŠ1, 3.1.21, B1)
5. Šulgi to Aradmu 2 (ŠAr2, 3.1.13.1, RCU 8)
6. Šulgi to Aradmu 3 (ŠAr3, 3.1.61, RCU 16)
7. Aradmu to Šulgi 3 (ArŠ3, 3.1.5, RCU 7)
8. Aradmu to Šulgi 4 (ArŠ4)
9. Aradmu to Šulgi 5 (ArŠ5, 3.1.6, RCU 6)
10. Aradmu to Šulgi 6 (ArŠ6, 3.1.4, RCU 5)
11. Urdun to Šulgi 1 (UrŠ1, 3.1.11.1, RCU 14)
12. Aradmu? to Šulgi? 7 (ArŠ7)
13. Puzur-Šulgi to Šulgi 1 (PuŠ1, 3.1.7, RCU 11)
14. Šulgi to Puzur-Šulgi 1 (ŠPu1, 3.1.8, RCU 9+10)
15. Šulgi to Išbi-Erra 1 (ŠIš1, 3.1.13.2, RCU 15)
16. Amar-Sin to Šulgi 1 (AmŠ1, 3.1.12, RCU 12)
17. Šulgi to Amar-Sin (ŠAm1, 3.1.13, RCU 13)
18. Šarrum-bani to Šu-Sin (ŠaŠu1, 3.1.15, RCU 17)
19. Šu-Sin to Šarrum-bani 1 (ŠuŠa1, 3.1.16, RCU 18)
246 Introduction to the Text Editions

20. Šu-Sin to Lu-Nanna and Šarrum-bani 1 (ŠuLuŠa1, 3.3.31)

21. Išbi-Erra to Ibbi-Sin 1 (IšIb1, 3.1.17, RCU 19)
22. Ibbi-Sin to Išbi-Erra 1 (IbIš1, 3.1.18, RCU 20)
23. Puzur-Numušda to Ibbi-Sin 1 (PuIb1, 3.1.19, RCU 21)
24. Ibbi-Sin to Puzur-Numušda 1 (IbPu1, 3.1.20, RCU 22)

Concordance between RCU and CKU

RCU CKU CKU RCU

1 1 1 1
1a 1a
2 2 2 2
3 3 3 3+4
4 3 4
5 16 5 16
6 9 6 8
7 7 7 7
8 6 8
9 14 9 6
10 14 10 5
11 13 11 14
12 16 12
13 17 13 11
14 11 14 9+10
15 15 15 15
16 5 16 12
17 18 17 13
18 19 18 17
19 21 19 18
20 22 20
21 23 21 19
22 24 22 20
23 21
24 22
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 247

Colophons
Fifteen of the 115 CKU tablets have colophons, and five of these have year-
names: Samsu-iluna 1 (H, I, L), 27 (O), and 28 (E). All are Old Babylonian, with
the exception of K, which is Middle Babylonian from Susa. Colophon G is from
Kish; all the other Old Babylonian CKU tablets with colophons are unprovenienced,
although N may be from Sippar. Because there is up-to-date study of such subscripts
it is impossible to make any reliable statements on the matter, but my impression is
that this is a relatively high number due, one would assume, to the large percentage
of unprovenienced CKU sources, since colophons are never used in Old Babylonian
school texts from Nippur and are rare at Ur.
Colophon A
ArŠ1 (1) X8
[im-gíd-d]a? dsin(30)-iš-me-a-ni
[iti . . .]x u4 3-kam (month x, day 3)
Colophon B
ŠAr1 (2) X5
im-⸢gíd-da⸣ qi-iš-ti-é-a
iti ⸢apin⸣-[du8]-⸢a⸣ u4 7-kam (month 8, day 7)
Colophon C
ArŠ2 (3) X2
⸢iti zíz⸣-a u4 ⸢25-kam⸣ (month 11, day 25)
Colophon D
ŠAr3 (6) X1
[i]ti še-kin-kuru5 u4 19-kam (month 12, day 19)
[i]m-gíd-da ⸢a⸣-lí-ba-ni-šu
Colophon E
ArŠ4 (8) X1
im-gíd-da ⸢dUTU?⸣-mu-ša-lim
iti gán-gán-⸢è⸣ ⸢ud⸣ 5-kam
mu sa-am-su-⸢i-lu-na⸣ lugal-e
á-ág̃-g̃á ⸢den⸣-líl-lá-t[a . . .] (month 9, day 5, Si 28)
Colophon F
UdŠ1 (11) X1
u4 26-kam (day 26)
Colophon G
PuŠ1 (13) Ki1
iti ⸢zíz-a u4⸣ [x ka]m
im-gíd-⸢da⸣ Idza-ba4-⸢ba4⸣-[...] (month 11, day x)
248 Introduction to the Text Editions

Colophon H
PuŠ1 (13) X5
i[m-gíd-da q]í-iš-ti-é-a
iti g[án-gán]-⟨è u4⟩ ⸢20⸣-kam
⸢mu⸣ [sa]-⸢am-su⸣-i-lu-na lugal-⸢e?⸣ (month 9, day 20, Si1)
Colophon I
PuŠ1 (13) X4
im-gíd-da qí-iš-ti-é-a
iti gán-gán-è ⟨u4⟩ 25-kam
mu sa-am-su-i-lu-na lugal-e (month 9, day 25, Si1)
Colophon J
ŠPu1 (14) X2
iti ⸢ne-ne-g̃ar u4⸣ [x]-kam
im-gíd-da i[b]-ni-DIG ̃ IR (month 5, day x)

Colophon K
Šiš1 (15) Su1
ŠU dKUR.GAL-ta-a-a-ar DUB.SAR TUR (hand of Enlil-tajjar, junior scribe)
Colophon L
ŠaŠu1(18) X2
20 mu-bi-im
iti u4-zíz u4 3-kam
mu sa-am-su-i-lu-na lugal (month 11, day 3, Si 1)
Colophon M
IšIb1 (21) X2
šu? ì-lí-re-[me]-⸢ni⸣ (hand of Ili-remeni)
iti zíz!-a [u4 x-kam] (month 11, day x)
Colophon N
IšIb1 (21) X4
šu-nígin 32 mu-bi-im
⸢iti zíz⸣-a u4 15-kam (month 11, day 15)
Colophon O
compilation tablet Xa (X1)
⸢4⸣ lugal-g̃u10-ra
[mu]-bi 182-àm
[šu x]x-ia-a dumu ku-bu-lum
[iti ne-ne]-g̃ar u4 17-⸢kam⸣
[mu sa-am-su]-⸢i-lu⸣-na lugal-e
[níg̃ babbar-ra] ⸢sízkur a-ki-tum⸣
[ul šár-r]a-k[am] (month 5. day 17, Si 27)
 1. Aradmu to Šulgi 1
(ArŠ1, 3.1.1, A1, RCU 1)

Composite Text
1. lugal-g̃u10-ra ù-na-a-dug4
2. I
árad-mu árad-zu na-ab-bé-a
3. kur su-bir4ki-šè har-ra-an kaskal si sá-sá-e-ra
4. gun ma-da-zu ge-en-ge-né-dè
5. a-rá ma-da zu-zu-dè
6. ugu a-pi-il-la-ša gal-zu unken-na-ka
7. ad gi4-gi4-da gù-téš-a si-ke-dè
8. inim u4-da ka-ne-ne-a hé-en-tùm á-še mu-e-da-a-a-ág̃
9. ká é-gal-la-šè gub-a-g̃u10-ne
10. silim-ma lugal-g̃á-ke4 èn li-bí-in-tar
11. dúr na-ma-ta-an-zi ki-a nu-ub-za
12. ba-an-da-mud-en
13. te-g̃á-e-da-g̃u10-ne
14. é kaskal-la kuš ga-ríg̃-ak šukur kù-sig17 kù-babbar
15. na4
gug na4za-gìn g̃ar-ra-ta
16. a-ab-dù-dù-a ùšu sar-àm i-íb-tuš
17. kù-sig17 na4za-gìn-na mí zi-dè-eš im-me
18. g̃iš
gu-za barag túgšutur-e ri-a i-íb-tuš
19. g̃iš
g̃ìri-gub kù-sig17-ka g̃ìri-ni i-íb-g̃ar
20. g̃ìri-ni na-ma-ta-an-kúr
21. àga-ús sag̃-g̃á-na iá li-mu-um-ta-àm zi-da gùb-bu-na íb-ta-an-gub-bu-uš
22. àš gud niga g̃éš udu niga níg-zú-gub-šè in-gar
23. šu-luh lugal-g̃á-ke4 sá bí-in-dug4
24. ká-na èn nu-tar-ra-bi lú na-ma-ši-in-ku4-re-en
25. ku4-ku4-da-g̃u10-ne
26. g̃iš
gu-za gàr-ba kù-sig17 huš-a g̃ar-ra lú ma-an-de6 tuš-a ma-an-dug4
27. á-ág̃-g̃á lugal-g̃á-ke4 ì-gub-bé-en nu-tuš-ù-dè-en bí-dug4
28. min gud niga niš udu niga g̃išbanšur-g̃u10 lú ma-an-gar
29. nu-kár-kár-dè àga-ús lugal-g̃á-ke4 g̃išbanšur-g̃u10 íb-bal-a-aš

249
250 1. Aradmu to Šulgi 1

30. ní ba-da-te su ba-da-zi

31. iti ezen-dnin-a-zu u4 iá-àm zal-la-àm
32. lugal-g̃u10 á-še mu-e-da-a-a-ág̃
33. iti u5-bímušen-gu7 u4 diš-àm zal-la-àm
34. lú-kaš4-e mu-e-ši-gi4
35. u4 sa9-àm šen-e ba-te
36. lugal-g̃u10 hé-en-zu
1
Speak to my king, 2 saying (the words) of Aradmu, your servant:
8
You commanded me, 3 while I was on an expedition to Subir, 4 to firmly secure
the taxes on the frontier territory, 5 to thoroughly investigate the state of (this) fron-
tier, 6–7 to confer (with the elites of Subir) about the prefect Apilaša and have them
come to agreement, 8 so that he could bring to them (i.e., the Subir elites) up-to-date
instructions. 1
9
When I stood at the gate of the (local) palace, 10 no one inquired about my
king’s well-being, 11 no one rose from (his) seat for me, nor did anyone prostrate
himself (before me); 12 this (all) made me very worried.
13
But when I drew nearer, 14–16 (I discovered that Apilaša) was dwelling in a
portable structure constructed by means of finely combed fleece (panels stretched be-
tween) staked poles inlaid with gold, silver, carnelian, and lapis-lazuli covering an
area of thirty sar (ca. 1080 sq. m.). 17 He was all decked out in precious stones and
metals. 18 He sat on a throne on a dais placed over a fine carpet, 2 19 and had set his
feet on a golden footstool. 20 He would not remove his feet in my presence! 21 He
had stationed no less than five thousand of his choice guards to his right and left.
22
(He ordered) six grass-fed oxen and sixty fattened sheep placed (on tables) for
a meal; 23 and he took over the performance of my king’s cleansing rites. 24 No one
bothered to bring me in through the very gate at which no-one had inquired about
your (well-being).
25
As I entered (anyway), 26 someone brought me a chair with red gold encrusted
knobs and told me: “Sit!” 27 I answered him: “When I am on my king’s orders I
stand—I do not sit!” 28 Someone placed 3 two grass-fed oxen and twenty grass-fed
sheep onto my table, 29 but even though I had given no offense, my king’s (own)
guardsmen overturned my table. 30 I was so frightened that my skin crawled!
31–32
My king, you gave me orders the evening of the fifth day of the Ninazu Fes-
tival Month;
33–34
I am sending you a courier the evening of the first day of the Swan-Eating
Month. 35 It is midday, and war is brewing! 36 Now my king is informed (about all of
this)!

1. Alt. transl.: so that as part of the daily instructions he could bring them (the people of
Subir) good news.
2. Alt. transl.: under an awning.
3. Var.: heaped up.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 251

Commentary
Although this was the most commonly studied letter in the OB schools, it is full
of lexical and syntactic difficulties. For this reason, but also because this translation
differs from all previous ones, including a number of my own, a detailed commentary
is required.
1. A constant problem that has come up in working with the CKU has been the
rendition of lugal.g̃ u (lugal-g̃u 10), literally, “my lord” or “my king.” This occurs
most frequently in the address phrase of letters addressed to kings: lugal-g̃u 10-ra ù-
na-(a)-dug 4. For Akkadian-speaking scribes, this corresponded, almost morpheme
for morpheme, to the opening letter formula ana bēlija qibīma, as discussed above. It
is quite possible that the Sumerian phrase is actually a calque from Akkadian; nev-
ertheless, lugal.g̃ u means more than “my king” in Ur III Sumerian. In administra-
tive texts from Drehem, the name of the living king is almost never invoked, except
to refer to statues. Instead, the term that is used is lugal.g̃u, even in third-person
reference; correspondingly, one often finds ereš.g̃a (ereš-g̃á), literally, “my queen/
mistress,” when the queen is mentioned (P. Michalowski, Syro-Mesopotamian Studies
2/3 [1978] 88–89). It is important to remember that, in the political language of the
Ur III state, with a few exceptions that need not concern us here, there was only one
real lugal in the mundane world, namely, the sovereign of Ur; all other rulers were
described as énsi, as were the provincial and city-governors of the state itself. At
the same time, the word lugal can be used, more simply, to mean “master,” much
like Akkadian bēlu, for the master of a slave, for example. From this, one may infer
that the phrase is an important formal manner of address, and I have struggled with
the translations, going back and forth between “my liege,” “his majesty,” “Milord,”
and simply “my king.” For subjective aesthetic reasons, I have settled on the latter,
although stylistically, and even perhaps ideologically, this is perhaps not the best
solution.
3. The use of the verb si . . . sá, “to make straight,” with kaskal, “road, expedi-
tion,” corresponds here to the Akkadian idiomatic use of šutēšuru in the meaning, “to
proceed, march on.” The rare ending ‑ra /e found on nominalized verbal forms has
been discussed by J. Krecher (ZA 57 [1965] 27) and a host of others, most recently
by Christopher Woods. 4 Both suggest that it serves to topicalize or stress the end of
subordinate clauses and also has a secondary temporal or spatial meaning, hence the
translation “while I was. . . .” Woods argues that this is still another function of the
demonstrative ‑re.
On the synonymic word pair kaskal har-ra-an-na and on the poetic structure
of the opening lines, see above pp. 28–29.

4. Christopher Woods, “The Element -re and the Organization of Erim-ḫuš,” paper read at
the 213th annual meeting of the American Oriental Society, April 4th, 2003.
252 1. Aradmu to Šulgi 1

5. The expression a-rá zu requires comment. In Sumerian, the noun a-rá means
“times (mathematical)” as well as “customary way, manner of behavior.” Its Ak-
kadian equivalent, alaktu, has a broader meaning, semantically parallel to English
“way,” because already in Old Assyrian and Old Babylonian it can also refer to “road,
way, passage, etc.” Students would have known the expression a-rá zu from the early
level “tetrad” excercise Lipit-Eštar Hymn A 39: dub-sar a-rá zu dnidaba-ka-me-
en, “I am a scribe who knows the ways of Nidaba.” Closer to the general semantic
context of the letter is the use found in the Ur-Namma Hymn A, B 10–11:
g̃iš
tir ha-šu-úr ⸢ba-da⸣-an-sìg a-rá ⸢kalam-ma⸣ ba-e-sùh
g̃iš
eren kalam-ma-⸢ke 4⸣ ba-da-bal a-⸢rá kalam⸣-ma ba-e-kúr
(Ur-Namma,) the stand of cypress trees was struck down; the mood of the homeland
was confused,
The juniper tree of the homeland was overturned; the mood of the homeland was
altered.

Here, as in our passage, the expression appears to be a synonym of dím-ma ma-da

= ṭēm mātim, on which see p. 401 below.
There is only one other example of the Sumerian expression with duplication
of the verbal root: Waradsin 29 59 [E4.2.13.21] a-rá nam-lugal-la-g̃á ùg̃-g̃á zu-
zu-dè, “to inform my? people of the conditions of my kingship.” This usage is what
one would expect—zu “to know, learn” and zu-zu “to teach”—but this can hardly
apply here, and therefore it is most probable that the duplication is intensive: “to
thoroughly investigate.” However, in view of the high level of underlying Akkadian
syntax and semantics in some of the CKU letters, it is also highly probable that
the present line was also understood, by some at least, as “to investigate the roads
through the frontier;” in fact, a double meaning may very well be intentional. In-
deed, it is possible that a-rá zu may be a calque from Akkadian alaktam lamādum,
which has been thoroughly analyzed by T. Abusch, HTR 80 (1987) 15–42.
Text X1 has additional material that may perhaps be restored as: [suhuš ma-d]a
gi-ne-dè, “to secure the foundations of the land.”
8. This line is unique; it has caused problems for all who have worked on this text
and remains open to different interpretations. The verb is probably ka . . . de 6,
“to bring news,” discussed by M. Civil, AOAT 25 92. Since this is a calque of
pû+suffix+abālum, the syntax of the phrase has to be understood as Akkadian. The
noun is qualified by u 4-da. One could understand this in an adverbial manner, as in
á u 4-da, “daily expenses/wages/work,” for which see R. de Maaijer and B. Jagersma,
AfO 44/5 (1997–98) 286, or as “today, present” as in munus u 4-da-e-ne in Ukg 6
iii 20′ and 23′, for which see D. O. Edzard, Sumerian Grammar, 19, who notes that
this is an adjectival compound. The plural form here is what drives the translation
of lines 6–7; the force of ugu in line 6 is difficult to gauge and, were it not for this
plural form, one would consider the rendition “to council (with) Apilaša and come
to mutual agreement.”
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 253

The final verb is á . . . ág̃, “to send news, command, instruct.” In CKU it is almost
always construed with /-še/ on the first element. This idiosyncratic usage is rarely
attested; for the most part OB Sumerian utilizes pronouns rather than ‑še 1/3 (Kara-
hashi, Sumerian Compund Verbs 72-74). This element must be the deictic particle
/-še/, and the use of it here probably reflects confusion with á-še = anumma, “now,
here.” Students in OB schools would have been familiar with the rhetorical use of
the verb governing purpose clauses from the early level exercise Iddin-Dagan Hymn
B (part of the “tetrad”).
9. Note the intentionally ambiguous use of the term é-gal to designate Apilaša’s
residence. On one level, Aradmu is implying the usurpation of royal power, antici-
pating the lines that follow; rhetorically, the line really means “when I had arrived
at his residence that was a veritable royal palace.” On a more prosaic level, the word
é-gal can be used to designate roadside establishments as well as royal palaces; ap-
prentice scribes would know this from their study of the ubiquitous hymn Šulgi A, in
which the king boasts that he built roadside establishments, or caravanserai (é-gal),
for travelers along the roads of Sumer (line 29). Similar ambiguous rhetoric is prob-
ably found in the final part of Inana and Šukaletuda; the goddess predicts that after his
death Šukaletuda will be remembered in songs performed in royal palaces (line 298:
é-gal lugal) but that he will dwell in the caravanserai of the wilderness (line 301:
é-⸢gal ?⸣ eden-na é-zu hé-a). Note that there were at least seven places designated
as é-gal in the Umma province alone in Ur III times (P. Steinkeller, FS Adams 193).
There is one Ur III document from Nippur that mentions an é-gal énsi-ka located
in nearby Tumal (TMH NF 1–2 174:7–8). Since Tumal did not have its own gover-
nor, this must refer to the temporary residence of the man who ran Nippur; see also,
possibly the Girsu document TÉL 271:4 (é-gal énsi ba-an-ku 4).
10. This expression has a very specific technical meaning in this context. The term
silim-ma is not “hail” or “bon santé” but a very specific obligation to inquire about
the king’s well-being and safety. It seems to allude to a blessing that was used in the
time of Šulgi that might be idiomatically rendered as “Long Live the King.” The
wording of this blessing is explicitly provided in ArŠ4: 6–7 (letter 8): silim-ma
lugal-g̃á-ke 4 èn mu-tar-re-eš lugal-me u 4 da-rí-šè hé-ti gù bí-in-⸢dé⸣-eš,
“they inquired about my king’s well-being and shouted out ‘Long Live the King!’”
Almost the same wording is found in a subscript written at the end of the Ur III ver-
sion of the Sumerian King List (which ends with the reign of Ur-Namma): ⸢d⸣ šul-gi
lugal-g̃u10 u 4 sud-šè ⸢ha⸣-ti-il, “May Šulgi, my king, live a life of long days!”
(P. Steinkeller, Fs. Wilcke 274). This official blessing is also encoded in OB personal
names such as Hamatil, Ušareš-hetil (Mari and Ešnunna), and Til-ani-hesud (Akk.
Balassu-lirik; see, most recently, D. Charpin, OBO 160/4 262, idem, Hammurapi
142–43). In Ur III, we commonly find RN/ lugal/nin/PN-ha-ma-ti and, once,
d
Šu- dSin-hé-ti (CUAS 88:3). This was obviously a common element of royal pro-
tocol, as evidenced by a passage in a letter from Jamīum to Zimri-Lim in Mari: “the
entire army cried out ‘Long Live Our King’ (bur bêlī)!” (ARM 26/2 327 2′–3′); the
254 1. Aradmu to Šulgi 1

same cry was addressed to Hammurabi, according to ARM 26/2 363 5–10; see also
J. M. Durand, LAPO 17 9d.
This use of the term is also attested in an Ur III document from the Drehem
“treasury”; in JCS 10 (1956) 30 10, a messenger receives silver rings (lines 3–4):
mu silim-ma a-bí-sí-im-ti, ⸢unug⸣ ki-ta mu-de 6-a-šè, “because he brought the
salutations of (Queen) Abi-simti from Uruk.”
11. To my knowledge, the idiom, or compound verb, dúr(. . .)zi is otherwise un­
attested. Compare the commonly attested dúr . . . g̃ar, “to sit, dwell.”
12. The reading of this line is not clear, and it appears that it already offered prob-
lems to the ancients: some Nippur students solved the problem by omitting it alto-
gether. Every text has a different version of this line. With reservations, I base my in-
terpretation on mud = galātu, “to be or become restless or nervous,” or parādu, “to be
scared, terrified,” assuming that túm in N9 and X3 reflect aural misinterpretations.
The use of mud as qulu, “silence, torpor,” for which see now M. Jaques, Le vocabulaire
des sentiments 217, is clearly related. One assumes a rhetorical progress; here, Aradmu
is very worried, but after the rest of the story, he is absolutely terrified (line 30).
14. It is difficult to ascertain the exact meaning of the rare é kaskal-(la). The
word is documented as é kaskal in two Sargonic period texts (OIP 14 43:1, Nik.
2 53:5 [ereš é kaskal-šè gin-né]), and only twice in Ur III. The first is an in-
complete Umma text (CUAS 93:2); the second is an account from Urusagrig that
includes provisions for a royal messenger, u 4 é kaskal lugal sa gi 4-gi 4-dè im-gin-
na-a, “when he traveled to prepare the royal travel tent” (LH 5458 8–9, courtesy D. I.
Owen). Note that the scribe of N1 was thinking of the more common é dána, rather
than é kaskal-la but thought better of it and complemented the term with -la.
IGI.KAK with the reading šukur = šukurru stands for a lance or spear for war
and hunting but can also have other uses, more specifically as a pole or stake to create
fencing—in our case, to hold the fleece panels. This is clearly the case in the Lamen-
tation over the Destruction of Sumer and Ur 45: sipa-dè gišukur-ra amaš kù‑ga šu
nu-nigin-dè, “that the shepherd(s) not enclose the sacred sheepfold with a fence.”
The image of a fence made up of fleece panels held up by metal poles is what lies
behind the otherwise impenetrable passage in Šulgi Hymn B 339–41:
pirig̃ igi urudušukur-ra ga-raš sar-gin 7 šab-šab-e
nemur(PIRIG ̃ .TUR) šu zi-ga igi g̃išga-ríg̃-ak gi-gin ša -ša -dam
7 5 5
zi-bi ur-gir 17-gin 7 urududur 10 UŠ.NE.NE-ga
Lions (trapped) by copper stakes are cut off like leeks,
Furious leopards (trapped) by fleece panels are broken like reeds,
Their life is . . . like dogs by an axe.

This is the meaning also implied by Diri Nippur 145 (MSL 15 18), which provides
the equivalence with ḫa-al-wu/mu-ú-um. This must be the same word as ḫalwu, “bor-
der wall,” listed in CAD H 57 as a Hurrian loan with distribution limited to Nuzi.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 255

17. The compound verb mí . . . dug 4 has many nuances; see P. Attinger, Eléments
603–19. On p. 612, he reads the line as [na 4 (?)] ⸢za ?⸣-gin 3? ku 3-sig 17 ku 3-babbar
⸢ na4gug⸣ mi 2 zi-de-eš 3 im-me, and proposes a translation: “Il (Apillaša) ne (prend
soin comme il se droit =) s’intéresse vraiment qu’au lapis, à l’or, à l’argent et à la
cornaline.” We differ in the reading of the line, but I would not completely rule out
his interpretation. The verb is mí zi-dè-eš . . . dug 4 and corresponds to Akk. kīniš
kunnu, “to honor.” The translation of the syntactic connections in lines 16–19 re-
flects the use of the non-perfect (17) followed by perfect (18 and 19).
18. The complex TÚG.MAH can be read túg  šutur or túg-mah, all with the mean-
ing “finest quality cloth/garment”; see M. Green, JCS 30 (1978) 150. The reading
šutur is adopted here in view of the complement ‑ré in U1. This does not mean
that all the other students who studied this text understood it in the same manner.
It is also possible that some scribes understood this to be a royal robe, as in Winter
and Summer 230: di-bí- den.zu túg  šutur túg  hur-sag̃ ù-mu-ni-in-mu 4, “after (King)
Ibbi-Sin had donned the special robe, the ‘mountain range’ robe. . . .” Thus, the
line would mean, “sat himself on a throne, dressed in a special (royal) robe.” There
is another meaning of the word, however, which is probably more pertinent to the
present passage. As W. Heimpel, N.A.B.U. 1994 72, has argued, in certain contexts
TÚG.MAH designates a tent or perhaps an awning. The understanding of barag
follows the traditional interpretation, strengthened by Heimpel’s definition TÚG.
MAH. However, M. Civil, “The Unveiling of the parakku” (unpublished commu-
nication read July 21, 2005, at the RAI in Chicago) has argued that this was really
a large ceremonial tent; in this case, one would have to translate “he sat inside a
(ceremonial) tent under an awning.”
For barag and túgšutur together in an economic document, see Tutub 46 iii 3–4
(Sargonic).
19. The noun g̃išg̃ìri-gub is used to designate an object that is set under foot; in con-
nection with thrones, it designates a footstool. D. Soubeyran, ARM 23 333, draws
attention to the representation of such footstools on cylinder seals, where they be-
long to deities and kings. This illustrates well the symbolic implications of Apilaša’s
actions.
21. The high number of guards is undoubtedly hyperbolic and should not be taken
literally, although there are examples of very large number of àga-ús in Ur III texts
(Lafont, CDLJ 2009/5). The use of the Semitic loan for “one thousand” has thus
far only been attested in literary royal correspondence (ArŠ7: 8 [7], Ni. 4164 [ISET
12 117] “rev.” i: 2 [see p. 330], SEpM 8–10). There is an Ur III text from Nippur
that mentions 6 li-mi 2 me-at bricks (NRVN 1 318: 1) but it is probable that this
was actually written in Akkadian. The earliest examples of both large numerals in
a possibly Sumerian context is the ED document IAS 519 (Biggs and Postgate, Iraq
40 [1978] 107).
The term àga-ús sag̃-g̃á is rare and difficult to define properly. The earliest at-
testation known to me is in the seal inscription of one e-em-ši-um, ugula àga-ús
256 1. Aradmu to Šulgi 1

sag̃-gá, árad su-mu-èl (D. Frayne, RIME 4, E4.3.7.2004). The translation is based
on the lexical equation érin sag̃-g̃á = KI.MIN (=ÉRIN) be-e-ru, i.e., bēru (Lu II iii
I′ 7′ [MSL 12 119; see CAD B 21, “elite troops”).
The translation “no less than” seeks to render the force of the copula; I have
assumed that the verbal form is transitive, but it is possible, in view of the reinter-
pretations of the use of Sumerian shifters that are characteristic of many forms in the
literary letters, that it is intransitive and means simply “stood (pl.).”
23. It is difficult to understand the use of sá . . . dug 4 in this context. In view of the
change of tone in the following line, it is possible that Apilaša performs the ritual on
behalf of the welfare of the king. More probable is that, in this series of implied usur-
pations of royal power, Apilaša is accused of performing rituals that properly belong
to the king, as in Šulgi Hymn C (Seg A) 28: sag̃ mu-tag šu-luh nam-lugal-lá-ka
šu gal mu-ni-du 7, “I touched (the Etemenniguru) and magnificently perfected it
with royal š. purification rites,” and many similar passages where these purification
rites are the prerogative of deities and kings. P. Attinger, Eléments 96, is clearly think-
ing in this direction when he renders this line as: “il (Apillaša) s’est arrogé les rites
de purification de mon roi.”
The nature of šu-luh purification needs a fuller study. These are clearly major
rites and seem to be linked to dining. This is well illustrated by the passage in Gudea
Cyl. A x: 7–14, in which Ningirsu proclaims:
banšur mu-íl
g̃iš

šu-luh si bí-sá
šu si-sá-a-g̃u10 an kù-ge ù-a ba-zi-ge
níg šu-g̃á du10-ga-àm
a ugu4-g̃u10
du10-ga-bi mu-gu7
an lugal dig̃ir-re-ne-ke4
d
⸢nin-g̃ír-su⸣ lugal išib an-na
mu-šè mu-sa4
I lifted the tray,
And performed the ritual hand washing;
Then my properly prepared hands woke holy An;
The sweet morsels from my hands
My progenitor
Eats with pleasure.
An, king of the gods,
Then named me
“King Ning̃irsu, An’s purification priest.”

The association between išib an-na and royalty is attested for Lipit-Eštar Hymn A:
23 and, more to the point here, for Rim-Sin Hymn E: 1–2: [. . .] x x [. . .] šu-luh
kù-ga túm-ma [ dri-im]- dsin išib an-na sízkur sikil-la túm-ma, “fit for (per-
forming) the holy š. rites, Rim-Sin, purification priest of An, fit for (performing) the
pure š. rites.”
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 257

24. The word for “gate” ends in /-n/; I understand the opening phrase as a com-
plex anticipatory genitive, (a)kan.a(k) en nu.tar.bi. On the Sumerian word for
gate, probably /(a)kan/, and its reduplicated equivalent /kankan/ (found in some
sources of Proto-Ea 238 [MSL 14 41] and here in X8), see M. Civil, FS Biggs 19.
Note the use of lú here; the term does not refer to a high officer who asks him to
enter but a mere nobody.
28. The reading and meaning of the verb is uncertain. The choice of g̃ ar is based
on N2 and Ur1; but other sources have sá/di but the final sign is broken in a num-
ber of manuscripts. X7 seems to have s[á], possibly even t[ùm], but the remains are
ambiguous. The meaning “heap up” for sá is based on the usage found in Enki and
Ninhursag̃a 49 c–e (UET 6/1 1 ii 3–5): kur me-luh-ha ki na4gug níg al di kal-
la g̃išmes šà-gan g̃iš ab-ba sig 5-g[a] má gal-gal hu-mu-ra-ab-s[á], “May the
foreign land of Meluhha load precious desirable cornelian, perfect mes wood and
beautiful aba wood into large ships for you,” and futher down in Enki and Ninhursag̃a
line 49o (restored).
29. The first verb in this line has troubled previous editors. The interpretation of-
fered here is based on kár = ṭapālu, “to slander, insult.” Note the variant nu-kár-
ak-dè in N6, which seems to be in harmony with lexical entries such as lú-kár-ak
= ṭa-ap-lum (OB Lu D 240 [MSL 12 208]). One could also take into consideration
a reading gur(u)6 = našû, and translate the line: “Before I could rise and depart,
my king’s (own) guardsmen overturned my table.” A remote possibility is that kár
should be taken as Akkadian napāḫu, in the meaning “to be bloated, full” (“although
I was not yet satiated. . . .”).
The final verbal form is problematical. The only complete form is in-bal-a-šè
in N1, not the most reliable source. This suggests a causative construction. The ad-
mittedly unsatisfactory composite version follows Ur1 and X1.
30. Students could not have ignored the instructive parallel with Šulgi Hymn A 70:
lugal-me-en ní ba-ra-ba-da-te su ba-ra-ba-da-zi, “but because I am King, I
have absolutely no fear!” Aradmu is clearly indicating his subordinate rank. The two
almost synonymous verbs ní . . . te and su . . . zi are used in a traditional hendiadys
as a rhetorical figure, hence the translation.
31–36. The final lines of the text are different in two manuscripts, N1 and Ur1,
which are included in the matrix but also transliterated separately. It is obvious that
the Old Babylonian scribes had difficulties with Ur III menology and were not sure of
the writing nor of the order of the month names; the Ur student seems to have had
the most difficulties. Within the official state calendar, the Swan-Eating Month (iti
u 5-bí mušen-gu 7) was month three (four after ŠS 3 and at Ur), and the Ninazu Festival
Month (iti ezen- dnin-a-zu) was month five (six after ŠS 3 and at Ur) but both
names were out of use by the OB period. Note that all preserved Nippur sources omit
the bird determinative and at least one (N1) writes gu 7 as KA. 5

5. For the probable identification of the bird as a swan, see P. Steinkeller apud N. Velduis,
Religion, Literature, 296.
258 1. Aradmu to Šulgi 1

For a similar formulation in an OB letter from Mari, see ARM 26 151: 24–27 iti
ki-is-ki-is-sí-im, u4 14-kam ba.zal-ma, ṭup-pa-am an-né-em a-na ṣe-er be-lí-ia, ú-ša-bi-
la-am, “at the end of the fourteenth day of the month Kiskissum I am sending this
tablet to my king.”
34. This is the only occurrence of a lú-kaš 4 in CKU; they were simple couriers who
carried messages, as distinguished from the lú-kíg̃-gi 4-a, who are also brought oral
instructions and possibly read the letters aloud to the recipient. This corresponds
to the Old Babylonian distinction between lāsimum and mār šiprim, as described by
D. Charpin, Lire et écrire 176. Note that in Ur III archival texts the former do not
occur as frequently as the latter.
The verbal form must be understood as the Sumerian equivalent of the “episto-
lary perfect;” it refers to the performative nature of the action. For the concept, as
applied to other ancient Near Eastern languages, see D. Pardee and R. M. Whiting,
BSOAS 50 (1987) 1–31.
35. This line is crucial for the understanding of the final passage. There are one
or two signs missing in nearly all manuscripts. The key word is šen, which is only
complete in found in N6 and X8. The signs šen and alal have been discussed by P.
Steinkeller, OA 20 (1981) 243–49, but the meaning here is elusive. Lexical texts
provide the Akkadian equivalent qablum, “battle, quarrel, strife,” but in literary and
historical texts this is usually rendered by the reduplicated form šen-šen, often in
hendiadys with mè; see, for a rare unreduplicated example, UET 6/2 350: 4 mè šen
im-ma-te.
The Ur1 text has a unique variant for the beginning of the line, ⸢u 4⸣ nu-mu-
⸢un-da⸣-sa 9-a; it is possible that this is related to the likewise unique, if difficult, Ur
ending of Gilgameš, Enkidu, and the Netherworld in UET 6/1 60 rev. 10′ u 4 nu-mu-
un-da-sá-a àm-da-diri àga-bi in-ši-tag-ne.

Sources
N1 = 3 N-T 311 (IM 58418) i (SL xxii; Sumer 26 171) = 1–36
N2 = 3 N-T 900,25 (SLF 21) = 23–27; 32–35
N3 = 3 N-T 918,440 (SLF 22) + 3 N-T 919,486 (SL 41; Sumer 26 174) = 1–20
N4 = 3 N-T 927,516 (SL xvi; SLF 21; Sumer 26 174) = 18–26
N5 = CBS 7096 = 8–19
N6 = CBS 8875 (SL xxvi; Sumer 26 175) + N 6672 = 20–36
N7 = Ni. 4149 (ISET 2 122) rev. i′ 1–9; ii′ 1–5 = 1–9; 32–36
N8 = Ni. 4490 (ISET 2 122) = 1–3;x
N9 = Ni. 9706 (ISET 2 112) rev. ii′ 12′–30′ = 1–21
N10 = UM 29–15–555 (SL xxxvii; Sumer 26 177) = 1–6; 16–20
Ur1 = U. 16853 (UET 6/2 174) + UET 6/3 557 (*532) ii′ 1′–13′ = 20–36
Uk1 = W 16743 gb (Cavigneaux, Uruk 143) ii′ 1′–4′; iii′ 1–4 = 25–32
X1 = A w/n i = 1–30
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 259

X2 = BM 54327 i 1′–8′ = 5–12

X3 = BM 16897+22617 6 = 1–21; 24–36
X4 = LB 2543 (TLB 3 172) 6–8 = 18–21
X5 = MS 3275 = 1–25; 33–36
X6 = HMA 9–1815 (JCS 28 [1976] 102 7) = 16–29
X7 = YBC 4596 obv. = 1–36
X8 = Cotsen 52157 (Wilson, Education 158 [p. 250]) = 4–36
Z 8 = MS 2199/1 1–9, 16–18 = 1–9; 14–15?; 21
X2 possibly from Sippar, X3 and X7 possibly from Larsa. The Tutub provenience of
X6 is doubtful (see p. 44 above).
Uk1, N1, and X4 collated on photographs (collations of X4 also by H. Waetzoldt,
OA 15 [1976] 332).
Tablet typology: compilation tablets: N1, N3, Ur1, Ur2, X1, X2. The rest are all
Type III, except X7 (one column with two letters) and X4 (oval exercise tablets with
excerpts of letters 1 and 2).
Bibliography: Editions: F. Ali, SL 27–33; F. Ali, Sumer 26 (1970) 146–51. Translation
and transliteration: P. Michalowski, LEM 63–64. Translations: S. N. Kramer, The
Sumerians, 331–32, P. Michalowski, Royal Letters, 77.

Concordance of sigla used here (CKU) and by F. Ali in SL and in Sumer 26 with ad-
ditions in RCU:

N1 A A N1
N3 F + 3 N-T 918,440 B N7
N4 H C N10
N6 G D N8
N7 B E N9
N8 D F N3
N9 E G N6
N10 C H N4
Ur1 I I Ur1
X1 L J X7
X2 M K X4
X4 K L X1
X7 J M X2

6. 92-7-9-13 + 94-1-15-419.
7. Formerly UCLM 9-1815. Photo on line at CDLI (http://cdli.ucla.edu/dl/photo/P247912.
jpg). The tablet has deteriorated somewhat since it was copied by D. Foxvog and since I first col-
lated it. Recollated in February, 2011.
8. This is not, properly speaking, a source of the letter. These are lines that were used to cre-
ate a new one together with elements of the answer, and it is edited here as ŠAr1a. The appropri-
ate lines are incorporated into the matrix for comparative purposes.
260 1. Aradmu to Šulgi 1

Textual Matrix
1. lugal-g̃u10-ra ù-na-a-dug4
N1 . . . +. o.
N3 o o o o . . .
N7 + + + +. oo
N8 . + + ++ - +
N9 o . . ++ - +
N10 + + + o o oo
X1 o o o . + +.
X3 . . o o o oo
X5 + + + . o oo
X7 + + + + + +.
Z o . . . . - +
2. I
árad-mu árad-zu na-ab-bé-a
N1 . . . . . + + o .
N3 o o o o . + . + +
N7 ++ + + + + . o o
N8 +. + + + + + + +
N9 +o o o o . + + +
N10 +. + + + o o o o
X1 o o o o o . + + .
X3 -. . . . . . . o o
X5 +. + + + . o o o
X7 - + + + + + - + +
Z o o o . o . . + +
3. kur su-bir4ki-šè har-ra-an kaskal-la si sá-sá-e-ra
N1 . . . . . . . . . + . . o o.
N3 o o o oo o o . . + o o o . +
N7 + + + ++ + + + + + + + . oo
N8 . o o . + + + + + ra o o . . .
N9 . o o oo o o o o o o . + +.
N10 + + . . + + . o o o + . +. o
X1 o o o oo o o o o . . + + ++
X3 . . . . . . . . o o o o o oo
X5 + . + ++ + + + + - . + +. o
X7 + + + ++ + + + + - + + + + dè
Z . o . . . . . . + - + + + - dè
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 261

4. gun   ma-da-zu   ge-en-ge-né-dè

N1 . . . + + + +en+ .
N3 o o o o o . + + +
N7 + + + . + + + o o
N9 + o o o o o o o .
N10 + . + + + . o o o
X1 . . . . . + . + +
X3 + + + ⸢za⸣ . o o o o
X5 gú-un + + - + + . o o
X7 gú-un + + - + + + + +
X8 o o o o . . . .? .
Z ⸢gú⸣-un ⸢kalam–ma⸣ . + + ne -
5. a-rá ma-da zu-zu-dè
N1 ++ . + + +9 .
N3 o o o o o . +
N7 ++ + + + .⸢ù⸣o
N9 ++ . o o o o
N10 . + + + + + o
X1 o . . + + .⸢ù⸣ .
X2 o o o o o o .
X3 ++ + + . o⸢ù⸣.
X5 ++ + + + +⸢ù⸣o
X7 ++ + + + + +
X8 o o o o . . +
Z á-⸢ág̃-g̃á zu⸣-zu-dè
5a. X1 [x x]x x ge-⸢ne-dè⸣ 10

6. ugu a-pi-il-la-ša gal-zu unken-na-ka

N1 + ++ . . + + + + + +
N3 o o o o o o . + + + +
N7 . ++ ++ + + + . o o
N9 + + + .? o o o o o o o
N10 . . . . . . o o o o o
X1 o o o o o . + . . + šè
X2 o o o o o o . . . + šè
X3 . ++ - . . . . . . ⸢šè⸣
X5 + ++ - + + + + + + o
X7 + ++ - + + + + + + šè
X8 o o o . ++ + + + + šè
Z + ++ - + + . . + + šè

9. Preceded by an erased zu.

10. Probably to be read [suhuš] ⸢ma-da⸣ ge-⸢ne-dè⸣, borrowed from ŠAr1 7 and 33 (let-
ter 3).
262 1. Aradmu to Šulgi 1

7. ad-gi4-gi4-da   gù-téš-a sì-ke-dè
N1 . + + + + + + ++ +
N3 o o o o . o o o . +
N7 + + + + . . . o o o
N9 . + + . o o o o o o
X1 o o o ⸢dè⸣ + . + . + +
X2 o o o o . . . +. +
X3 . . + ⸢dè⸣ + + + . . .
X5 + + + dè + + + + ⸢ge⸣ .
X7 + + + dè + + + . ge +
X8 o . + dè +bi + + + ⸢ge⸣ .
Z . + + dè + + - + .? +
8. inim u4-da ka-ne-ne-a hé-en-tùm    á-še mu-e-da-a-a-ág̃
N1 + + + + + + + + em + ++ + + + +++
N3 o o . + + . . . . . o + + + - +++
N5 o o o . . . o o o . .⸢šè⸣ + . o o o o
N7 + + . . . . o o o o o o o o o o o o
N9 + + + + + . . . o o   / + + + + + ++.
X1 o o o o . + - + + + . + + + + - ++
X2 o o o o o o o o⸢éb?⸣ . . ša + + +- - +
X3 . o . . . + + + + .   / o o o . . - . .
X5 + + + + . + - +⸢em⸣ . ⸢mu?⸣ / + šè + . + - +.
X7 + + + + + + + + em + + šè + + +- - +
X8 + + + + + + ++ + + ++ ⸢me⸣-da-an-ak
Z + + - + + + - + eb +   / + šè me-da-ak
9. ká é-gal-la-šè gub-a-g̃u10-ne
N1 + ++ + + + + + +
N3 o o . - + + +. .
N5 o . + ++ . o o o
N7 . . . o o o o o o
N9 + ++ + + + + + .
X1 o o o o . . . + +
X2 o o o o o . . . +
X3 o o . . ⸢ta⸣. o . .
X5 + ++ + . + + + .
X7 + ++ + + + + + +
X8 + ++ + + . - + +
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 263

10. silim-ma lugal-g̃á-ke4 èn li-bí-in-tar

N1 . . + + + + ++ + +
N3 o o . + + . ++ + o
N5 o . + + . o o o o o
N9 + + + + + . +. o o
X1 o o o o o . . -  ⸢ib⸣ +
X2 o o o o o . . . + +
X3 o o . . . . o . . .
X5 + + + + . + ++ . +
X7 + + + + + + ++ + +
X8 . . . g̃u10  - + . bi en +
11. dúr na-ma-ta-an-zi    ki-a nu-ub-za
N1 + . + + + + + ++ + .
N3 o o o . + . . ++ + +
N5 o . + . + . o o o o o
N9 +   nam + + + + + +. o o
X1 o o o . . . . ++ + .
X2 o o o o o o . . . + +
X3 o . . + . . o . . . +
X5 + + + . + . + ++ + .
X7 + + + + + + + ++ + + :
X8 . x nu-⸢na?⸣-ma-da-zu    . + . - zu
12. ba-an-da-mud-en
N1 #
N3 #
N5 #
N9 ba-⸢an⸣-túm-mu-dè :
X1 [. . .]x-⸢mud⸣-dè-en
X2 [. . .]-⸢da?-mud?-dè-en⸣
X3 ⸢ba-an-túm⸣-mu-dè :
X5 ba-an-da-⸢mud-en⸣
X7 ba-an-da-mud-da
X8 ⸢ba-an-da⸣-mu-dè
264 1. Aradmu to Šulgi 1

13. te-g̃á-e-da-g̃u10-ne
N1 + + +. + .
N3 o o . + . .
N5 . + - + . o 11
N9 + + - . o o
X1 o o oo . +
X3 . o oo o .
X5 + + - + + +
X7 + + ++ + +
X8 + ge - . . .
14. é kaskal-la kuš ga-ríg̃-ak   šukur kù-sig17 kù-babbar
N1 + + gíd + . . + + uruda+ + + + +
N3 o o . + . . . / . + . + +
N5 o o . + + . o . . . . +:
N9 ++ + + + + . / ⸢kak⸣ + + + +:
X1 o o o . + + + . + + + +
X3 o o o o + . . o o o o . :
X5 ++ + + + + + / + + + . +:
X7 ++ a + +raš+ + + + + + +:
X8 +. e . o . . šu-gur . . + +:
Z - - - - - - - . + + - - :
15. na4
gug za-gìn
na4
g̃ar-ra-ta
N1 . + ++ + + + +:
N3 . + +. . + + +
N5 o o o o o o o o
N9 - . o o o o o o
X1 o . ++ + + + . :
X3 o . o o o o + .
X5 . . . + + . o o
X7 . + ++ + + + -
X8 . . - - - . . - :
Z - + - + + + + + íb-ta-⸢gi4⸣-gi4

11. Possibly read ⸢te-e⸣ at the beginning of the line. There does not seem to be
enough room for line 12.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 265

16. a-ab-dù-dù-a ušù sar-àm i-íb-tuš

N1 ++ + + + + . + - + .
N3 o + + + + /o . . oo o
N5 o + + + + . . o oo o
N9 ++ + + + + . o oo o
N10 . . . . . o o o oo o
X1 - . + + + /o o + ++ +
X3 o o o o . o o o . . .
X5 . + + . . . . . ++ .
X6 o o o o o /o o o ox x:
X7 ++ + + + + + a ++ +
X8 - + + + . + + - - + .
17. kù-sig17  na 4
za-gìn-na mí zi-dè-eš im-me
N1 . . ++ + + + + + + + +
N3 o . . o o o o . o o o o
N5 . + - + + - + . o o o o
N9 + + - + + - . . o o o o
N10 . . - + + . . o o o o o
X1 o . ++ + + + . . + + +
X3 o o o o o o o . + + + +
X5 . + . . . - + . + + + o
X6 . .⸢kù-babbar⸣ . . . . . + + + + + 12
X7 + + ++ + + + + + + + +
X8 + + . . + . ní . . + + +
18. gu-za
g̃iš
barag túgšutur-e ri-a i-íb-tuš
N1 ++ + + + + - + + ++ +
N3 o o o . + . o o o . + o
N4 traces
N5 ++ + + + . - . . o o o
N9 ++ + + + o o o o o o o
N10 +. o . . . o o o o o o
X1 o . . . + + ré + + . - + +
X3 o o o . + . o o o . + +
X4 ++ + + + + - ++ ++ .
X5 . + + + + . . ++ . . .
X6 . + + + + + + ++ - + +
X7 ++ + + + + + ++ - + +
X8 ++ + . + . o⸢rí?⸣ + - + +

12. There are remnants of two signs and space for two more at the beginning of this line;
probably had end of 16.
266 1. Aradmu to Šulgi 1

19. g̃ìri-gub
g̃iš
kù-sig17-ka g̃ìri-ni i-íb-g̃ar
N1 . . + + . + + + ++ .
N3 o o . + . o . + +. o
N4 ++ + + . o o o o o o
N5 . . . o o o o o o o o
N9 ++ + . . o o o o o o
N10 ++ + . o o . . o o o
X1 o . + + + + + + - ++
X3 o o o . . ⸢ga⸣ . o . ⸢ì⸣ . +
X4 ++ + + + - + + i-ni-gub:
X5 . + + + + + . + . . ⸢gub⸣
X6 . + + + + + + + - + +:
X7 ++ + + + ga + + + ++ +:
X8 +. . . . - . + - - . :
20. g̃ìri-ni na-ma-ta-an-kúr
N1 . + + + + + +
N3 o . + + . o o
N4 + + + . o o o
N6 . + . o o o o
N9 . . . . o o o
N10 + + + . o o o
Ur1 o o o . . o o
X1 . . + + da + +
X3 o o . . + + +
X4 . o o o o o o
X5 + + + + + + .
X6 + + nu-mu-un-da-an-kúr
X7 + + + + + + zé-er
X8 + . . o o o o
21. àga-ús sag̃-g̃á-na iá li-mu-um-ta-àm zi-da gùb-bu-na íb-ta-an-gub-bu-uš
N1 + + + + + + + + + + + . + + + + + + + + + +
N4 + + + . . o o o o o o . + . o o o o o o o o
N6 o . + . o o . + + . o . + . + . . + + + o o
N9 . . . o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
Ur1 o o o . . . . . o o o /o . . + ⸢ba⸣+ + . . o o
X1 o . + + + + + + + + + /o o . . + + + + + + +
X3 o o . . + + + - + + . /o o o o o o o o o o o
X4 + + + + - + ME.LI + . . o o o o o o o o
X5 + + + + + o . - + + . + + + + ba . . . o o o
X6 + + + +a ni + + im - + + + + á. - . . . - . . .
X7 + + + an + + + + + + + + + + + ba + + + + + +
X8 . . . . + . - - x 13 + + . o . . . . x o o o o
Z o . + + - + + . . xxx . + á+ + x o o o o o o

13. ⸢me⸣?
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 267

22. àš gud niga g̃éš udu niga níg̃-zú-gub-šè in-g̃ar

N1 o o o x . . . + + + + .
N4 + . + + o o/ + + + + o o
N6 . + + niš + + + . o . + +
Ur1 . + . + + + àm - + . . . o
X1 o o o . . + - + + + + .
X5 + + + + . o o . + . o o
X6 + + - + +níta + - + + + . .
X7 + + + + + + - + + + + +
X8 o o o o o o o o x + o o
23. šu-luh lugal-g̃á-ke4 sá bí-in-dug4
N1 o o o o . . . . .
N2 . o o o o o o o o
N4 + + + . o o o o o
N6 + + + + . o o . +
Ur1 . + + + + šu 14+ + ⸢du⸣
X1 o . . + + . . . .
X3 o o o o o o o o x
X5 + +x . o o o o o o
X6 + + . + + + . . .
X7 + + + + + + íb - +
X8 . + ha? ke4 + + + + .? o o

23a Ur1 [k]á é-⸢gal-la⸣-ta ⸢ì⸣-gub-bu-n[e] (see line 9)

24. ká-na èn nu-tar-ra-bi lú na-ma-ši-in-ku4-re-en
N1 . o o o o . + + + + + + + + +
N2 + . o o o o o o o o o o o o o
N4 + + + + o o o o o o o o o o o
N6 + . + . + . . o ⸢na-ma-da-ku4-re⸣
Ur1 [ká] ⸢en nu-mu-un-tar-ra-ba 15⸣ [lú] ⸢nu-mu-un-ši-in-ku4-ku4⸣
X1 o . + + . . + . . . . - . . .
X3 o o o o o o o o ⸢nu⸣-mu-ši-ku4-re
X5 + + . + . o o o o o o o o o o
X6 . o o . . . a ba . o o o o . . o
X7 + + + + + + + + + + + + + + -
X8 + ká en + + + + + nu mu - . o o o

14. It is unclear if this is a true phonetic variant or a graphic error for sá. This student had
an idiosyncratic hand and also sometimes used this shape for š è.
15. There is a small vertical line in the middle of the sign that almost makes it look like zu
but collation suggests that it is not a real wedge. There does not seem to be room at the beginning
of the line for more than one sign.
268 1. Aradmu to Šulgi 1

25. ku4-ku4-da-g̃u10-ne
N1 o o . + +
N2 . o o o o
N4 + + + . o
N6 + + + . .
Uk1 x o o o o
Ur1 . . . + .
X1 . + + + +
X3 o o o o .
X5 . . o o o
X7 + + + . +
X8 + + + + o
26. gu-za
g̃iš
gàr-ba kù-sig17 huš-a g̃ar-ra lú ma-an-de6 tuš-a ma-an-dug4
N1 o o . . . + + + - + + + + + + + + + + +
N2 +. o o o o o o o o o . o o o o o o o o
N4 . . . . . . o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
N6 +. + + + + . + + + + + + + + + + + + +
Uk1 . o o o o o o o o o o/ . o o o o o o o o
Ur1 . + . + + + + 16 - - + ./ . . o . + + bí i[n] o
X1 o . + + + + . . + . ./ o . + . . . + + .
X3 o o o o o o o . . + + šutur-e ri-a + + + + +
X6 o o o o o o o o o o o o o . + o o o o o
X7 ++ + + + + + + + + . . . . + + + + + +
X8 ++ . + + + + + . . . + . o o o o o o o
27. á-ág̃-g̃á lugal-g̃á-ke4 ì-gub-bé-en nu-tuš-ù-dè-en bí-dug4
N1 o . . . + + ++ + + + + ++ + + +
N2 . . o o o o oo o o o o o o o o o
N6 . + + + + + +. . + + + ++ + + +
Uk1 . o o o o o oo o o o o o o o o o
Ur1 . . o o . . . . . o . . ⸢a⸣ - - +i[n]o
X1 o o o o o . ++ + . /o o o o . + .
X3 o o o o o . . . + + o o o + + + +
X6 o o o o o o oo o o o o o o o o .
X7 ++ . . . + ++ + . . . o . + + +
X8 ++ + + + + . . - - . . - - - .⸢in?⸣o

16. Written zi.

 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 269

28. min gud niga niš udu niga banšur-g̃u10

g̃iš
lú ma-an-g̃ar
N1 ⸢diš⸣ + . . + + ++ + + + + sá
N6 + + + + + . . + + . + + .
Uk1 diš . o o o o +. o o o o o
Ur1 diš + + àš + + +. o o o o .
X1 o o o o o o o . . . + .  x x
X3 o o o o o o o . + . . + sá
X6 o o o o o o o o o o o o x
X7 + + + + + + ++ g̃á . o ⸢un sá?⸣
X8 + + + + . + ++ + + + . .
29. nu-kár-kár-dè àga-ús lugal-gá-ke4 banšur-g̃u10 íb-bal-a-aš
g̃iš

N1 . . . da + + + + + ++ + in + + +
N6 + + ak + . . . . . +. . o o o o
Uk1 + + + x o o o o o +. o o o o o
Ur1 + + + + + + . o . ++ + + . o ⸢eš⸣
X1 o o o o o o o . o o o o o . ⸢e⸣ o
X3 o o o o o . + + + +. + - + o o
X6 o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o x
X7 + g̃á . + + + + + . . + - ⸢in⸣ o o o
X8 + . + x+ + + + + - ++ . x o o o
30. ní ba-da-te su ba-da-zi
N1 . o + + + + + +
N6 + + . o o o o o
Uk1 . . o o o o o o
Ur1 #
X1 o o o o o o . .
X3 o o o . . + . +
X7 . . + + . . + .
X8 . .an+ + + + + +
31. iti ezen-dnin-a-zu u4 iá-àm zal-la-àm
N1 + . . . ++ + + + + + +
N6 . o oo o o o o o o o o
Ur1 + + ++ + + + udilia-kam ba-[ab?]-⸢te⸣
Uk1 + . oo o o o o o o o o
X3 o o o. ++ + + + + + a
X7 o o . + ++ . o o o o o
X8 . . ni-na + + + kam+ - .
270 1. Aradmu to Šulgi 1

32. lugal-g̃u10 á-še mu-e-da-a-a-ág̃

N1 . + . + + + + ++ +
N2 . o o o o o o oo o
N6 + + +. o o o oo o
N7 o o o o . + + ++ +
Uk1 .? o o o o o o oo o
Ur1 + + + šè + 17 - + o o o
X3 . o . šè + + + +- +
X7 o o +o o o o oo o
X8 + . ++ me-da-an-⸢ág̃⸣
33. iti u5-bí  mušen-gu7 u4 diš-àm zal-la-àm
N1 . + +- KA + + + + + +
N2 + . oo o o o o o o o
N6 + ⸢u4-bí-KAmušen⸣ o o o o o o
N7 o o oo o o o . + + +
Ur1 + u5-gu7mušen u4 diš-kam ba-[(da)-zal/te]
X3 . . o o . + + + + + +
X5 . o o o o o o o o o o
X7 o o . . . . + k[am] . . .
X8 + u4 . . - . . kam + - +
34. lú-kaš4-e mu-e-ši-gi4
N1 . . . + - + + in
N2 + . o o o o o
N6 + + šè + . o o
N7 o o o o o .in+
Ur1 ⸢lugal-g̃u10⸣ lú ⸢kaš4⸣-[e]/ ⸢lú hu?-mu-un⸣-ši-⸢in-gi4-gi4⸣
X3 + + o . ++ .
X5 + + . o o o o
X7 o o o . - + o
X8 + + + me-ši-in-⸢gi4⸣
35. u4 sa9-àm šen-e ba-te
N1 . + . . + + + 18
N2 + + . o o o o
N6 + + + + . o o
N7 o o o o o o +
Ur1 ⸢u4⸣ nu-mu-⸢un-da⸣-sa9-a ⸢šen-e⸣ ba-te
X3 . + + . . + +
X5 + + a . o o o
X7 o o o o o . +:
X8 + + - + + + +:

17. The scribe wrote a sign, possibly ha, erased it, and then wrote an incomplete mu.
18. Preceded by an erased te.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 271

36. lugal-g̃u10 hé-en-zu

N1 . o . . .
N6 . + + . .
N7 o o o . +
Ur1 . + + + +
X3 . . . . +
X5 + + o o .?
X7 + . o o o
X8 + + + + +

In N1, N7, N9, U1, Uk1, and X7 followed by ArŠ1(2).

Three manuscripts have different line orders:

N1:
iti ⸢ezen- dnin⸣-a-zu u 4 iá-àm zal-la-àm
⸢lú-kaš 4-e⸣ mu-ši-gi 4-in
⸢iti⸣ u 5-bí-gu 7(KA)u 4 diš-àm zal-la-àm
⸢lugal⸣-g̃u 10 ⸢á⸣-še mu-e-da-a-a-ág̃
⸢u 4⸣ sa 9-⸢àm⸣ ⸢šen⸣-e ba-te
⸢lugal⸣-[ g̃u 10] ⸢hé-en-zu⸣

“I am sending you this messenger the evening of the fifth day of the Ninazu
Festival. 32My king, you gave me orders the evening of the first day of the
Swan-Eating Month. Now it is midday, and war is brewing. Now my king is
informed (about all of this)!”
Ur1:
iti ezen- dnin-a-zu u 4 udilia-kam ba-[ab ?]-⸢te⸣
lugal-g̃u 10 á-šè ! 19 mu-da-[a-(a)-ág̃]
iti u 5-gu 7mušen u 4 diš-kam ba-[(da)-zal/te]
⸢lugal-g̃u 10⸣ lú-⸢kaš 4⸣-[e]
⸢lú hu ?-mu-un⸣-ši-⸢in-gi 4-gi 4⸣
⸢u 4⸣ nu-mu-⸢un-da⸣-sa 9-a ⸢šen-e⸣ ba-te
⸢lugal⸣-g̃u 10 hé-en-zu

“My king gave me orders when the fifteenth day of the Ninazu Festival
Month approached. On the first day of the Swan-Eating Month my king
sent him [(these) messengers]. It is not yet the middle of the day and war is
brewing. Now my king is informed (about all of this)!”

19. The scribe had some problems at this point. The sign is really šu, followed by an erasure;
the following mu is also badly written.
272 1. Aradmu to Šulgi 1

X7:
[iti u 5]-⸢bí mušen-gu 7 u 4⸣ diš-⸢kam zal-la-àm⸣
[lugal-g̃u 10] á-[še mu-e-da-a-(a)-ág̃]
[iti ezen]- ⸢d⸣nin-a-zu ⸢u 4⸣ [x-kam-ma-àm]
[lú-kaš 4-e] ⸢mu⸣-ši-[in ?-gi 4-in]
[u 4 sa 9-àm šen-e] ⸢ba⸣ -te lugal-⸢g̃u 10⸣ hé-en-zu]

“My king, you gave me orders the evening of the first day of the Swan-
Eating Month. I am sending you this messenger the evening of the x-th day
of the Ninazu Festival. Now it is midday, and war is brewing. Now my king
is informed (about all of this)!”
Colophon A (X8)
 1a. Aradmu to Šulgi 1a
(ArŠ1a)

X1 = MS 2199/1
Tablet: Type III.
1. [lugal]-⸢u10-ra ù-na⸣-dug4 ArŠ1:1
2. [(I)árad-mu] ⸢árad⸣-[zu] ⸢na-ab⸣-bé-a ArŠ1:2
3. ⸢kur⸣ [su]-⸢bir4ki-šè har-ra-an⸣ kaskal si sá-sá-dè ArŠ1:3
4. ⸢gú⸣-un ⸢kalam-ma ge⸣-en-ge-ne ArŠ1:4
5. á-⸢á-á zu⸣ 1-zu-dè ArŠ1:5
6. ugu a-pi-la-ša ⸢gal-zu⸣ unken-na-šè ArŠ1:6
7. ad gi-gi-dè gù-téš sì-⸢ke?⸣-dè ArŠ1:7
8. inim u4 ka-ne-ne hé-eb-tùm ArŠ1:8
9. á-šè me-da-ak! ArŠ1:8
10. sìg-sìg eden-na lib4-lib4 a-šà-ga ú-gu dé-e-ne ŠAr1:13
11. en-na a-pi-la-ša sa e-ne ŠAr1:14
12. igi-zu hé-dib igi-zu ib-ši-UD ŠAr1:15
13. lú ⸢gal⸣-gal-bi inim-bi hé-zu ŠAr1:9
14. za-⸢pa?-á?⸣-zu kur-kur-ra hé-eb-ul ŠAr1:10
15. x x ta hur-sa-á x x x ba-ra?-á-á ?
16. ⸢šukur⸣ kù-sig17 gug za-gìn ar-ra-ta íb-ta-⸢gi4⸣-gi4 ArŠ1:14–15?
17. na4
nir7 kù-⸢sig17⸣ gug za-⸢gìn⸣ x x [. . .] x ?
18. [àga]-⸢ús⸣ sa-á iá li-⸢mu-um⸣ x x x [z]i–da á-gùb!-⸢bu⸣ x[. . .] ArŠ1:21

Reverse
One illegible line.

Speak to my king, 2 saying (the words of) Aradmu, your servant:

1

You commanded me 3 to undertake an expedition to Subir, 4 to secure the taxes

9

on the frontier territory, 5 to inform (them) about (your) orders, 6–7 to confer (with
the elites of Subir) about the prefect Apilaša and have them come to agreement, 8so
that he could bring to them (i.e., the Subir elites) up-to-date instructions. 2
1. Followed by an erased zu.
2. Alternative translation: so that as part of the daily instructions he could bring them (the
people of Subir) good news.

273
274 1a. Aradmu to Šulgi 1a

Drop (chasing) winds in the wilderness and robbers in the­fields! 3 11 Until you have
10

reached my prefect Apilaša, 12 ignore all of this so that you can . . . your face before him
(without delay),” ­13 so that their (local) dignitaries learn their orders, 14 so that your
battle cries should cover the land(s). 15 . . . 16 staked poles/lances inlaid with silver,
carnelian, and lapis . . . 17 nir-stone, gold, carnelian, lapis, . . . 18 Choice guards, five
thousand strong, (stood to) his right and left . . .

Commentary
This is an one-off attempt at creating a new letter from Aradmu to Šulgi by past-
ing together pieces of the first two letters of CKU, that is, ArŠ1 (1) and its response,
ŠAr1 (2). This student exercise ends inconclusively: it is clear that the whole thing
makes little sense. The text shares some unique variants with source X8 of ArŠ1 (1),
and both may come from the same place (e.g., the verbal form in line 9).
4–5. The source text (ArŠ1: 4–5 [1]) has gun ma-da-zu ge-en-ge-né-dè, a-rá
ma-da zu-zu-dè. The substitution of kalam-ma for ma-da-zu is simply wrong, re-
sulting from lexical identification of both kalam and ma-da with Akkadian mātum.
The use of á-á-á for a-rá ma-da may have been triggered by problems with
understanding the use of the reduplicated predicate (see the commentary to ArŠ1: 5
above). The infelicitous alterations may have been motivated by a desire to create a
completely new text based on the two source letters.
17. This line, while it plays off the previous one, does not derive from any known
letter. The only passage known to me that has the sequence kù-sig 17 gug za-gìn
is from Enlil-bani Hymn A 107, part of the “tetrad” used in early stages of education,
but the latter is without the precious nir 7 (ḫulalum) stone that opens the list here.
3. Alternative translation: make winds and robbers disappear from the wilderness!
 2. Šulgi to Aradmu 1
(ŠAr1, 3.1.2, RCU 2)

Composite Text

1. Iárad-mu-ra ù-na-a-dug4
2. dšul-gi lugal-zu na-ab-bé-a
3. lú in-ši-gi4-in-na-zu lú-dun-a-zu in-nu-ù
4. šu-zu-ta-àm á-ág̃-g̃á šu la-ba-ra-ab-te-g̃á-e
5. a-na-aš-àm níg̃-a-na an-ga-àm bí-in-ak-a-ni ur5 ì-me-a nu-e-zu
6. g̃á-e níg̃ g̃á-e-gin7-nam ma-da ge-né-dè
7. ùg̃ si sá-sá-e-dè gù-téš-a sì-ke-dè 1
8. uru ma-da ba-te-g̃á-dè-na-zu umuš-bi zu-zu-àm
9. lú gal-gal-bé-ne inim-bi zu-àm
10. za-pa-ág̃-g̃u10 kur-kur hé-eb-si
11. á kala-ga á nam-ur-sag̃-g̃á-g̃u10 kur-re hé-en-šub-šub
12. u18-lu-g̃u10 kalam-ma hé-eb-dul
13. sìg-sìg eden-na lib4-lib4 a-šà-ga ú-gu dé-ni-ib
14. en-na a-pi-il-la-ša gal-zu-unken-na-g̃u10 sá an-né-en
15. igi-zu è-ta-ab igi-zu hé-en-ši-UD
16 . á-šè mu-e-da-a-ág̃
16a. a-na-aš-àm g̃á-a-gin7-nam nu-un-ak
17. tukum-bi gal-zu-unken-na-g̃u10 g̃á-a-gin7-nam nu-ub-gur4
18. g̃išgu-za barag túgšutur-e ri-a nu-ub-tuš
19. g̃išg̃ìri-gub kù-sig17-ka g̃ìri-ni nu-ub-g̃ar
20. énsi nam-énsi-ta
21. lú g̃árza g̃árza-ta
22. ní-te-ní-te-a li-bí-ib-g̃ar ù nu-ub-ta-gub-bu
23. lú nu-un-gaz igi nu-un-hul
24. lú igi-bar-ra-ka-ni lú-a li-bí-in-diri
25. a-na-gin7-nam ma-da íb-gi-ne
26. tukum-bi ki um-mu-e-a-ág̃

1. Var.: suhuš ma-da ge-en-ge-né-dè.

275
276 2. Šulgi to Aradmu 1

27. šà-zu šà zú-kešda ba-ra-na-g̃á-g̃á

28. ì-gur4-re-en àga-ús-zu nu-e-zu
29. nam lú-u18-lu-bi ù nam-ur-sag̃-g̃á-ka-ni igi-zu bí-in-zu
30. tukum-bi émedu-g̃u10 me-en-zé-en
31. igi min-na-zu-ne-ne-a im-sar-e gù hé-em-ta-dé-dé-ne
32. gù-téš-a sì-ke-dè-en-zé-en
33. suhuš ma-da ge-né-dè-en-zé-en
34. a-ma-ru-kam

Speak to Aradmu, 2 saying (the words) of Šulgi, your king:

1

(Apilaša), the one I sent you to—is he not your own trusted subordinate? 4 Did
3

he not receive (his) orders from your very own hands? 5 What is more, how could you
so misunderstand the true meaning of all that he has been doing?
6
As far as I am concerned, you were to make the frontier territory secure as my
representative, 7 to organize the people and keep them obedient, 8 and once you
reached the cities of the frontier, to discern their attitudes 9 and to learn what their
dignitaries are saying, 10 so that my battle cry would fill the mountains, 11 my mighty
battle weapons fall upon the foreign lands, 12 and my “storm” cover over the home-
land! 13 “Drop (chasing) winds in the wilderness and robbers in the fields! 2 14 Until you
have reached my prefect Apilaša, 15 ignore all of this so that you can . . . your face before
him (without delay)!” 16 Thus did I command you! 3
17
If my prefect had not expanded (his powers), just as I would have, 4 18 if he had
not sat on a throne on a dais placed over a fine carpet, 5 19 had not set his feet on
a golden footstool, 22 had not by his very own authority appointed and removed 20
governors from the office of governor, 21 office holders from official positions, 23 had
not (punished anyone) by death or blinding, 24 (and) had not promoted those of his
own choosing over others—25 how else could he have secured the frontier? 26 If you
(truly) love me 27 then you will not be so set against him!
28
It is you who have expanded your powers so that you no longer understand
your (own) guardsmen! 29 He has made you learn (the hard way) the responsibilities
of those people, as well as the responsibilities of his own warriors!
30
If you are indeed both my most faithful retainers, 6 31 (you will listen together
while) they read out this tablet before the two of you. 7 32 Both of you must come to
an agreement 33 and secure the foundations of the frontier territory! 34 It is urgent!

2. Alt. transl.: make winds and robbers disappear from the wilderness!
3. Two texts have an additional line 16a; see commentary.
4. Var.: If you had not expanded my prefect’s powers as my representative.
5. Alt. transl.: under an awning.
6. Var.: If you (sing.) are indeed my faithful retainer. . . .
7. Viz.: have them read out aloud my inscribed tablet before your (pl.) very own eyes.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 277

Commentary
3. The term lú-dun-a clearly denotes a relationship of subordination between two
people, but more precise legal and social ramifications of the word are difficult to de-
fine (the reading of the second sign is uncertain). Lexical equivalencies from Lu are
a-RA qa-a-te (MSL 12 142:18′), a-wi-il qá-ta-tim (MSL 12 166:280), ḫa-[i-ṭu] (MSL
12 202:4); but the word is not the same as Akkadian qātātu, “guarantor,” as that is
Sumerian šu-du 8-a. CAD Q 171, under amil qātāti, translates it as “ward, (bonded)
dependent.” In administrative texts, the context is always PN1 lú-dun-a PN2. The
term is already attested, albeit not very frequently, in pre-Sargonic texts (e.g., SR
94:3; CT 50: 28: iv 1; vii 3′, CT 50 26 v 3 [ugula l.] VS 25 10:3, VS 25 55: iv 3) as
well as in Sargonic (TMH NF 5 12:3, 6, BIN 8 153:3, OSP 1 50:2; see F. Thureau-
Dangin, ITT 1 27 n. 3 for other examples) and Ur III sources.
Unlike the earlier examples, almost all the Ur III occurrences are found in con-
nection with the šakkana, that is, with the highest military rank, and most of them
are àga-ús, “(body)guards.” These generals are Abuni (TrDr 83:13; AUCT 1 276:
14–15; TIM 6 34:7–8), Ea-ili (MVN 11 186:13, 15; TCL 2 5488:4–5), Šeškala (UTI
6 3800:11), and possibly Lugalkuzu (TIM 6 34:11–12). Other occurrences are con-
nected with a certain Puzur-ili, who may have headed a leather workshop (SCT 38
14:7; MVN 3 354:12). A “captain” (nu-bánda) who was a lú-dun-a of one šeš-sag,
serves as witness in a text from Ur (UET 3: 43) and six individuals receiving silver
rings are described as gàr-tum lú-dun-a lú maš-kán-šar-[ru-um ki ] (PPAC 4:
7). Different from all the above is the example from an Ur III cylinder seal inscrip-
tion, SAT 3 2199: dèr-ra-qú-ra-ad, zadim dnin-lí l-lá, lú-dun den-lí l-lá, “Erra-
qurad, lapidary of Ninlil, ‘subordinate’ of Enlil.” The cumulative evidence suggests
that they are stand-ins; they are intimate subordinates, perhaps “adjutants” of very
important military officers, but this specific meaning may be limited to Ur III times.
The word is rare in literary texts: Schooldays 88: u 4-me-da-aš lú-dun-a-zu sa 6-
ge hu-mu-ra-g̃ á-g̃ á-ne/ hu-mu-ra-i-ni-in-ku 4-re 8: Tree and Reed 243: lugal-
g̃ u 10 g̃ iš lú-dun-a-g̃ u10; SP Coll. 13 39 […] x húb-bi-gin 7 igi lú-dun-a-za-ka
⸢ti⸣ (nu)-mu-ni-í b-bal-e-en, “do (not) duck sideways before your own faithful
retainer like an . . . acrobat.”
3–5. The rhetorical import of these lines is open to a number of interpretations. Pre-
vious translations have taken for granted that these words refer to the messenger who
brought the previous letter. Thus, P. Michalowski, LEM 65, rendered the passage in
the following manner: “That man whom you have sent to me, he cannot (really) be
your trusted subordinate! Surely he does not take his orders from your hand! How is
it that you are unaware of what he is doing? ” Upon further reflection, one may sug-
gest that, in view of what follows, it might be better to assume that the lú-dun-a of
line 3 is anticipatory and that it refers to Apilaša.

8. S. N. Kramer, JAOS 69 (1949) 204, restored from Ni. 9751 rev. 10 and Ni. 4567 rev. 18
(both ISET 2 82).
278 2. Šulgi to Aradmu 1

5. This line seems to have created problems for the ancients, and the manuscript
tradition is confused. The somewhat redundant fully reconstructed line reflects the
Nippur tradition. Both texts from Ur differ from one another; Ur1 has a unique set
of variants, while Ur2 resembles the two sources of unknown origin, which probably
came from the same place (X5, X6). The term a-na-aš-àm corresponds to Akkadian
ana mīnim, ammīnim, “why” (with negative verb); níg̃ -a-na is used here in the same
sense as mimma ša, “whatever, (about) everything”; and an-ga-àm (only in Nippur
manuscripts) corresponds to appūna, “moreover, furthermore, indeed.” More difficult
is ur 5 ì-me-a, which is, otherwise, only attested in a reconstructed lexical passage
[ur 5] ⸢ì⸣-me-a = ki-ma ki-a-am (OBGT I 879 [MSL 4 60]).
6. I take níg̃ g̃ á-e-gin 7-nam to be a calque from Akkadian ša kīma jāti, “my repre-
sentative.” Elsewhere in CKU, as in lines 16a and 17 below, g̃ á-e-gin 7-nam, with-
out níg̃ , means, “as I instructed.”
9. The grammatical form, and hence the meaning of the final verb, differs in many
of the manuscripts. The only Nippur witness to the line has zu-àm; X4, X5, and X6
have zu-a, which can be imperative or an abbreviation of zu-àm. The text from Ur
has hé-en-zu. Thus, all the texts that are not from Nippur may be interpreted as “so
that their (local) dignitaries know their orders.”
13. The readings and meanings of PA.PA and IGI.IGI are uncertain, even though
the obvious parallelism suggests similar or antithetical meanings. I understand this,
as well as the following two lines, as an admonition from the king to Aradmu forbid-
ding him to be distracted by anything until he reaches Apilaša. I also assume that
the description of the activities of lawless people in the plain in ArŠ2: B1′–7′ (3) is
related to this line and contains Aradmu’s defense against this accusation, and this
has influenced my understanding of the present line. The interpretation offered here
is provisional at best and is based on PA.PA as sisig or sìg-sìg = meḫûm, “storm,”
šārum, “wind” (also zaqīqum, “fantom,” šaqummatum, šaḫurratum, “stillness, silence”)
and IGI.IGI as lilib or lib 4-lib 4 = šarrāqum, “thief ” (on the latter, see also A. Cavi-
gneaux and F. al-Rawi, Gilgameš et la mort 38). The choice of these particular read-
ings is based on ArŠ2: B2′ (letter 3) lú-la-ga lú-sa-gaz-e eden si-si-ig-ga-bi
níg̃ -gul-bi bí-ak, “ Even rustlers and robbers break up the earth (for cultivation)
in the (wind)-swept wilderness.” 9 I assume that the “rustler” and the “wind-swept
wilderness” are oblique references to Šulgi’s rhetorical exhortation.
In Ur III and earlier documents, the verb ú-gu . . . dé usually means “to run
away” when used of persons and animals and “to be lost” when used of objects. 10 In
Old Babylonian literary texts, it can also mean “to vanish, disappear,” but there is
no other example of the verb in the imperative or of any parallel passage. So is the

9. Alt. transl.: I have made rustlers and robbers break up the earth (for cultivation) in the
wind-swept wilderness.
10. For a discussion of certain aspects of this verb, including its treatment in the lexical
tradition, see P. Steinkeller, Sale Documents 69–70.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 279

king telling his grand vizier to deal with matters by making the “disappear,” or is he
exhorting to “forget” such issues and move on to Apilaša without distraction?
15. As presently preserved, this line is filled with difficulties. There are only two
Nippur sources: the inferior N1 and the badly preserved N10. N1 is in Baghdad and
can only be collated from the field photo; the first verbal form is è-x-ta-ab; x ap-
pears to be a badly written ta that may have been erased. Only the bottom parts of
signs are preserved in N10, but collation confirms the probability of reading ⸢è-ta-
ab⸣. Ur2 is also broken, but and the first preserved sign in the line appears to be [a]b.
The two unprovenienced Yale tablets X5 and X6, which are undoubtedly from the
same place although probably from different hands, both have è-ni-ib. It is possible
that the verb è should be understood as ḫâṭum, “to watch over, explore”: “explore
the area ahead of you, so that he can appear before you (without delay),” or perhaps “so
that he can clear (the way) for you.” I do not understand the final verb, which is hé-
en-ši-UD in three sources; only the Ur2 text, which is not the best, provides TU as
the root. Is this a syllabic variant (kud for húd), or is it semantic (kud = erēbum)?
Note the clustering of the variants in all three unprovenienced texts.
16. All non-Nippur manuscripts add an additional line here (16a): a-na-aš-àm
g̃ á-(a)-gin 7-nam nu-un-ak. It is not clear if these texts connected this line with
line 16 or with what follows. It is possible that the source of the interpolation—if
that is indeed the case—is ŠuŠa1: 23–24 (letter 19), where the two are clearly re-
lated and mean “Thus I did command you! Why did you not act in accordance
with my instructions? ” although in the Šu-Sin letter the final verb is second person
(nu-ak) rather than third. Even if this was the source, it appears that the new line
has been reinterpreted (nu-un-ak) and was designed to introduce what follows. 11 I
would therefore consider it analytically part of the next paragraph: “16a (As to your
accusations), why should he not act according to my instructions? ”
21. The only occurrence of lú-g̃ árza outside of CKU is in OB Lu C5 4 (MSL 12
195) and OB Lu A 374 (MSL 12 169); in both cases, it is rendered as be-el pa-ar-ṣí,
“office holder, intimate participant.” Note the identical formulation in an Old Baby-
lonian Akkadian language omen: šar-rum be-el pa-ar-ṣi-im i-na-as-sà-aḫ-ma be-el pa-
ar-ṣi-im i-ša-ak-ka-an, “the king will remove an office-holder and install (another)
office-holder” (YOS 10 46 ii 16–17, cited CAD P 202). This confirms that Apilaša
is in part usurping royal prerogatives and that the monarch accepts this fact, as do
the lines that follow, all of which have Akkadian analogies. Note the sequence of a
perfect verbal form followed by a non-perfect one to indicate the sequence of action.
22. The fully reduplicated form of the reflexive pronoun ní-te is unique. Note the
idiomatic use of the verbs g̃ ar and gub together to denote the appointment and fir-
ing of officials; this probably reflects Akkadian usage, as documented, for example, in

11. The distribution of the interpolation is of interest since it is not found in the two Nippur
manuscripts. Note that at present the Šu-Sin/Šarrum-bani correspondence is not attested from
that city.
280 2. Šulgi to Aradmu 1

the OB letter AbB 14 218:8–11 a-na na-sa-ḫi-im ú ša-ka-nim qá-at-ka i-te-li na-sa-ḫu
ù ša-ka-nu ša qá-ti ša qá-ti-x, “Have you really obtained the authority to remove and
install people? Removing and installing people is, in fact, only my responsibility.”
23. igi . . . hul is rendered by lapātu or abātu ša inī in late lexical texts (SIG7.
ALAN G1 ii 6′′ [MSL 16 283], Antagal VIII 125 [MSL 17 174], Antagal G 56
[MSL 17 222], Antagal G 168 [MSL 17 225]). The use of this in CKU, as well as in
other contexts, implies that such actions can be done only upon orders of the king.
Another example of blinding as a royal prerogative is found in an Old Babylonian
omen (i-n[i-in LÚ]-⸢im⸣-ma LUGAL i-na-sà-aḫ, “the king shall tear out the eyes of
the awīlum,” YOS 10 17:61); in Akkadian, nasāḫum is used alongside napālum and
ḫuppudum (only in CH) for the act of blinding. There is one definite reference to the
Ur III practice of blinding prisoners of war in an OB copy of a Šu-Sin inscription; see
R. Kutscher, Brockman I 96 (the verb is igi . . . du 8). 12 The Akkadian lexical equiva-
lents are somewhat problematical. The Akkadian verb abātum “to destroy” is clearly
secondary, derived from its normal Sumerian correspondent gul. The other verb,
lapātum, literally, “to touch,” is more difficult to define in such contexts. The literal
translation, “to touch,” does not help us. The expression i-ni-šu-nu li-il-pu-t[u]-ma is
documented in a Mari letter (ARM 14 78 = LAPO 18 929, l 10′); K. van der Toorn
translates this as “let them gouge out their eyes” (RA 79 [1985] 190). The same verb
is attested with the tongue as an object in a few OB contracts; see M. deJong Ellis,
JCS 27 (1975) 147–48.
24. Note the extraordinary transmission of the crasis form (lú-al-li-bí-ib-diri for
lú-a li-bí-ib-diri) in all manuscripts from Nippur with the exception of N1, which
was found in House F (lú li-bí-ib-diri; see also pp. 52–53 above). Could these
five tablets have come from the same house? The N1 text is not always the best,
however. The “correct” form is found in three texts of unknown provenience (X2,
X4, X6: lú-a li-bí-in-diri, with no final -a in X2). The scribe of Ur 2 may have
been working from a tradition that also had a crasis form but one that was reinter-
preted with lú-ùlu as an imitation of Ur III lú-ù, and a verb with the prefix al-. For
another example of crasis in this text, see sá (an)-né-en in the Nippur manuscripts
of line 14. See also p. 53 above.
29. There is broad confusion concerning the first bound pronoun in this line, rang-
ing from third-person singular and plural to second-person singular. Two texts omit
it altogether. This confusion concerns both the referent of the pronoun and the un-
derstanding of nam(-) in this line. All previous modern renditions have taken this
to be the abstract derivational morpheme but the use of the genitive nam ur-sag-
gá-ka-ni/g̃ u 10/∅ suggests that it is the homophonous and etymologically related
noun nam that is used here in the meaning “province, responsibility,” corresponding
to Akk. pīḫātum (Hh I 126 [MSL 5 17]), and that the tone is clearly sarcastic; see

12. On blind workers in Ur III times see now Wolfgang Heimpel, KASKAL 6 (2009) 43–48.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 281

also PuŠ1: 15ff. (letter 13). Our own confusion about this may mirror ancient differ-
ences about the interpretation of this line, since nam-lú-ùlu and nam-ur-sag̃ are
commonly encountered in the school texts. Note, however that nam-lú-ùlu can
be used to refer to troops, as in Letter of Lipit-Eštar to Nanna-kiag̃a (SEpM 5) 15–16
uru-bi šu-zu-ta la-ba-ra-è, nam-lú-ùlu-zu g̃ ar-bí-ib, “Do not let those cit-
ies out of your grasp, station your forces (there)!” Note also Letter of Iddin-Dagan to
Sin-tillati (SEpM 3) 7–8 me-lam-g̃ u 10 kalam-ma ba-e-dul, ù za-e nam-ur-sag̃
nam-kala-ga-zu kur-bi-šè ba-e-te, “My glory spread over the homeland but you
brought your martial glory and power to that foreign land.”
30. The predicate pronoun is second-person plural in N1, N8, and X4 (me-en-zé-
en). The writers of N11 and Ur2 understood this as za-e me-en, that is, first-person
singular, addressed only to Aradmu. This is not consistently carried out in the lines
that follow, although the Ur2 scribe continued the singular forms in lines 32 and 33.
The excerpt exercise adds the unrelated phrase tukum-bi lugal-g̃ á an-na-kam,
“if my king is agreeable,” taken from PuŠ: 16 (letter 13) or from some other letter.
The same scribe provides a syllabic rendering of émedu (AMA.A.TU), “house-
born slave:” a-tu-mu. The word is already attested in ED texts; for references and
earlier literature see J. Krecher, WO 18 (1987) 9–12. Krecher uses this in support
of an assumed word *eme, “woman,” which I do not believe exists. As I see it,
émedu is originally derived from *ama-a tuda, “born in the woman’s quarters (of
the household).”
31. Note the use of im-sar-ra, “inscribed tablet;” except for ArŠ5: 12, where it is
rendered in Akkadian as ṭuppum, elsewhere in the CKU letters and written instruc-
tions are referred to as á-ág̃ -g̃ á or as ù-na-a-dug 4. The precise meaning of this
word eludes us at present; in later lexical texts, it is the equivalent of ṭuppu(m) (see
the dictionaries), but in Ur III times it was certainly not simply a synonym of dub,
“tablet,” as evidenced by the basket tag AUCT 2 92, which lists 160 dub, followed
by 4 im-sar-ra.
The verb gù . . . dé, “to call, name,” is used with the technical meaning of “to re-
cite, read aloud,” with ablative dimensional prefix in OB school texts (F. Karahashi,
Sumerian Compound Verbs 109). This is already attested in Gudea Cyl. A v 21–vi 2,
albeit without the ablative; the king sees the goddess Nidaba in a dream, who is hold-
ing in her lap, and consulting, a lapis lazuli tablet on her lap, covered with “stars,”
that is, cuneiform signs. The last lines of the passage reads (v 25–vi 2):
nin 9 -g̃ u 10 dnidaba ga-nam-me-àm
é-a dù-ba mul kù-ba
gù ma-ra-a-dé
That was, beyond any doubt, my sister Nidaba,
The (instructions) for that temples construction, from those sacred ‘stars’
She read out to you.
282 2. Šulgi to Aradmu 1

Sources
N1 = 3 N-T 311 (IM 58418) ii (SL xxii–xxiii, Sumer 26 171) 13 = 2–34
N2 = 3 N-T 903,102 (SL xxxiv, Sumer 26 176) = 23–30
N3 = CBS 6513 + N 3096 (SL xxxiii, Sumer 26 177) = 21–34
N4 = Ni. 2317 (SLTNi 126) = 3–8; 30–34
N5 = Ni 2723 (SLTNi 136) = 17–22; 24–26
N6 = Ni. 4149 (ISET 2 122) rev. ii′ 6–8 = 1–4
N7 = Ni. 4389 (ISET 1 144 [86]) = 23–30
N8 = Ni. 9706 (ISET 2 112) rev. iii′ 1′–14′ = 21–34
N9 = Ni. 9709 (ISET 1 180 [122]) 14 = 1–5; 31–34
N10= Ni. 9854 (ISET 1 189 [131]) obv. i′ 1′–9′ = 15–21
N11= UM 29–13–330 (SL xxxiv, Sumer 26 176) = 21–34
Ur1 = U. 16853 (UET 6/2 174) + UET 6/3 557 (*532) obv. ii′ 14′–19′;
iii′ 1′ = 1–5, 33
Ur2 = U. 17900v (UET 6/2 181) = 1–16a; 20–33
Su1 = MDP 27 87 = 1–2
Su2 = MDP 27 88 = 1–2
X1 = A w/n ii 1′–21′ = 15–35
X2 = BM 54327 ii 1′–12′ = 16a–28
X3 = LB 2543 (TLB 3 172) 1–4 = 25–26, 28–30
X4 = HMA 9–1820 (JCS 28 [1976] 103) 15 = 6–11; 20–33
X5 = YBC 4185 = 1–17
X6 = YBC 4596 rev. = 1–34
Z 16 = MS 2199/1 10–15 = 13–15, 9–10, 27
X2 possibly from Sippar, X5 and X6 possibly from Larsa. The Tutub provenience of
X4 is doubtful (see p. 44 above). The clustering of variants suggests that the Yale
tablets X5 and X6 must have come from the same place.
N1 and X3 collated on photographs (collations of the latter in H. Waetzoldt, OA
15 [1976] 332). Su1 and Su1 assigned here provisionally; they could be the open-

13. The tablet was collated on a cast held by the University Museum and on a field pho-
tograph that is reproduced on the accompanying compact disk. The right edge is not shown on
either, and therefore one must rely on F. Ali’s hand-copy, which was apparently made from the
original tablet in Baghdad, for signs that are not visible on the photograph and cast.
14. Listed as Ni 9707 in SL 34. The reverse, which is not included in the published hand-
copy, is heavily destroyed, but some signs of the last four lines can be read, ending in a double
line.
15. Formerly UCLM 9–1820. The tablet has deteriorated since it was copied and then col-
lated by D. Foxvog and me. Recollated in February, 2011.
16. This is not, properly speaking, a source of the letter. These are lines that were used to
create a new line together with elements of the previous letter, and it is edited here as ArŠ1a (let-
ter 1a). The appropriate lines are incorporated into the matrix for comparative purposes.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 283

ing lines of any of the letters from Šulgi to Aradmu. Neither could be located at the
present time.
Tablet typology: compilation tablets: N1, N8, N10(?), Ur1, X1, X2, X6. The rest are
all Type III, except X5 (one column with two letters), Su1, Su2, which are Type IV
lentils, and X3 (oval exercise tablets with excerpts of letters 1 and 2).
Bibliography: Editions: F. Ali, SL, 34–41, F. Ali, Sumer 26 (1970) 152–59. Translitera-
tion and translation: P. Michalowski, LEM 64–66. Translation: S. N. Kramer, The
Sumerians, 332–33. C. Wilcke 1970 62–64 (lines 14–35), C. Wilcke 1993 65–66:
translation, commentary (lines 6–26), P. Michalowski, Royal Letters, 77–78.

Concordance of sigla used here (CKU) and by F. Ali in SL and in Sumer 26, with
additions in RCU:
N1 A A N1
N2 I B Ur2
N3 H C N9
N4 E D (+) Ur1
N5 F E N4
N6 T F N5
N7 Q H N3
N8 J G N11
N9 C I N2
N10 P J N8
N11 G K Su1
Ur1 D (+) L Su2
Ur2 B M X6
Su1 K N X5
Su2 L O X3
X1 R P N10
X2 S Q N7
X3 O R X1
X5 N S X2
X6 T T N6
284 2. Šulgi to Aradmu 1

Textual Matrixes
1. I
árad-mu-ra ù-na-a-dug4 17
N6 oo o o o . - +
N9 o. + ++ + - +
Ur1 oo o . + + + . 18
Ur2 o+ + + + + + +
Su1 -+ + + /+ ne - +
Su2 -+ + + /+ ne - +
X5 .o . + + . ++
X6 oo o o o o . o
2. d
šul-gi lugal-zu na-ab-bé-a
N1 o. . + + + . . .
N6 oo o o o o . + +
N9 ++ + + + . + + o
Ur1 oo o . . . . o .
Ur2 o. + + + + + + +
Su1 ++ + + + /+ + + +
Su2 +. o o o /+ o o o
X5 .. . . + . + + +
X6 .o o o . . + . .
3. lú in-ši-gi4-in-na-zu lú-dun-a-zu in-nu-ù
N1 + + + + + + + + . ++ + + o
N4 . o o o o o o o o oo o o o
N6 o o o o o o o o . ++ o . +
N9 . + + + - + + /+ da - + + + +
Ur1 o o o o . . . . x oo x x x
Ur2 o . + + - + + + + ++ + + -
X5 + . + + . + + + + ++ + + .
X6 + . o o o . + . . . . + + .
4. šu-zu-ta-àm á-ág̃-g̃á šu la-ba-ra-ab-te-ğá-e
N1 . + + + ++ + + + + + + + + .
N4 + . . o oo o + . o o o o o o
N6 o o o o oo o o o o o o . . o
N9 + + + + ++ + /. . + + + + + .
Ur1 o . .x . x x ⸢ak⸣ . . + . + [ti] ti
Ur2 o . + – ++ + + + + + – + + +
X5 + + + + . + + + + + – + + + +
X6 + . . . . + + . . + + + + + .

17. N9 and Ur2 must have had the first sign.

18. The spacing of the break at the beginning of the line indicates that Ur1 had the per-
sonal name marker.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 285

5. a-na-aš-àm níg̃-a-na an-ga-àm bí-in-ak-a-ni ur5 ì-me-a nu-e-zu

N1 + + + + + ++ + + + + + + - + + +a + +aš + - +
N4 ++ + . o oo o o o o o o oo . o o o o oo
N9 o o o . + + + + . o /o o o . + + + . o o oo
Ur1 ⸢a⸣-na-aš-⸢àm⸣ níg̃-⸢nam⸣-gin7 ⸢hé-en?-ak?-a?⸣ ur5 i-me nu-um-[zu?]
Ur2 o . + + + - - - - - + + + ++ . + ++ + - +
X5 + - + + + ++ - - - + + + +- + + + + + ++
X6 + + + + + ++ - - - + + + +- + + ++ . . .
6. g̃á-e níg̃ g̃á-e-gin7-nam ma-da ge-né-dè
N1 + ++ + ++ + + + + + +
N4 + +. o oo o o o o o o
Ur2 o oo . - + + + + + + +
X4 o oo o oo o o o o o .
X5 + ++ + - + + . + + + +
X6 + ++ + - + - + + . + +
7. un si sá-sá-e-dè gù-téš-a sì-ke-dè
N1 + + + + ++ + . + + . .
N4 + ++ . oo o o o o o o
Ur2 o o o . - + suhuš ma-da ge-en-ge-né-dè
X4 o o o o oo o o o o o .
X5 + + + + + + ⸢suhuš ma⸣-da ge-en-ge-né-dè-en
X6 + + + + + + suhuš ma-da ⸢ge-en⸣-ge-né-dè
8. uru ma-da ba-te-g̃á-dè-na-zu umuš-bi zu-zu-àm
N1 +ki + + + + +e + + + + + + + +
Ur2 o o o . e+ . + + + + + + + +
X4 o o . o o o o o o o o . za +
X5 + + + + + . +en+ + + + + + a
X6 + + + + + + +en+ . + + + + a
9. lú gal-gal-bé-ne inim-bi zu-àm
N1 + + + + + + ++ +
Ur2 o o o o . + + hé-en-zu
X4 o o o o o o o o ⸢a⸣
X5 + + + + + . . + a
X6 + + + + + . ++ a
Z + . + + - + + hé-zu
10. za-pa-ág̃-g̃u10 kur-kur hé-eb-si
N1 + + + + + + + + +
Ur2 o o o o + + ra ⸢hé⸣-en-dul
X4 o o o o o o o o x 19
X5 + + + + + + ⸢ra⸣ o - dal
X6 + + + + + + ⸢re⸣ + - dal
Z + .? .? zu + + ra + + ul

19. The sign is either si or dul, not dal (now all gone).
286 2. Šulgi to Aradmu 1

11. á kala-ga á nam-ur-sag̃-g̃á-g̃u10 kur-re hé-en-šub-šub

N1 ++ + ++ + + + + + ++ + + .
Ur2 o o o o+ + + + - o . + + + + bu
X4 o o o oo o o o o o o o o . .
X5 ++ . ++ + o . + + ra . o . .
X6 ++ + +. . + + - + ra + - + +
12. u18-lu-g̃u10 kalam-ma hé-eb-dul
N1 + + + + + + + +
Ur2 o o o o . hé-en-dal
X5 . + + + . . ⸢en?⸣ .?
X6 + + + + + + en +
13. sìg-sìg eden-na lib4-lib4 a-šà-ga ú-gu dé-ni-ib
N1 + + + + + + ++ + ++ . ++
Ur2 o o o o o . ++ + ++ + ++
X5 + + + . + . o . . o o di + .
X6 + . . + + + ++ + ++ + ++
Z + + + + + + ++ + ++ + e ne
14. en-na a-pi-il-la-ša gal-zu-unken-na-g̃u10 sá an-né-en
N1 + + ++ + + - + + + + + + + + .
Ur2 o o oo o o o o o o o o + - + +
X5 + + ++ - + + - - - - - . - ⸢e⸣ né
X6 + + ++ - + . - - - - - + - e né
Z + + ++ - + + - - - - - + - e ne
15. igi-zu è- ta-ab igi-zu hé-en-ši-UD
N1 . . . ⸢éb⸣ + + + . + + + + (x=⸢éb?⸣)
N10 . . . . . . . . o o o
Ur2 o o o o . + + + in + TU
X1 + . o x o o o o o o o
X5 + za è-né-eb + + . + ++
X6 + za è-né-eb + + + + ++
Z + + hé-dib + + - ib + +
16. á-šè mu-e-da-a-ág̃
N1 #
N10 o+ ì - + +.
Ur2 oo o . + o.
X1 . o o oo oo
X5 ++ + +. ++
X6 ++ + ++ ++
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 287

16a. a-na-aš-àm g̃á-a-gin7-nam nu-un-ak

N1 #
N10 #
Ur2 o o o o o o o o o o .
X1 x o o o o o o o o o o
X2 o o o o o o o o . o o
X5 ++ + + + +. + + + +
X6 ++ + + + - + + + + +
17. tukum-bi gal-zu-unken-na-g̃u10 g̃á-a-gin7-nam nu-ub-gur4
N1 . . . + + . . + +. + + + +
N5 . + + + + + . + ++ + + + +
N10 . + + + + + + ⸢níg̃⸣ . + + + + - + re-en
X1 x o o o o o o o o o o o o o
X2 o o o o o o o o . + . o o . re
X5 + + + + . . . 20 + - + . + + + re
X6 + + + - + + + + ++ + + + + re
18. gu-za
g̃iš
barag šutur-e ri-a nu-ub-tuš
túg

N1 . . + + ++ - +- + . .
N5 ++ + + ++ + + +. + +
N10 . + + + ++ + + ++ . +
X1 . . . . +. - . . o o o
X2 oo o o oo o o oo . +
X6 ++ + + ++ + + ++ + +
19. g̃ìri-gub
g̃iš
kù-sig17-ka g̃ìri-ni nu-ub-g̃ar
N1 . . - . . . . - + + .
N5 +. + + + + + + + + .
N10 o. + + + + . + + um +
X1 ++ + + + . + + + . o
X2 oo o o o o . + + + +
X6 ++ + + +ga + + + + + + g̃ar
20. énsi nam-énsi-ta
N1 + . + +
N5 . + . o
N10 . . . .
Ur2 o o . o:
X1 + + . .
X2 + . . . :
X4 o o . o:
X6 + + + +:

20. The scribe wrote g˜ u10 right after na, realized that it had to be spaced at the end of the
line, erased it, and then wrote it in its proper place.
288 2. Šulgi to Aradmu 1

21. lú g̃árza g̃árza-ta

N1 + + + .
N3 + + . o
N5 . + . o
N8 traces
N10 o . . o
N11 . + + .
Ur2 o . nam + o
X1 + . + +
X2 + + lú + . :
X4 . + ⸢nam⸣ o o :
X6 + + nam lú +! 21 -
22. ní-te-ní-te-a li-bí-ib-g̃ar ù nu-ub-ta-gub-bu
N1 + + + + + ++ + + + + . . . .
N3 + . . + + . o o o + . + - + + ⸢uš⸣
N5 o o . . o o o o o o o o o o o
N8 o o o o o o o o o o . + +. -
N11 + + + + + ++ + + + o . - + +
Ur2 o o o o[à]m + + . o o o o . + +
X1 + + + + + . + íb . / ++ + +⸢àm⸣- +
X2 + + + + + + + in + + + íb + + .
X4 . . . ta . o o o o + . . - . .
X6 + + ni ta + + in + + + + +an + -
23. lú nu-un-gaz igi nu-un-hul
N1 . . . + + + + +
N2 o o . . . . - .
N3 + + + . . . . .
N7 o o o o . . o o
N8 o o o . + + - .
N11 + + + . + + + +
Ur2 o o o o o + + +
X1 + + + + . . + +
X2 + + ub + + + ub +
X4 . o o + . o o o
X6 + + + + + + + +

21. Written g˜ arza (PA.AN!).

 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 289

24. lú igi-bar-ra-ka-ni lú-al-li-bí-ib-diri

N1 + + + + + + + - +- + .
N2 o . + + + . . + ++ - .
N3 + + + + + . + + oo o o
N5 . . o o o o o o oo o o
N7 o o o o o o . . oo o o
N8 o o o o o o + + +- . +
N11 . + + + + + +. . +- +
Ur2 o o o o o + + ùlu al-diri-ge
X1 + + + + + + . ⸢a⸣ + . o o
X2 + + + + + + + - + + in +
X4 + . + + +a + + ⸢a⸣ . .⸢in⸣ o
X6 + + + + + + + a + + in +
25. a-na-gin7-nam ma-da íb-gi-ne
N1 ++ + + + + + . .
N2 o. . + + + + + x
N3 . . + . . + + + .
N5 . . + . o o o o o
N7 oo o . . + . o o
N8 oo o o . + + + né
N11 . . + . . . . . .
Ur2 oo o o o . + + +
X1 . . . + + + . . o
X2 + + + + + . gi-né-dè
X3 + + + + + + + . na
X4 ++ . + + + + . +
X6 + + + + + + + + né
26. tukum-bi ki um-mu-e-a-ág̃
N1 + + + - + . o o
N2 . + + + + . +⸢a⸣o
N3 . + + + + ++ .
N5 + + + . o o o o
N7 . + + im-me-a-⸢a?⸣-[…]
N8 . . o . + ++ .
N9 . o o - + + +a+
N11 . . . . - ++ .
Ur2 o o o o + - - +
X1 . + + . . ++ .
X2 . + + ⸢a mu⸣x o o o
X3 + + + - - - - +
X4 . + + im-mi-ág̃ :
X6 + + + - + + - + 22

22. Written KA.

290 2. Šulgi to Aradmu 1

27. šà-zu šà zú-kešda ba-ra-na-g̃á-g̃á

N1 + + + + + . o o o o
N2 . . + + 23 + + + . o o
N3 o o . + + + + . . +
N7 o o . + + + + . o o
N8 + . . . . . . + + +
N11 + + + + + + + + + .
Ur2 o o o . + + + + + +
X1 . . + . . + . + + .
X2 + . . . o o o o o o
X3 #
X4 + . . . . + + .an+ +
X6 + + + + + + +an+ + +
Z ? ? ? + + ni + + - + +
28. ì-gur4-re-en àga-ús-zu nu-e-zu
N1 ++ - + + . o o oo
N2 . . - + + + - + +o
N3 o. + + . . o o o.
N7 . . + + + + - + . o
N8 +. . . o o . . . +
N11 ++ + . + . - . +.
Ur2 oo o . + + + + - +
X1 ++ + . . + + + -? .
X2 . o o o o o o o oo
X3 ++ + + + + + - +.
X4 o o o . + + sag̃-g̃á-ni ì-⸢zu⸣-x?
X6 ++ + + + + + + ++
29. nam lú-u18-lu-bi ù nam ur-sag̃-g̃á-ka-ni igi-zu bí-in-zu
N1 + + + - ni + . o o . . . + + + . .
N2 . + + + + . . . o o o o + . o o o
N3 o o . + . . o o o o o o o o o o o
N7 . . + - ba + + + . o + + + + . o o
N8 . + . - + +. . . o o o + . . . .
N11 + . . + + . . . + + - g̃u10 . + + . +
Ur2 o o o . ni + + + + - + + o . ù-bí-du8
X1 . + + - - ++ . . . + + + . o o o
X3 + + + - - - + + + + + - . . x o x
X4 o . . ⸢a ni⸣. . . . ⸢a⸣ - . + + + + .
X6 + + + - zu + + + + . . . o o o o o

23. The student began to write kešda but thought better and wrote zú over it.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 291

30. tukum-bi émedu-g̃u10 me-en-zé-en

N1 + + . + + . + .
N2 . o o o o o o o
N3 traces, possibly end of 29
N4 . o o o o o o o
N7 . . . o o o o o
N8 + + . . + + . .
N11 . + . + za-e-me-⸢en⸣
Ur2 . + + + za-e-me-en
X1 + + . . . o o o
X3 (space) a-tu-mu mi-zé / tukum-bi lugal-g̃á an-na-kam
X4 . + + + + + + .
X6 + + + + e[n] o o o o
31. igi min-na-zu-ne-ne-a im-sar-e gù hé-em-ta-dé-dé-ne
N1 + mìn + + . - ta + + + + + ⸢íb⸣ + + + .
N3 o o o . + . o o o o . - . + + . o
N4 + + àm + . o o o o o o o o o o o o
N8 + + ⸢a?⸣ + + + - + + . + + + + . o o
N9 + mìn . . o o o o o o o o o o o o .
N11 + + ⸢àm⸣. . . o o .re-en + . + . + + e
Ur2 o o o o + + - + + ra . + + + + + e
X1 + mìn + + + . šè + + r[e]/ + . íb . + +e .
X4 o . ni + + + - - + + re + + + + + + +
X6 + mìn + - + + + + + ra + . o o o o o
32. gù-téš-a sì-ke-dè-en-zé-en
N1 + + + +. + + + +
N3 o o + ++ + + + .
N4 + + + . o o o o o
N8 + + + ++ + . o o
N9 o . . . x x -? . .
N11 . + . . + . . o +
Ur2 o o o ++ + - - -:
X1 + + . . + + eb + +
X4 . + + hé-eb-sì :
X6 + + + + ge + . o o
292 2. Šulgi to Aradmu 1

33. suhuš ma-da ge-né-dè-en-zé-en

N1 + + + + + eb - + . :
N3 o o + + + + ++ +
N4 + + . o o o o o o
N8 + + . . . ⸢éb⸣ o o o
N9 o . . + + .? -? .? .
N11 + + + .⸢en⸣ . . + +
Ur1 o o o /⸢ge-en-ge⸣-ne
Ur2 + + + ge-en-ge-ne
X1 + . . . né-eb - + + :
X4 + + + + né-dè - - -
X6 + + + + né-éb - . o
34. a-ma-ru-kam
N1 ++ + .
N3 . . + .
N4 +. o o
N8 . . . o
N9 o. . .
N11 ++ + +
Ur1 #
Ur2 #
X1 ++ + .
X4 #
X6 o. + o

X4 after a double line; lines 32/33 repeated at least five times

Catchlines (all refer to ArŠ2 [3]):

N3 lugal-g̃u10-⸢ra⸣ ù-n[a-dug4]
N4 lugal-g̃[u10-ra ù-na-(a)-dug4]
N11 lugal-⸢g̃u10⸣-ra ⸢ù-na⸣-dug4

In X1 followed by ArŠ2 (3), in N8, N18, X2 by PuŠ1 (13), and in N1 and Ur by

PuIb1 (23).

Colophon B (X5)
 3. Aradmu to Šulgi 2
(ArŠ 2, 3.1.3 + 3.1.11. A2a, RCU 3+4)

Composite Text
Part A
1. lugal-g̃u10-ra ù-na-dug4
2. I
árad-mu árad-zu na-ab-bé-a
3. lugal-g̃u10 níg̃-na-me-šè á-še mu-e-da-a-a-ág̃
4. a-ab-ba kur dilmunki-na-ta
5. a mun4 gaba kur amurrumki-šè
6. zag si-mu-ur4-ru-um ma-da su-bir4ki-šè
7. uruki-didli ma-da-ma-da-bi1
8. a-­šà a-gàr-bi ù ég pa5-bi
9. igi bí-in-kár è-dè en-nu-ùg̃ bí-dab5
10. uruki-uruki g̃iš-tuku lugal-g̃u10
11. ki x x a-bi ì-KU šu-úr im šu bí?-dab5
12. bàd-bi en-nu-ùg̃ kala-ga bí-gub
13. ugnim-bi gú-g̃iš bí-g̃ar-g̃ar
14. x du10 ús x du-ús bí-dúr-ra
15. a-gàr a g̃ar-ra-bi a-ta im-ta-è
16. kankal zal-la-bi sahar bí-ak
17. x x a-šà-ga g̃iš-gi ambar-ra
18. a bal sag̃-g̃á sag̃-sìg-ge x-bi
19. x x x x-ma g̃išbunig̃-ta im-ta-ak
20. [. . .]x a la-ba?-an?-dé?-ke›-eš [. . .] ⸢kal?-ga? bí?⸣-x
21. [. . .]x a-šà-ga kíg̃ x x
22. [. . .]x-ge(-)en-na-bi [. . . n]e-ne bí-in-zu
Part B
1′. eden a du11-ga íd-da mi-ni-g̃ar-g̃ar íd-da mi-ni-luh-luh
2′. lú-la-ga lú-sa-gaz-e eden si-si-ig-ga-bi níg̃-gul-bi bí-ak

1. Var.: iri ki-didli-bi ⸢ugnim-bi⸣-ne.

293
294 3. Aradmu to Šulgi 2

3′. nita-bi-e-ne munus-bi-e-ne nita-bi ki šà-ga-na-šè ì-du-ne

4′. munus-bi g̃išbala g̃iškirid-da šu ba-e-si-ig har-ra-an­šà-ga-na du-ù-ne
5′. eden níg̃-dag̃al-la g̃á-rig7 mu-ni-ib-g̃ar
6′. za-lam-g̃ar maš-gána-bi ki um-mi-g̃ar-g̃ar2
7′. lú-kíg̃-ak-bi lú-gud-apin-lá a-šà-ga u4 ­mu-un-di-ni-ib-zal-e
8′. á-ág̃-g̃á šul-gi lugal-g̃á-ke4 gú-g̃u10 nu-mu-da-šub
9′. gú bí-dù g̃i6 an-bar7-ba á-bi-šè ì-du-dè-en
10′. Iá-pi-il-la-ša u4 tur-ra-ni-ta šu-g̃á mu-un-dim4-e
11′. lú al-me-a-gin7 šà-g̃u10 ì-zu igi-zu um-mi-zu
12′. lugal-g̃u10 igi-bar-ra dig̃ir-ra lú-ù-bi i-ni-in-zu
13′. lú g̃árza gal kur-kur-ra-ke4 ugu-bi im-mi-diri
14′. lugal-g̃u10 níg̃ gal-gal ba-e-diri gaba-ri-g̃u10 šu i-ni-i[n-gi4?]
15′. du11-ga-ab gi4-bi3 inim-zu inim dugud-da níg̃-zu níg̃ ­gal-la-àm
16′. inim sa6-ga-ni šà-za ì-g̃ál u4-šú-uš ì-gál-e
17′. lú-u8-lu-àm igi-zu an-sa6
18′. šà-g̃u10 šà zú-kešda a-gin7 hé-en-ta-g̃á-g̃á
19′. ma-da suhuš bí-ge-en gù-téš-a bí-sì-ke
20′. lugal-g̃u10 lugal nu-mu-e-da-sá šà-zu hé-éb-du10-ge
Part A
Speak to my king, 2 saying (the words) of Aradmu, your servant:
1

(Concerning) everything that my king commanded me (to do): 4 (The entire

3

kingdom), from the sea of Dilmun land 5 to the brackish waters at the foot of the
Amorite Highlands, 6 to the borders of Simurum in the land of Subir—7–9 I have in-
spected the various cities, their (surrounding) territories, their fields and agricultural
tracts, and their levees and irrigation ditches; I have imprisoned (all) fugitives.4 10 All
the cities obedient to my king 11 . . . 12 I strengthened the garrisons on their walls; 13
I made their troops submit (to you). 14 . . . 15 I have drained flooded tracts 16and had
earth work done on dissipated plots that had been abandoned. 17 . . . in the fields, and
canebrakes in the marshes . . . 18–19 Wherever the drawing of water was not sufficient
(to irrigate gardens), I had . . . pour water by means of buckets. 20–22 (too fragmentary
for translation).
Part B
Having brought water to the wilderness, they establish watercourses, they wash
1′

in the watercourses.
2′
Even rustlers and robbers break up the earth (for cultivation) in the (wind)-
swept wilderness.5 3′ As for their men and women, their men go wherever they wish,

2. Var.: ⸢za⸣-lam-g̃ar maš-gána-⸢bi⸣-ta ú-sal mu-un-nú-nú.

3. Var.: du 11-ga-du 11-ga-ab.
4. Alt. transl.: I have established a lookout for any leaks.
5. Alt. transl.: I have made rustlers and robbers break up the earth (for cultivation) on the
wind-swept steppe.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 295
4′
and their women hold spindles and­needles, wandering on whatever roads they
wish. 5′ They set up animal pens in the far-flung wilderness, 6′ and after pitching their
tents and encampments,6 7′ their laborers and tenant farmers then spend their days
(working) in the­fields.
8′
I have not neglected the orders of Šulgi, my king! 9′ I resisted, but now I attend
to those orders (without sleep) at night or during the midday siesta!
10′
Apilaša, from childhood, has been loyal to me. 11′ And when he became a (grown)
man, I recognized him in my heart, and once it was clear to you, 12′ my king, with di-
vine insight, you recognized that person, 13′ and promoted him above all the (other)
high officials in the foreign territories. 14′ My king, you surpass all great deeds, you
[take revenge] on my opponents. 15′ Give a command; change it! 7Your orders are
imperative orders; your deeds are great deeds! 16′ (Apilaša’s) supplications are in your
heart, daily they are. 17′ He is the mortal who has found favor in your eyes, 18′ so how
could I ever be set against him?
19′
I have secured the foundations of the frontier and made obedient (all of its
inhabitants). 20′ No king can rival my king! 21′ May your heart be glad!

Commentary
In view of my reconstruction of CBS 7787+ (source N1 of this composition), it
appears that what has been thought of as two separate letters (ETCL 3.1.3 + 3.1.11)
are actually one and constitute a reply to ŠAr1. There is no overlap between the two
preserved sections, but there seem to be between two and five lines missing.
Although the composition is relatively well attested and was clearly part of the
regular set of CKU letters at Nippur, the reconstruction of the text is still uncertain
and must be considered preliminary until better-preserved sources are recovered.
Many difficulties remain. Note also that this is the only CKU text excerpted for early
scribal training on a round practice tablet outside of Susa (source Si1).
8 and 15. For a discussion of a-gàr = ugāru, see M. Stol, FS Kraus, 351–58, and,
more recently, G. Marchesi, OrNS 70 (2001) 313–17, who opts for a rendition
“(communally held) meadow.” It is clear from numerous references in administra-
tive and literary texts alike that the a-gàr was cultivated and cannot be a meadow.
Therefore I am inclined to follow Stol (“irrigated fields”).
The translation follows the meaning of a g̃ ar established by M. Civil, Farmer’s
Instructions 68–69 (“to irrigate, to be submerged”), so that the literal meaning would
be, “have caused the submerged fields to come out.” Just recently, W. Heimpel, Work-
ers and Construction Work in Garšana 277–79, claims that it means “to set/prepare
for watering.” While I find much of his argument convincing, it does not fit the
present context very well. Translate perhaps: “the fields that are ready for (proper)

6. Var.: They rest safely in their tents and encampments.

7. Var.: Give commands!
296 3. Aradmu to Šulgi 2

irrigation have emerged from (the spring) inundation.” Interesting in this context
is a set of six almost-identical often-cited short documents from Girsu in which the
high adminstrator (sag̃ a) of various temples swear that they will not irrigate/prepare
for irrigation fields without the permission of the grand vizier—that is, of Aradmu
(sukkal-mah-da nu-me-a, a ba-ra-g̃ á-g̃ á); see M. Civil, Farmer’s Instructions,
68–69, B. Lafont, RA 88 (1994) 97–106, idem, Eau, pouvoir et société, p. 17; idem,
Sur quelques dossiers, pp. 167–68 (adding the sixth text); Heimpel, Workers and
Construction Work in Garšana, 277–78.

9 and 12. In line 12, the word en-nu-ùg̃ is used in the sense of Akkadian maṣṣartum,
“guard, watch.” The combination with kala-ga occurs otherwise only once, in a
Rim-Sin royal inscription (RS I 8:43 [E4.2.14.20], in conjunction with a wall); it
seems to be a calque from the Akkadian use of maṣṣartum qualified by dannum; see
CAD M/1 335. Line 9 is more difficult. First, the verb igi . . kár, “to inspect, in-
vestigate,” is followed by what seems to be UD.DU-dè in N1 and X1; the -dè is not
there in N6, and the whole complex is missing in N2. Here en-nu-ùg̃ is governed by
the verb dab 5. To my knowledge, the only other example of this combination is in an
Ur III letter-order from Girsu, ITT 3 6511 (=TCS 1 54, LEM 127) 6: e-ne-àm inim
en-nu-g̃ á-[ta ?] ma-an-dab 5, “it was (PN) who detained him for me by command
of the prison (warden) on my behalf ” (translation uncertain). With reservations, I
have assumed that the verb /ed/ refers to escaped soldiers and workers who have all
been caught and detained.

16. The term zal-la-bi is difficult. The approximate translation is based on ég zal-
la = pa-áš-ru (Hh 22 Section 9: 6′ [MSL 11 29]), discussed briefly by M. Civil,
Farmer’s Instructions 115 (“not in use,” but note Civil’s comments on the philological
difficulties of this section of Hh).

18–19. The translation of these lines is provisional at best. As W. Heimpel, Work-

ers and Construction Work in Garšana, 241–42, has recently shown, a bal refers to
pouring water, not to drawing it. The rendering of sag̃ -sìg as “deficit,” or the like,
follows K. R. Veenhof, Mélanges Birot, 296.

1′. This line would only make sense if we knew what preceded it; the direct objects
must have been in the lines above.

2′–7′. The lack of preceding context hinders the interpretation of these lines as
well. Presumably, the description of lawless men and women settling down, building
encampments, and raising crops on the eden (“desert, wilderness;” often rendered
as “plain”)—that is, outside of the normal agricultural areas—must be related to
Šulgi’s admonitions in ŠAr1: 13–16 (3). Presumably, Aradmu is explaining why he
had taken time on his journey to Apilaša to inspect the eden. Thus, the passage
concludes with the words (lines 8′–9′): “I have not neglected the orders of Šulgi, my
king! I resisted but now I attend to these orders night and day!”
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 297

2′. lú-la-ga is rendered in lexical texts by ḫa-ba-tum (OB Lu A 282 [MSL 12 166])
and sà-ru-um (OB Lu A 283 [MSL 12 166]). The Sumerian is more specific, how-
ever; W. Heimpel (BSA 8 [1995] 106–7) has suggested that it is the word for “cattle
rustler.”
Note also the literary trope of danger from brigands/rustlers in the wilderness:
Sheep and Grain 128–29: muš-g̃ ìr lú-la-ga níg̃ -eden-na-ke 4 zi-zu­ an-eden-na
ku-kur ba-ni-ib-bé, “Scorpions and rustlers, creatures of the ­wilderness, threaten
your life in the high wilderness,” with variant lú-lul-la-ke4 for lú-la-ga.
Although the immediate context is missing, it seems that the lines that follow
pertain to these unruly people. Therefore, Aradmu seems to be reassuring the king
that all is so well that even rustlers and brigands have settled down—or have been
settled by him—and are involved with taming the land and agriculture.
The meaning of the line is complicated by si-si(g), which I take to be an ab-
breviation or corruption of the rare im si-si(g). It occurs in the Flood Story 201:
im hul-hul im si-si-ig dù-a-bi ur-bi ì-su 8-ge-eš, “all the sweeping gales were
gathered together.” More important is the parallel line in Išme-Dagan Hymn A + V
Segment A 219: lú-sa-gaz-e eden im si-si-ga níg̃ -gul-bi hu-mu-ak, “I have
made bandits break up the earth (for cultivation) in the wind-swept wilderness” (in
broken context; others have interpreted this passage differently).
3′–7′. These lines are repeated in letter ŠPu1 MB1 9–14 (letter 14). For lines 5′–6′,
see the commentary to that letter below.
5′. The pairing of bala and kirid seems to be a traditional metaphor for aspects of
femininity (see, for example, Enki and the World Order 434 g̃išbala g̃iškirid šu-šè hé-
em-mi-šúm). Though the translation “spindle” for bala seems well established, the
meaning of kirid (Akk. kirissu) is problematic; it is usually rendered as “hair clasp,”
but W. Farber, FS Reiner 98, argues for “needle.” Both are traditional accoutrements
symbolizing femininity in Mesopotamian literary texts; for wider ancient Near East-
ern use of the spindle trope, see H. A. Hoffner, JBL 85 (1966) 326–34.
7′. The exact definition of lú-kíg̃ -ak and lú-gud-apin-lá is somewhat hazy. The
former occurs only once outside of CKU, in a Sin-iddinam inscription [no. 6, E.: 33],
and the latter is quite rare. The rendering of lú-gud-apin-lá as “tenant farmer,
cultivator,” follows P. Steinkeller, JESHO 24 (1981) 114 n. 5.
9′. The interpretation of this line is hindered by the state of preservation of the wit-
nesses. Only one Nippur manuscript fully preserves the beginning of the line (N4);
X2 is problematic and seems to bear the traces of textual corruption and reinterpreta-
tion. Note, in that source, the use of á-g̃ i 6-ba, which is otherwise unattested in OB
literary texts, although it is known from administrative documents.
The first verb is gú . . . dù, which is often translated “to neglect, despise,”
(F. Karahashi, Sumerian Compound Verbs 95) but which carries a more nuanced
meaning “to be remiss, to turn against, resist,” may be a better rendering. Note that
it is used of rebellious kings in the inscriptions of Samsu-iluna.
298 3. Aradmu to Šulgi 2

The rare idiom á-bi-šè gin, “to apply oneself to a task,” is also encountered with
somewhat similar usage in Supervisor and Scribe 18: u 4 na-ab-zal-e gi 6 na-ab-še 17-
e-en á-bi-šè gin-na, “Don’t (idly) pass the day, do not (even) relax at night—ap-
ply yourself to that task!”
10′. This is the only example known to date of a finite form of the rare verb šu . . .
dim 4. It is otherwise only attested in the expression agrig šu-dim 4-ma, “loyal stew-
ard” (Anam 4 6 [E4.4.6.2], SP 3 60+Bilingual Proverbs [= abarakku sanqu; B. Alster,
Proverbs I 91], dgu-la agrig šu-dim4di-im-ma-ke4 [VS 17 33:25]) and úku šu-dim 4-
ma-(àm), “the poor are loyal” (SP 9 Sec. A 2, B. Alster, Proverbs I 177). B. Alster,
Proverbs II 419 and CUSAS 2 104 also argues for the meaning “to become rich, to
prosper” for the verb, but this does not seem to fit the context here. Note M. Civil’s
rendering, JNES 23 (1964) 7, of šu-dim 4-ma as “one who keeps tight control, en-
ergetic,” commenting on Message of Ludig̃ira 18: šu-dim4-ma-(àm) níg̃ -gur11
mu-un-šár-šár, “She applies herself energetically (to running the household), she
enriches (its) assets.”
11′. al-me-a is rare. The assumption here is that the verbal form is derived from the
copula “to be” and is the same as al-me-a in early incantations (da)-g̃ u 10 d nanše
al-me-a, “since Nanše is at my side,” MDP 14 91: 23–24, W. W. Hallo, OrNS 54
[1985] = N. Veldhuis, CDLB 2003: 6 line 18, and unpublished examples). The tem-
poral use of ‑gin 7 has been discussed by M. Civil, Farmer’s Instructions 92.
13′. ugu-bi diri is a calque from Akkadian watārum eliana; see J. Krecher, UF 1
(1969) 150 and F. Huber, ZA 91 (2001) 179.
14′. The restoration of the verb as šu . . . gi 4, “to take revenge,” follows a suggestion
by Steve Tinney.
18′. This line links the text with ŠAr1: 27 (letter 2) and suggests that it is an answer
to that letter.
20′. Note the final er šahug̃ a-like passage, which is more reminiscent of letter-
prayers than of prose literary letters.

Sources
N1 = CBS 7787 + N1200 + N1203 + N1204 + N1208 + N1210-27a +
N1210-27b + N1210-27d + N1210-27e + N1212 + N1214 +
N1218 (+?) Ni. 4061 + Ni. 4188 (ISET 2 118) i–ii = 1–19; 1′–20’
N2 = CBS 8385 + N 3290 = 1–22
N3 = N 2884 = 1–5
N4 = Ni. 2191 (ISET 1 64[122] = BE 31 54) = 2′–20′
N5 = Ni. 9706 rev. ii 13′–34′ (ISET 2 112)8 = 1–21
N6 = Ni. 9711 (ISET 1 63 [121]) = 1′–20′

8. The surface of this tablet is much worn. Unless there are parts of a sign clearly missing,
recognizable signs are marked by +.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 299

N7 = Ni. 9866 (ISET 1 133[191]) = 6′–10′

Si1 = Si. 420 (V. Scheil, USFS 134) =10′
X1 = A w/n ii 22–33 = 1–12
X2 = BM 108869 = 1′–20′
Tablet typology: compilation tablets: N1, X1. The rest are all Type III, except Si,
which is a type IV round practice tablet.
Photograph of Si1 by Gary Beckman.

Textual Matrixes
Part A

1. lugal-g̃u10-ra ù-na-dug4
N1 . . + . o +
N2 o o + + + +
N3 . . o o o o
N5 + + + + + +
X1 . + + + +a+
2. I
árad-mu árad-zu na-ab-bé-a
N1 o. . . . . . + +
N2 oo o . + + + + +
N3 -+ + o o o o o o
N5 ++ + + + + + + +
X1 .. + + . + + + +
3. lugal-g̃u10 níg̃-na-me-šè á-še mu-e-da-a-a-ág̃
N1 o + . + + . . . + . + +- +
N2 o . + + + + o o o . + +++
N3 + - + + . o o o o o o ooo
N5 + + + + + + ++ + - . - - +
X1 . + + + + . ++ + . . +- .
4. a-ab-ba kur dilmunki-na-ta
N1 . . o o . +. .
N2 o o o o + ++ +
N3 +. . o o o o o
N5 ++ . + + ++ .
X1 ++ + + . - + +
5. a šeš gaba kur amurrumki-šè
N1 + + . . . . +
N2 o o o . + ++
N3 o . o o o o o
N5 + . . + . - +
X1 + + + + . - ta
300 3. Aradmu to Šulgi 2

6. zag si-mu-ur4-ru-um ma-da su-bir4ki-šè

N1 + + . . + - + + + + . +
N2 o o o o . + + + . . .⸢a⸣.?
N5 + + + + . . . . -? . + +
X1 + + + + + + . + + + + ta
7. uruki-didli ma-da-ma-da-bi
N1 . - . + + + +⸢ki⸣.
N2 o oo . + . . .
N5 + ++ + + + + +
X1 + ++ bi ⸢ugnim-bi⸣-ne
8. a-­šà a-gàr-bi ù ég pa5-bi
N1 o . + + + + + . .
N2 o o o . + + + + .
N5 + + + + . . + + +
X1 ⸢íd⸣ + + + + + . . . +
9. igi bí-in-kár è-dè en-nu-ùg̃ bí-dab5
N1 o o . + ++ . - . + +
N2 o o o . - - + + + zu . x
N5 + + + + . - + - + + +
X1 . . - . +. . . . . +
10. uruki uruki g̃iš-tuku lugal-g̃u10
N1 o o . + + . . +
N2 o o o o . + + +
N5 + ++ + + + + +
X1 . . o o . . . +
11. ki x x a-bi ì-KU šu-úr im šu bí?-dab5
N1 [  ]-⸢a⸣-bi ì-kùš ⸢ im šu⸣ bí-x
N2 [x x-b]i ì-KU šú-úr šu bí-íb-ŠU
N5 ki x x a-bi ì-KU šu-úr im šu bí?-dab5
X1 [ ] x x [  ] im šu bí-x
12. bàd-bi en-nu-ùg̃ kala-ga bí-gub
N1 o o o o + + + . o
N2 o o o + + + + + +
N5 + + + + . . + + +
X1 o o o o + o o o .
13. ugnim-bi gú-g̃iš bí-g̃ar-g̃ar
N1 o o . + + o o
N2 . - + + + + +
N5 . + + + + + +
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 301

14. x du10 ús x du-ús bí-dúr-ra

N1 [x x x] x-bi [. . .]x
N2 [. . .]x du-ús bí-dab5-bé
N5 x du10 ús x du-ús bí-dúr-ra
15. a-gàr a g̃ar-ra-bi a-ta im-ta-è
N1 o. + + + + . o . . .
N2 oo o o . + ++ + + x
N5 ++ + + . + ++ + + +
16. kankal zal-la-bi sahar bí-ak
N1 . + + . x . .
N2 o o + + + . .
N5 . + + + . + +
17. x KU a-šà-ga g̃iš-gi ambar-ra
N1 x + +. . + + . o
N2 o o o o . + . . +
N5 x x ++ + + + + +
18. a bal sag̃-g̃á sag̃-sìg-ge x-bi
N1 + + + + . + . o o
N2 o o o . + + . x +
N5 o o x + + + + x +
19. x x x x-ma g̃išbunig̃-ta im-ta-ak
N1 x x x x + -. . o o o
N2 [ ] . + + + + +
N5 [. . .] x x - bunig̃x9 - .? . ? .
20. [. . .]x a la-ba?-an?-dé?-ke4-eš [. . .] ⸢kal?-ga? bí?⸣-x
N2 [. . .]x + + . . . + + [. . .] . . . x
N5 [. . .]o o . + . . . + [. . .] . . . x
21. [. . .]x a-šà-ga kíg̃ x x
N2 [. . .]x + + + + x x
N5 [. . .]o o o o x x x
22. [. . .]x-ge(-)en-na-bi [. . .n]e-ne bí-in-zu
N2 [. . .]x-+ + + + [. . .]. + + + +

Part B

1′. eden a du11-ga íd-da mi-ni-g̃ar-g̃ar íd-da mi-ni-luh-luh

N1 + o . . o o o o o o o o o o o o
N6 . + . + + + + + + + + o o o o o
X2 o o . + + + i + - + ì-dun ì - + .

9. A.LAGAB×A.
302 3. Aradmu to Šulgi 2

2′. lú-la-ga lú-sa-gaz-e eden si-si-ig-ga-bi níg̃-gul-bi bí-ak

N1 + ++ o o o o o o o o o o o o o + +
N4 + ++ + ++ . + + ++ + + + + . o o
N6 + ++ + ++ - + + ++ - . + + + + +
X2 o . + + ++ - . . + + - - g̃iš + + + + +
3′. nita-bi-e-ne munus-bi-e-ne nita-bi ki šà-ga-na-šè ì-du-ne?
N1 + + - + + . o o o o o o o o o xo o
N4 + + ++ + + +. + + + + + + + ++ .
N6 - - - - - - - -lú+ - + . . ⸢ni⸣-ta? an-na-da­-x-du-ù
X2 #
4′. munus-bi bala
g̃iš
kirid-da
g̃iš
šu ba-e-si-ig har-ra-an­ šà-ga-na du-ù-ne
N1 + + ++ +. o o o oo o + + + + + o o o o
N4 . . ++ ++ + + + +. . o . + + . + + ++
N6 . - ++ +. o o o . sì ga . . . . + + ì-⸢du⸣-⸢ne?⸣
X2 . ⸢e⸣ ++ +. - + + ++ + + + + + + + ì-DU
5′. eden níg̃-dag̃al-la g̃á-rig7 mu-ni-ib-g̃ar
N1 + + + + o o o o o o
N4 . . . + ba10 + + + ++ +
N6 . o o . . . + . ⸢in⸣ .
X2 . + + - é-ŠU.ŠÚ.DIB mu-ni-si-ig (after 6′)
6′. za-lam-g̃ar maš-gána-bi ki um-mi-g̃ar-g̃ar
N1 . + + + . o o o o o o
N4 + + + + + + + + + + +
N6 . . . . . +ta . . . ⸢in-g̃á-g̃á⸣
N7 o o o o . + + . o o o
X2 . + + + + . ta ú-sal mu-un-nú-nú
7′. lú-kíg̃-ak-bi lú-gud-apin-lá a-šà-ga u4 ­mu-un-di-ni-ib-zal-e
N1 + + + . o o o o oo o o o o o o o o o
N4 + + + + + + + a+! . + + + ­ mu-un-di-ni-ib-zal-e
N6 . . . + + + + + . . . . mi-ni-ib-⸢zal-zal⸣-e
N7 o o . + + + + + . . o o ⸢mu⸣-un-⸢di⸣-ni-ib-zal-⸢e⸣
X2 + + + a. + + + + ++ + + mu-ni-íb-zal-e
8′. á-ág̃-g̃á šul-gi lugal-g̃á-ke4 gú-g̃u10 nu-mu-da-šub
N1 ++ + . o o o o o o o o o o
N4 ++ + + + + + + + + + + + +
N6 o o o o + . . . o . x x . +
N7 o . + + + . . o o . + + + o
X2 ++ + ⸢d⸣+ + + + + + + + + + +

10. Preceeded by an erased ba.

 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 303

9′. gú bí-dù g̃i6 an-bar7-ba á-bi-šè ì-du-dè-en

N1 + + x o o o o oo o oo o o
N4 + + + + + + + . + + ++ + .
N6 o o o o o o ⸢bi⸣⸣ ++ . . + . .
N7 o o o . + + ⸢a⸣ oo . ++ o o
X2 + + - á-g̃i6-ba + + + ++ + ++ - +
10′. I
á-pi-il-la-ša u4 tur-ra-ni-ta šu-g̃á mu-un-dim4-e
N1 ++ + + + . o o o o o o o o o o o
N4 .. + + + + + + . o o + + + + + .?
N6 oo o o o o + + + . + . - + ni . o
N7 oo o o o . . . o o o o o o o o o
Si1 +a + - + + / + + + + +/+ + + + . -?  11
X2 .. . - + . + + + + + + + ba-dim4-e
11′. lú al-me-a-gin7 šà-g̃u10 ì-zu igi-zu um-mi-zu
N1 + + + ++ o o oo o o o o o
N4 + + + ++ + + +. + + + + .
N6 o . . . . . . ++ . +!12 - bí +
o . + ++ + + ++ + + im + du8
X2 + + + +. + + ++ + + + + +
11a′.N6 [lú] ⸢al⸣-me-a-gin7 šà-g̃u10 ì-zu igi-zu im-mi-zu

12′. lugal-g̃u10 igi-bar-ra dig̃ir-ra lú-ù-bi i-ni-in-zu

N1 . + + + . o o o o o oo o o
N4 + + + + + + + + + . oo o o
N6 o . + + a + - + . x ++ . .
X2 + + + + - + . . .⸢NE⸣ + + + +
13′. lú g̃árza gal kur-kur-ra-ke4 ugu-bi im-mi-diri
N1 o o o . . . + . . o o o
N4 + + + + + + + + + um + +
N6 . . + + + + + ⸢úgu⸣. . . .
X2 . + + + + + + . ⸢ba⸣ . . .
14′. lugal-g̃u10 níg̃ gal-gal ba-e-diri gaba-ri-g̃u10 šu? i-ni-in-[gi4?]
N1 . . . . + . o. . . . o oo o o
N4 #
N6 . + + + + + - . + . . . .x o o
X2 . + + + + + ++ + ++ . .+ . o

11. The same text inscribed on obverse and reverse by the teacher and by the student. The
line is entered as a composite of both sides. It is difficult to ascertain if the root of the verb is the
final sign or if there was something after that.
12. The scribe was running out of space in the last line of the obverse and wrote what looks
like igi-bar for igi-zu, probably also thinking of ù, resulting in some confusion. He then wrote
the line again on the reverse of the tablet, attempting to correct himself but changing the predi-
cate. Were two different versions available to him?
304 3. Aradmu to Šulgi 2

15′. du11-ga-ab gi4-bi inim-zu inim dugud-da níg̃-zu níg̃ ­gal-la-àm

N1 . + . . . . . . . o . . . + . .
N4 + + + ++ + + + + + . + + + + +
N6 + . ⸢du11⸣-ga-ab-⸢bé⸣ . . . o o + + + . . .
X2 . . du11-ga-ab + . . . . . . . . . .
16′. inim sa6-ga-ni šà-za ì-g̃ál u4-šú-uš ì-g̃ál-e
N1 + + + na + + ++ . . + x+ +
N4 + + + - + + ++ + + + + ku4?
N6 . . + + . ⸢zu-ka?⸣ +. + . . . . -
X2 . . + . . o oo o o o x . ? .?
17′. lú-u8-lu-àm igi-zu an-sa6
N1 + . + + + + . +
N4 + + + + + + + +
N6 + . . . . . . .
X2 . . . . . . ì-in .
18′. šà-g̃u10 šà zú-kešda a-gin7 hé-en-na-g̃á-g̃á
N1 + + . + + +. . - + + +
N4 + + + + + ++ + + . + .
N6 + + + . . +. . . . + .
X2 + + + . . ++ + ni - + +
19′. ma-da suhuš bí-ge-en gù-téš-a bí-sì-ke
N1 + + + - + ⸢né⸣ . + - + + ⸢ga?⸣
N4 + + + + + + + + + + ++
N6 + + . . . + + . . - +.
X2 + + . ⸢bí-in-ge gù-téš⸣­a bí-⸢in-sì⸣
20′. lugal-g̃u10 lugal nu-mu-e-da-sá šà-zu hé-éb-du10-ge
N1 + . . . . ++ .e + + . + + +
N4 + + + + + ++ + + + + + + +
N6 + + + + + . . . + + . x + .
X2 . . . . . . . . . + + em + +

Catchlines:
N4 ⸢d⸣i-bí-den.zu lugal-g̃u10-[ra ù-na-(a)-dug4] (PuIb1 [23]).
N6 ⸢lugal⸣-g̃u10-ra ù-na-⸢a-dug›⸣ (PuŠ1 [13], less probably AbŠ1 [4]).
In N5, X1 followed by PuŠ1 (13), in N1 by PuIb1 (23).
In N5 followed by PuŠ1 (13)
In X1 followed by PuŠ1 (13)
Colophon C (X2)
 4. Abaindasa to Šulgi 1
(AbŠ1, B1, SEpM1, 3.1.21)

Fully Reconstructed Ideal Text

1. lugal-g̃u10-ra ù-na-a-dug4
2. máš hur-sag̃-g̃á á sa6-sa6-g̃á
3. anše kur hur-sag̃-g̃á umbin hu-rí-inmušen-na
4. g̃iš
nimbar ki sikil-e mú-a zú-lum na4za-gìn lá-mu-úr
5. ù-na-dè-dah
6. I
a-ba-in-da-sá ugula érin1 zú-kešda
7. sag̃-ki zalag lugal-la-na-šè šà lugal-a-ni-ir du10-du10-ge-ra
8. árad-zu na-ab-bé-a
9. ì-kala-ga lugal-g̃u10 ga-ab-ús2
10. igi-tuku igi-zu-šè ga-gin
11. inim-ma-zu ra-gaba-zu hé-me-en
12. a gub-ba-àm a mu-da-ak-e
13. tumu gub-ba-àm še mu-un-da-lá-a
14. g̃iš
má gub-ba-àm g̃išg̃isal mu-un-sì-ge
15. dub-sar-me-en na-rú-a ab-sar-e
16. inim ugnim-ma mu-da-[ . . . ]
17. inim pu-úh-ru-um-ma šub-ba e11-dè-bi mu-un-da-sì-ge
18. g̃iš-gin7 tir-g̃á mu-un-dù-ù-nam mu-sír-re im-gam-me-en
19. g̃iš
gu-za-g̃á lú mu-un-da-lá-a šu-mu éše im-ma-lá
20. uru-g̃á túg dàn-na mi-ni-mu4-ra túg mu-sír-ra ba-mu4
21. lag-e a mi-ni-íb-tu5-tu5-a sahar igi-g̃á ba-e-gub
22. ur-e ad6 íb-gu7 gaba-bi íb-zi-zi-i
23. ušumgal-e sag̃ g̃iš um-mi-íb-ra-ra ka-ta-tak4 íb-tuku
24. g̃iš-gi izi ub-gu7 nig̃in5 ì-tuk-tuku
25. d
utu ìa un-gu7 ga-ára un-gu7 g̃išbanšur úku-ra-šè šu-ni íb-ši-in-tùm
26. zi-g̃u10 ba-e-i šu-g̃u10 ha-za-ab

1. Var.: àga-ús.
2. Vars.: kala-ga-me-en lugal-g̃ u 10 ga-ab-ús; kala-ga-me-en àga-ús-zu hé-me-en.

305
306 4. Abaindasa to Šulgi 1

27. dumu nu-mu-un-kuš-me-en lú èn-tar-re la-ba-an-tuku

28. g̃á-àm me-na-àm3 šà dšul-gi lugal-g̃á ki-bi ha-ma-gi4-gi4
29. lugal-g̃u10 èn-g̃u10 hé-tar-re ki dag̃al-g̃u10-šè hé-em-mi-ib-gi4-gi4

1. Speak to my king:
2. To my mountain goat, fair of limb,
3. Eagle-clawed highland horse,
4. To my date palm growing in a sacred place, laden with glistening dates,
5. Say moreover:
6/8. Saying (the words of) Abaindasa, officer of the armed forces,
7. Who, (to obtain) his master’s favor, is a constant delight to his master’s heart:
9. Being strong, I want to follow my king,4
10. Having vision, I want to go in your vanguard,
11. At your command please let me be your messenger!
12. Even when water is still, I can make water flow;
13. Even when the wind is still, I can winnow grain;
14. Even when the boat is still, I can row!
15. I am a (trained) scribe—I can inscribe a stele!
16. I can . . . the orders of the army.
17. The orders of the assembly . . .
18. As if I were planting a tree in my own woodlot, I kneel in the dirt;
19. As if someone had managed to tie me to my own chair, my hands are tied with
rope;
20. In my own city, where I used to dress in fine clothing, I am forced to wear dirty
rags;
21. Forced to wash in clods of dirt, there is dirt on my face.
22. A beast devours cadavers but then retreats,
23. Even after the king of beasts makes a kill, he slackens his jaw;5
24. Even after the canebrake is consumed by fire, the pond remains (intact),6
25. And even Utu, after consuming (offerings of) ghee and cheese, still reaches
out to (accept offerings from) a pauper’s table;
26. (But now) my life hangs by a thread; please take my hand!
27. I am a widow’s son; I have no one to show concern for me.
28. Ah but me—when will Šulgi, my king, restore me to my position?
29. May my king show his concern for me and restore me to my prosperous
position!

3. No two manuscripts agree on the first two words of the line.

4. Vars.: I am strong, I want to follow my king; I am strong, so let me be your soldier.
5. Var: it spares some remains.
6. Var.: it spares some ponds.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 307

Commentary

2–4. The metaphors of the opening lines are not directly paralleled in any other
composition, but the general tenor is consistent with the kind of imagery that is
found in Šulgi hyms, especially in the opening lines of Šulgi Hymn D. Note also Šulgi
Hymn A 48: máš hur-sag̃ -g̃ á ki ùr-bi-šè húb sar-sar-re-gin 7, “As a mountain
goat running to its lair (I entered the Ekishnugal).”
6. The use of zú-kešda in the sense of “troops” in Sumerian was established by
C. Wilcke, Das Lugalbandaepos 195. According to M. Stol, OBO 160/4 777, the term
érin zú.kešda (lugal) appears as a logogram in Old Babylonian texts, standing for
kiṣir šarrim, who are the “Truppen der Armee des Königs.” To my knowledge, it is not
attested earlier, and therefore its usage in the correspondence concerning Abaindasa
may very well be anachronistic.
7. F. Ali, SL 53, read the first three signs as KA-šu-U4, but collations do not support
this reading. This line, which is absent from all Nippur manuscripts, as well as one
from Ur, contains a number of grammatical problems. No two sources have the same
exact text:
Ur1 sag̃ .ki zalag lugal.ani.ak.še šag lugal.ani.ra dug.dug.e.ra
Ur3 sag̃ .ki zalag lugal.ani.ak.ta šag lugal.ani.a dug.dug.e.ra
X1 sag̃ .ki zalag lugal.ani.ak.e šag lugal.ani dug.dug.e.ra
X2 sag̃ .ki zalag lugal.ani.ak.še šag lugal.ani dug.dug.e.ra

The most problematical element is the final /‑ra /; most likely this is a misplaced da-
tive, which does not belong here, because this line pertains to the sender of the mes-
sage, Abaindasa, and not to the recipient. It is also possible that it is the rare /-ra /
ending encountered in ArŠ1: 3 (letter 1); see the commentary to that line.
9. This line has many variants that do not show any obvious clustering. The main
text follows N2; N8 is broken but may have been similar. All other sources have a
different first part of the line. The three Ur texts differ: Ur1 is similar to N1 but Ur2
omits the line and Ur3, in concert with X1, has kala-ga-me-en àga-ús-zu hé-
me-en, “Because I am strong, let me be your bodyguard.”
12–14. These lines are difficult because they are without good parallels and are rife
with variants. On the one hand, one is tempted to understand the repeated gub as
“to be appointed to work/a position” and translate:
He who assigned to water duty must know how to do water work,
He who is assigned to the barley sheaves must know how to winnow,
He who assigned to boat duty must know how to man the oars.

A somewhat different approach was taken recently by P. Attinger, ZA 95 (2005) 256,

who renders gub-ba by “est à disposition.” I would not rule out either interpretation.
The translation offered here—not without misgivings—is influenced, in connection
308 4. Abaindasa to Šulgi 1

with line 14, by the parallel metaphor in W. L. Lambert, JNES 33 (1974) 290: 21: a
gub-ba ! g̃išgi[sal-mu hé-m]e-en = ina me ni-ḫu-ti lu-u gi-šal-li at-ta, “in still waters
be my oar.” Further support comes from the Susa round practice tablet Su2, which
may have an Akkadian translation on the reverse. The last two lines seem to read
(the text requires detailed personal inspection): i-na ša?-ri-im ne-ḫi-im a-ri-a-am šu-li-i.
13. The line is highly problematical. Ur1 has še . . . lá, which is OB Sumerian for
“to winnow.” As M. Civil, Farmer’s Instructions 96 has shown, the Ur III term for this
activity is še . . . dé; in manuscripts Ur3 and Su1 the verb is sì (sig 10), which is most
probably to be interpreted as šapākum, “heap up.” The echoed im and ak in N2 are
clearly erroneous and are influenced by the previous line and the beginning of this
one. The confusion may be due to the lexical difference between Ur III and OB us-
age. Moreover, it is difficult to explain IM at the beginning of the line. The obvious
interpretation is im/tumu, “wind,” as that would explain the interpretation offered
by the scribe of Ur3, who wanted to see winnowing here. This does not explain the
use of the verb sì (sig 10) here; it may very well be that that at some point IM was
incorrectly interpreted as sarrum, “stack (of sheaves of barley),” actually a loan from
Sumerian zar, or even as zārûm, “winnower;” the basis would have been lexical: lú-
IM = sà-(ar)-rum (OB Lu A 33 [MSL 12 158; OB Lu B i 36 [MSL 12 178]); (OB Lu
D 151 [MSL 12 207]), which normally means “liar, criminal.” Note the Akkadian
translation of line in Su2: i-na ša-ri-im ne-ḫi-im, za-ri-a-am šu-li-i.
15–17. It is possible that a faint echo of these lines is found in the somewhat garbled
passage in Letter to Zimri-Lim 16′–17′:
[dumu é-dub-ba-a-me-en] ⸢sag⸣ lugal-g̃á-šè ⸢gub⸣-bu-dè im-mi-ús
dumu é ṭup-pí a-na-ku a-na ⸢re⸣-[eš be-lí-ia] a-na ú-zu-⸢uz⸣-zi-im [ ]
[á-ág̃-g̃á lugal-g̃á zú]-⸢kéš⸣-e u18-lu lugal-g̃á ⸢g̃éštu⸣ KA RI KAK
wu-ur-ti be-⸢lí-ia⸣ ka-ṣa-ra-am ma-ši-it ⸢be⸣-[lí-ia] ⸢ḫu-us⸣-sú-sà-am e-le-i
I am a scribal graduate, I am . . . to serve my king,
I am able to draw up in good form my king’s commands, and to remind my king of
what he has forgotten.7

20. The adjective /dana / = zakûm, “clean,” can be written with four different but
visually often indistinguishable signs: most often it is dan 6 (UŠ×TAG4) or dàn
(G̃ Á×TAG ), but sometimes it can be written dán (G ̃ Á×ME.EN) or dan (G ̃ Á×
4 4
GÁNA-tenû); see ePSD and C. Mittermayer, aBZL s.v. In OB school texts, the dif-
ference between the first two is often difficult to discern; when the end part of a sign
is not well preserved, one cannot establish which one was actually used. This is the
case in N1, N2, and N9.
22. gaba . . . zi has been translated “to depart, retreat” (F. Karahashi, Sumerian
Compound Verbs 83, with previous literature). The verb has a more nuanced mean-

7. See B. Foster, Before the Muses, 223.

 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 309

ing, “to retreat, withdraw, turn tail,” and is used almost exclusively of animals or
inanimate subjects. Contrast the marked rare example of an animate subject in the
hymn Šulgi Hymn B 66 (concerning lions): za-pa-ág̃ -bi-šè gaba-g̃ u 10 ba-ra-ba-
ta-zi, “but I did not retreat from (the sound) of their roar!”
23. The word ušumgal is presumed to be a mythological beast, often translated
“dragon.” In poetry, this word occurs in contexts in which this meaning makes little
sense, but translators still insist on it. In magical texts and poetry, a distinction is
made between ušum and ušum-gal, which refer to a snake-like beast, and ušumgal,
which is a metaphor for “lion,” perhaps idiomatically equivalent to English “King
of Beasts.” It is used separately or paired with pirig̃ , another name for “lion,” and
with ur-mah in hendiadys constructions. See, for example, Šulgi Hymn A 3: pirig̃
igi huš ušumgal-e tu-da-me-en, “I am a fierce-eyed lion, born of the ‘King of
Beasts’.” Instructive is the passage in Gudea Cyl. B iv 20–21:
ur-mah pirig̃ ušumgal eden-na-ke 48
ù du 10 g̃ ar-ra-àm
Even the lion, the p., ‘King of Beasts’ of the wilderness,
Was lying down in sweet sleep.

The matter of the words for “lion,” or “lioness,” in ancient Near Eastern languages,
particularly in Sumerian and Akkadian, is quite complex; I deal with this in a forth-
coming article.
The compound verb sag̃ g̃ iš...ra is usually used with a human (or divine) agent
and clearly means “to kill, to beat to death;” see the examples in F. Karahashi, Sume-
rian Compound Verbs, 138–39. The only other reference in which the action is per-
formed by a lion suggests that it refers to the attack of the animal: Gilgameš, Enkidu,
and the Netherworld, 23–26:
lugal-ra a g̃išmá sag̃ -g̃ á-ke 4
ur-bar-ra-gin 7 téš mu-na-gu 7-e
d
en-ki-ra a g̃išmá eg̃ ir-ra-ke 4
ur-mah-gin 7 sag̃ g̃ iš im-ra-ra
The waters attack the King at the prow of the boat
Like a wolf pack,
The waters strike at Enki at the stern of the boat
Like lion(s).

I know of only one other occurrence of ka-ta tak 4, in the lexical entry Sag A iii 36
[MSL SS 1 22]), where the Akkadian is the equally obscure ú-zu-ba-at pi-i. Accord-
ing to AHw 3 1448b, uzubbatu, “Verschonung,” is otherwise only attested in first-
millennium personal names. The meaning seems to be “dropping from the mouth,”
idiomatic for “to spare.” The broader metaphorical frame of reference links this to a

8. For this line, see also Šulgi Hymn B 59 and possibly Šulgi Hymn C B1.
310 4. Abaindasa to Šulgi 1

passage in a Sin-iddinam inscription (Frayne 1990: E4.2.9.1: 79–83), an eden-na,

pirig̃ šu ba-an-zi-ga, g̃ ìri-gin-na ba-an-gub, í b-tag 4 ⸢hé-em-ma-an⸣-gaz,
“In the high wilderness, the lion, having risen, stood on the pathway so as to be able
to kill stragglers/deserters.”
The distribution of tak 4  /tuku in both lines is due to the quasi-homonymic na-
ture of the verbs but also reflects the aesthetic that dictates the repetition of the same
word in two consecutive lines. The fairly consistent difference between Nippur and
elsewhere is not significant, because most texts from Nippur are badly preserved at
this point.
27–29. The verb èn...tar is used here in the sense of Akkadian warkatam parāsum,
“to take care, be concerned with (a person, situation),” (CAD P 166 173) rather than
in the more commonly attested meaning, “to ask, inquire,” (Akkadian šālum). This is
made explicit in Letter-Prayer to Zimri-Lim 22′: [lugal-g̃ u 10] èn-g̃ u 10 hé-tar-re ki-
bi-šè-⸢g̃ u 10⸣ hu-mu-un-g[i 4-gi 4] = be-lí wa-ar-ka-ti ⸢li⸣-ip-[ru-us-ma] a-na aš-ri-[ia
li-ti-ra-an-ni], “May my king show his concern for me and restore me to my position.”
Line 27, which is only present in two sources, Ur1 and X2, must be compared
with Letter-Prayer of Ininka to Nintinuga (SEpM 19) 16: lú èn-tar-re la-ba-(an)-
tuku, “I have no one to show concern for me.” Note that Ur1 is inscribed on a col-
lective tablet that also included SEpM 19 (col. i 1′–4′).
The idiom šà ki-bi gi 4 often occurs in the final lines of other literary texts, most
notably in eršahug̃as; see already M. Civil, Fs Oppenheim, 89. It is often translated
literally but means “to be favorably disposed to once again.” In epistolary literature,
see Letter of Gudea to His God 10: dig̃ ir-g̃ u 10 lú kúr-ra-zu nu-me-en šà-zu ki-bi
ha-ma-ab-gi 4-gi 4, “O my god, I am not your enemy, so please be well disposed to
me once again!”

Sources
N1 = 3 N-T 8 = IM 58335 (SL xxxvii)
N2 = 3 N-T 309 = A 30231 (SL liii)9
N3 = CBS 8007 (STVC 110) + Ni. 4592 (ISET 2 21)
N4 = HS 1456 (TMH NF 4 43, collations C. Wilcke, Kollationen 73)
N5 = UM 29-13-20 + UM 29-13-24 (both SL liii) i 1–6
N6 = UM 29-16-139 + N 3264 + N 3266 + N 3294 + N 3301 + N 3303 + N 3308
+ N 3310 (all SL xxiv-xxv) + Ni. 9701 (ISET 2 114) i 1′–7′
N7 = UM 29-15-535
N8 = N 1555
N9 = N 3461
N10 = CBS 10069

9. The surface of the tablet is worn and made difficult to read by a cover of shellac for
preservation.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 311

Ur1 = U. 7741 (UET 6/2 173, No. 7 Quiet St.) ii 2′–iii 7

Ur2 = U. 16857 (UET 6/2 178, No. 1 Broad St.)
Ur3 = U. 16894B (UET 6/2 179, No. 1 Broad St.)
Su1 = MDP 18 51
Su2 = MDP 27 207
X1 = Crozer 206a i
X2 = YBC 6458
X3 = Cotsen 40832 (Wilson, Education 159 [p. 251])
N1 collated on cast; N4, collated by S. Tinney and on print photographs provided
by Manfred Krebernik and on digital photographs provided by Jerrold Cooper. Su2
collated by Mrs. Mernoush Malyeri.
Tablet typology: compilation tablets (Type I): N5, N6, Ur1, X1, the rest are all Type
III, except Su1, Su2, which are Type IV round practice tablets.

Concordance to F. Ali, SL 53:

A Ur1 N1 I
B N2 N2 B
C Ur2 N3 F+G
D Ur3 N4 H
E N5 N5 E
H N4 N8 J
F N3 Ur1 A
G N3 Ur2 C
I N1 Ur3 D
J N8

No other text in CKU is subject to the degree of textual manipulation that was
allowed for Abaindasa’s letter of petition. Leaving aside the Susa sources, the letter
is preserved on four compilation tablets: two from Nippur (N4, N6), one from Ur
(Ur1), and one of unknown origin (X1). There are twelve Type III manuscripts—
that is, one-day imgida exercises—and although some are in fragmentary state, it
seems that they contained some version of the complete composition. Unlike any
other letter, AbŠ1 seems completely fluid; students/teachers appear to choose at will
which lines they will use and which they will omit. Not all the pieces are completely
preserved but within what we have, only three tablets contain exactly the same
lines—N5, N7, and N10—but since all three are incomplete, one cannot be certain
that they were identical in content. This textual flexibility is not limited to Nippur.
The three tablets from Ur are subject to the same lack of uniformity. Significantly,
the three sources from that city were found in different houses: Ur1 at No. 7 Quiet
St. and the other two at No. 1 Broad St., and yet the variations do not cluster ac-
cording to place of origin.
312 4. Abaindasa to Šulgi 1

Source Distribution10
N1 N2 N3 N4 N5 N6 N7 N8 N9 N10 Ur1 Ur2 Ur3 X1 X2 X3 Su1 Su2
1 - + + - + - - - - - + + + + + + +
2 - + + - + - - - - - + + + + + + +
3 - + + - + - + - - - + + + + + + +
4 - + + - + - + - - - + + + + + + +
5 - + + - + - + - - - + + + + + + +
6 - + + - # - # - + # + # + + + #
7 - # # - # - # - # # + # + + + #
8 - + + - # - # + + # + # + + + #
9 - + # - # - # + # # + # + + - #
10 - + # - # - # + # # # # # + - #
11 - # # - # - # + # # + # # + - #
12 - + # + # - # + # # + # + + - # +
13 - + # + # - # + # # + # ++ + - # +
14 - # # + # - # + # # + # + + - #
15 - + # + # - # + # # + # # + - #
16 - + # + # - # + # # # # # # - #
17 - + # ++ # - # # # # + # # + - #
18 - + + + + - + + + + + + + + - +
19 + + + + - - + + + + + + + + - +
20 + + - + - - + + + + # + + + - +
21 + + - + - + + + - + + + + + - +
22 + + - + - + + + - - + + + + - +
23 + + - + - + + + - - + + + + + +
24 - + - + - + + + - - + + + + + +
25 - + - + - + ++ + - - + + + + + +
26 - # - - - # - # - - + # # - + #
27 - # - - - # - # - - + # # - + #
28 - + - - - + - + - - + + + - + +
29 - # - - - # - - - - + # # - + #

To provide a flavor of the difference between the preserved manuscripts, I offer

a translation of an idealized shorter version (the line numbers are those of the full
edition):
   1. Speak to my king:
   2. To my mountain goat, fair of limb,
   3. Eagle-clawed highland horse,
   4. To my date palm growing in a sacred place, laden with glistening dates,
  5. Say moreover:
6/8. Saying (the words of) Abaindasa, officer of the armed forces,

10. In the table - = line broken, + = line present, ++ = line present and followed by one or
more additional lines, # = line omitted.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 313

18. As if I were planting a tree in my own woodlot, I kneel in the dirt;

19. As if someone had managed to tie me to my own chair, my hands are tied with
rope;
20. In my own city, where I used to dress in fine clothing, I am forced to wear dirty
rags;
21. Forced to wash in clods of dirt, there is dirt on my face.
22. A beast devours cadavers but then retreats,
23. Even after the king of beasts makes a kill, he slackens his jaw;
24. Even after the canebrake is consumed by fire, the pond remains;
25. And even Utu, after consuming (offerings of) ghee and cheese, still reaches
out to (accept offerings from) a pauper’s table;
28. Ah but me—when will Šulgi, my king, restore me to my position?

Textual Matrix
1. lugal-g̃u10-ra ù-na-a-dug4
N2 . . . +. - .
N3 . . + . + - .
N5 . + + ++ + +
Ur1 o o . . . o o
Ur2 . . . ++ - +
Ur3 o . + ++ . o
Su1 + + + + ne - +
X1 . + + . . - .
X2 + + + . . - .
X3 + + . o o o o
2. máš hur-sag̃-g̃á á sa6-sa6-g̃á
N2 + + + + + + + .
N3 . + + + + + + .
N5 . + + + + + + g̃u10
Ur1 . . + + + + . o
Ur2 . . + + + + + g̃u10
Ur3 . + + + + + . o
Su1 . . . . . . . ⸢g̃u10⸣
X1 + + + + + + . ⸢g̃u10⸣
X2 + + + + . o o o
X3 + + + o o o o o
314 4. Abaindasa to Šulgi 1

3. anše kur hur-sag̃-g̃á umbin hu-rí-inmušen-na

N2 + + . + + + . . + + +
N3 + + + + + + + +. o o
N5 + + + + + + + ++ + +
N7 o o o o o . + . . o o
Ur1 . +ra + + + + . . o o o
Ur2 + + + + + . + ++ - +
Ur3 . + + + + + + ++ - .
Su1 . x . . . / traces11
X1 + + + + + + + ++ - +
X2 + +ra + . . o . . o (-) o
X3 + + + + . ⸢ke4⸣12 + . ++ + +
4. g̃išnimbar ki sikil-e mú-a zú-lum na4
za-gìn lá-g̃u10-úr
N2 + + + + + + + . + + ++ + . .
N3 . + + . . . . + + - ++ . o o
N5 + + + - + + + + + + ++ + + g̃á13
N7 o . + + o o o . + + . o o o o
Ur1 + + + + + + + + + + +. o o o
Ur2 + + + + + + +/ + + + ++ + - +
Ur3 + + + + + + + + + - ++ . . .
Su1 traces / + + + + +- + -
X1 + + + + + + +/ + + + ++ + + +:
X2 + . + . o + o/ + + . o o o . .
X3 + + + + . + +14/ + + + +- + + +
5. ù-na-dè-dah
N2 ++ + .
N3 . +15 . .
N5 . +e + +
N7 . + + .
Ur1 + ne + .
Ur2 + ne + +
Ur3 + ne + .
Su1 + ne á + dah
X1 + +e +? +
X2 . . o o
X3 + ne + +
X4 ++ + +

11. See p. 323 below.

12. A modern piece of clay with etched in wedges has been inserted here.
13. Probably trunacted úr.
14. Preceded by an erased a.
15. Erasures before and after na.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 315

6. I
a-ba-in-da-sá ugula érin zú-kešda
N2 ++ + + + + + + + +
N3 .+ + + . o + + + + lu[gal]
N5 #
N7 #
N9 oo . . . . . . . o
N10 oo . . o o / o . . .
Ur1 ++ + an + + + àga-ús + +
Ur2 #
Ur3 ++ + ⸢nam⸣++ + àga-ús + +
X1 ++ + an + + + àga-ús + +
X2 -.. ⸢an⸣ . . / . ⸢àga-ús⸣ . .
X3 #
X4 oo o o . + + + + +:
7. sag̃-ki zalag lugal-la-na-šè šà lugal-a-ni-ir du10-du10-ge-ra
N2 #
N3 #
N5 #
N7 #
N9 #
N10 #
Ur1 + + + + + + + + + ++ + + + + +
Ur2 #
Ur3 + . + + + + ta / + + ⸢la⸣ na - + + + +
X1 + + + + + + ke4/ + + la ni - + + + +
X2 . . . . a ni . / . . o . - . . . .
X3 #
8. árad-zu na-ab-bé-a
N2 + + + + + +
N3 + + + . + .
N5 #
N7 #
N8 o o o . o o
N9 . + + o o o
N10 #
Ur1 + + + + + +
Ur2 #
Ur3 + + + + + +
X1 + + + + + +
X2 . o o o o o16
X3 #

16. Followed by traces of two lines.

316 4. Abaindasa to Šulgi 1

9. ì-kala-ga lugal-g̃u10 ga-ab-ús

N2 ++ + + + + + +
N3 #
N5 #
N7 #
N8 o o o . + o o o
N9 #
N10 #
Ur1 kala-ga-me-en + + + + +
Ur2 #
Ur3 kala-ga-me-en àga-ús-zu hé-me-en
X1 kala-ga-me-en àga-ús-zu hé-me-en
X3 #
10. igi-tuku igi-zu-šè ga-gin
N2 + + + ni + + +
N3 #
N5 #
N7 #
N8 o . + + + o o
N9 #
N10 #
Ur1 #
Ur2 #
Ur3 #
X1 + tuk + + + + + + (after 11)
X3 #
X1 has an additional line: A DIŠ Ú-àm g̃išbanšur mu-da-ak-e

11. inim-ma-zu ra-gaba-zu hé-me-en

N2 #
N3 #
N5 #
N7 #
N8 . . . + + + . o o
N9 #
N10 #
Ur1 + + + + + + + + +
Ur2 #
Ur3 #
X1 + +17 + + + + + + +18
X3 #

17. Followed by erased NI.

18. The line ends with four squeezed signs that I cannot read; it seems to be a verb begin-
ning with ga-.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 317

12. a gub-ba-àm a mu-da-ak-e

N2 + + . ⸢a⸣ + + + + +
N3 #
N4 . . . . o o o o o
N5 #
N7 #
N8 + + + + + + + . o
N9 #
N10 #
Ur1 + + + - + +un+ + + (after 14)
Ur2 #
Ur3 o o o x x im-ma-ak-en (after 13)
Su2 +a+ + - . + + - -19
X1 . + + - + + + x x
X3 #
13. tumu gub-ba-àm še mu-un-da-lá-a
N2 + + + a IM mu-da-ak-e
N3 #
N4 + + + + še x [ ]
N5 #
N7 #
N8 + . + - še mu-da-⸢ak⸣-[. . .]
N9 #
N10 #
Ur1 + + + - še mu-un-da-lá-a
Ur2 #
Ur3 o o o o še mu-un-sì-ge
Su2 i . + - še mu-sì
X1 . + + - + mu-⸢da⸣-x-⸢e⸣
X3 #
Ur3 has additional line: [. . .] ⸢bar?⸣-g̃á mu-un-dadag-ge

19. See full transliteration below. The final sign seems to be da but could be a combination
of da and ak.
318 4. Abaindasa to Šulgi 1

14. g̃iš
má gub-ba-àm g̃iš
g̃isal mu-un-sì-ge
N2 #
N3 #
N4 + + + + + ++ o o o o
N5 #
N7 #
N8 + . . + + +. o o o o
N9 #
N10 #
Ur1 + + + + - ++ + + + + (before 12)
Ur2 #
Ur3 - . . . o ++ + + + + (before 13)
X1 + + + + - ++ + - + . (before 12)
X3 #
15. dub-sar me-en na-rú-a ab-sar-e
N2 + + + + + + . . . +
N3 #
N4 + + + + + + o o o o
N5 #
N7 #
N8 . + . .⸢dub⸣ . + + . o o (after 16)
N9 #
N10 #
Ur1 + + + + + + + + +20 re ⸢en⸣
Ur2 #
Ur3 #
X1 + + + + + + + mu + ⸢re⸣
X3 #
16. inim ugnim-ma mu-da-[. . .]
N2 . + o . . [. . .]
N3 #
N4 + + + . o
N5 #
N7 #
N8 ̃ AR+
+ KI.AD.G + . [. . .]
N9 #
N10 #
Ur1 #
Ur2 #
Ur3 #
X1 #
X3 #

20. Preceded by an erased sign.

 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 319

17. inim pu-úh-ru-um-ma šub-ba e11-dè-bi mu-un-da-sì-ge

N2 o . + + x o o o o o o o o o o o
N3 #
N4 + + x+21 + + . o o o o o o o o o o
N5 #
N7 #
N8 #
N9 #
N10 #
Ur1 + + + + + + + + + + + + + + ++
Ur2 #
Ur3 #
X1 + + + + - + + + + + + mu-dab5?
X3 #
N4 has another line after 17: inim sa6-ge gaba-ri x[ . . . ]
18. g̃iš-gin7 tir-g̃á mu-un-dù-ù-nam mu-sír-re im-gam-me-en
N2 o o . . . . . o o o o o o o o o
N3 + + + . . + + + . + + . . + m[a] o
N4 + + + + + - + . o o o o o o o o
N5 . . . + + + + - + . . ⸢e⸣ . + + +
N7 o . + + . . o o o o . ⸢e⸣ + + ⸢e⸣ o
N8 + o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
N9 . + + + + - + un o o o o o o o o
N10 o o o o o o o o o o o . + + - +
Ur1 + + g̃iš + + + - + - na + + + + + e -
Ur2 + + + + + + tùm - - + + e + + e -
Ur3 o o o . . . + + + o . . . + e -
X1 + + + + . - + - + + + + + + + +
X3 + + g̃iš + + + + + - +! . + . ì + e -

21. The scribe has trouble with úh and began to write something else, erased it, and then
wrote the right sign. He then repeated the line, once again with a problematical úh, partially
erasing the offending sign: inim pu-x-úh-ru-um-m[a ].
320 4. Abaindasa to Šulgi 1

19. g̃išgu-za-g̃á lú mu-un-da-lá-a šu-g̃u10 éše im-ma-lá

N1 . . . . . . . o o o + . . . . o
N2 o o o + + + + dam. o o o o o o o
N3 + + . . . . . . . o o o o o o o
N4 . . + + + + + + . o o o o o o o
N7 o o . + + + . o o o o . ⸢uš⸣ + . +
N8 + + - - . . o o . . . o o o o o
N9 o . + g̃u10 + .⸢da-an⸣ o o o o o o o o
N10 o o o + + + + . o o/ o o . + + +
Ur1 + . + + + + + + + + + + . + +an +
Ur2 + . + - + + - + + + + + . . + +
Ur3 o o o . . . . + ++ + + + + +an +
X1 o o o . + + + + + + . . . . . .
X3 + . + + + + + + + + . . + + + +
Followed by another line in X1.
20. uru-g̃á túg dàn-na mi-ni-mu4-ra túg mu-sír-ra ba-an-mu4
N1 . + . . + + + o o o . + + + x o
N2 o . + + +a + + + + + + + o o o o
N4 o . . dan6 + a + +i[n]o o o o . + + + o
N7 o o o ⸢dan6 a na⸣ . . o o o o o o o o o22
N8 + + + + . ⸢a⸣ . . o o o o o o o o o
N9 o o . . o o o o o o o o o o o o
N10 o o . + + + + . ./ o o o . . - +
Ur1 # (see next line)
Ur2 + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
Ur3 o o . dan4 + . + + + o . + + + + +
X1 o . . . + + + . . o o o . . . .
X3 + . + dan4 + + +in- . + + + + + - +
21. lag-e a mi-ni-íb-tu5-tu5-a sahar igi-g̃á ba-e-gub
N1 o . + + + - + . o . + + + . +
N2 . + + + + ⸢ib⸣ . + + + + + + . .
N4 o o o . + + + . o o . + + ++
N6 o o . + + . . o o . + + o oo
N7 o o o o o o . + o o . . + ++
N8 . . . + . o . . o o o o o oo
N10 o o o + + ⸢ib⸣ . o o /o o . . . o
Ur1 + . + níg̃-dan6-dan6-a + + + + + + bu
Ur2 + + + + + - + . + + + + + ++
Ur3 + + + + + in + . . + + + + ++
X1 o o o + + - + + + . o o o o.
X3 . . + + + in + + + . + + + ++

22. Traces of an indented line, possibly ⸢mu-sír-ra⸣.

 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 321

22. ur-e ad6 íb-gu7 gaba-bi íb-zi-zi-i

N1 . + + ub + + + + +. +
N2 + + + + + + + . ++-
N4 o o . + + + . o o o o
N6 . . . i+ + . o o o o o
N7 o o . . + + + . . +.
N8 . o . . . . . o o o o
Ur1 + . + + + + + + ++-
Ur2 . + . . + + + + +++
Ur3 + re + + . . + + du8 du8
X1 o o o . + + + + . . -
X3 o o . + + o . + ++.
23. ušumgal-e sag̃ g̃iš um-mi-íb-ra-ra ka-ta-tak4 íb-tuku
N1 . . + + + . . o o o o o o o
N2 + + + + + + - ++ + + + + +
N4 o . g̃iš sag̃ - + . o o o o o o o
N6 . + + + + + ib + . o o o o o
N7 . + + + ⸢im-mi⸣o o o + + + . o
N8 o . + + . + . . - + . o o o
Ur1 . + + + - - + ++ . +ab. ì+ tak4
Ur2 + + + + - - + ++ .⸢tak4⸣ . + +
Ur3 + + + + - - + ++ + tak + + tak4
X1 o o . + + + + . . o o . .⸢tuk⸣.
X2 o o o o o o o o o /o o . . tak4
X3 . . . - - - + ++ + + + + tak4?
24. g̃iš-gi izi ub-gu7 nig̃in5 ì-tuk-tuku
N2 + + + + . . ⸢mi⸣-ni +
N4 o o . - . o o o o
N6 + . +⸢i íb⸣ + . o o o
N7 + + + ub + o o o o
N8 o . + íb + + . . .
Ur1 . . + íb + e + e + ⸢tak4⸣ tak4
Ur2 + + + íb + + + + +
Ur3 + + + + . + + ⸢tak4 tak4⸣
X1 o o o o o o o . +
X2 . . + íb +23 e/ + tak4 tak4
X3 . + . + + + + . +

23. Written as ka.

322 4. Abaindasa to Šulgi 1

25. d
utu ìa un-gu7 ga-ára un-gu7 banšur
g̃iš
úku-ra-šè šu-ni íb-ši-in-tùm
N2 .+ . + + + ra + + + + + + + + + + +- +
N4 oo o . . o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
N6 +. + . . . x o o o o o o o + + . o o o
N7 .. + + . o o o o . + + o o/ o . . o o o
N8 oo . + + + x24 + + + . . . + + . o o o o25
Ur1 .. + - + + +mu-un + . + + + + + + im + + +
Ur2 ++ + + + + + + + + +! . + +/ + + + ++ +
Ur3 ++ + . + + - + + + + + + + + + + ++ +
X1 oo o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o . ⸢túm⸣9
X2 ++ + - + + + - +26/ - + + + +/ + + + + - túm
X3 .+ + . . + ra ? ?/ + . + + + + + + ++ +
26. zi-g̃u10 ba-e-i šu-g̃u10 ha-za-ab
N2 #
N6 #
N8 #
Ur1 . . + ++ + + + + a+
Ur2 #
Ur3 #
X2 + + + -+ + + + + +
X3 #
27. dumu nu-mu-un-kuš-me-en lú èn-tar-re la-ba-an-tuku
N2 #
N6 #
N8 #
Ur1 + + + + + + + + + + + + . + +
Ur2 #
Ur3 #
X2 + + + - + + + + + + - + + - +
X3 #
28. g̃á-àm me-na-àm šà d
šul-gi lugal-g̃á ki-bi ha-ma-gi4-gi4
N2 ⸢g̃á-àm⸣ me-na-⸢àm⸣ . .+ + . . . + + . . .
N6 g̃á-a me-na-àm + -. . o o + + + . . o
N8 o o o o . + -. o o o o o . o o o
Ur1 g̃á-e me-e-a-na-àm + ++ + + g̃u10 + + + + + +
Ur2 g̃á-a me-na-àm / + ++ + + + /+ + - + + +
Ur3 g̃á-e me-en-na-a + ++ + + g̃u10 + + + + + +
X2 g̃á me-en-a + -+ + + g̃u10 /. + + + + +
X3 g̃a me-⸢en⸣-na-àm + ++ + + g̃u10 /. + ⸢ha?⸣ an + +

24. Erasure, or broken ára.

25. Followed by three additional lines; see p. 324 below.
26. Written as ka.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 323

29. lugal-g̃u10 èn-g̃u10 hé-tar-re ki dag̃al-g̃u10-šè hé-em-mi-ib-gi4-gi4

N2 #
N6 #
Ur1 . + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
Ur2 #
Ur3 #
X2 + + + - hu-mu-un-tar-re /+ + bi + + + + íb + .
X3 #

Catchline N2: lugal-g̃ á ù-na-⸢dug 4⸣ (SEpM2).

In N6, Ur1, X1, and probably in N5 followed by SEpM2.

Su1 is a round tablet from Susa with an elementary exercise based on this letter:
Obverse:
⸢zú-lum⸣ na4za-gìn-⸢mu⸣
⸢ù⸣-ne-á-dah-dah
⸢zú⸣-lum na4za-gìn-mu
ù-ne-á-dah-dah
Reverse:
In a rectangle:
1. lugal-g̃u10-ra
2. ù-ne-dug4
3. ù-ne-á-dah-dah
4. ⸢máš hur-sag̃-g̃á⸣
5. ⸢á sa6-sa6-mu⸣
6. ⸢anše? x hur?-sag̃-g̃á?⸣
7. traces (seems to end in ⸢mu⸣)
8. traces
9. traces
10. zú-⸢lum na4za-gìn-mu⸣
11. ù-ne-á-dah-dah
12. dnidaba
On the right of the rectangle, written horizontally:
  zú-lum na4za-gìn-mu
  ù-ne-á-dah-dah

The central part of the reverse is very worn, and only traces of signs remain.
Lines 7–9 should correspond to the second part of line 3 and the first part of line 4.
Su2 is a round practice tablet with lines 13 and 12 a repeated set of lines on the
obverse and at least six lines on the reverse. A fragment on the left edge is now miss-
ing; this transliteration is based both on the copy in MDP 27 207 and the collation
324 4. Abaindasa to Šulgi 1

of the tablet in its present state by Mrs. Mernoush Malyeri. In the matrix, the text
is entered only once.
1. a-a gub-ba ⸢a⸣ mu-da/ak?
2. i ⸢gub⸣-ba še mu-sì
3. a-a gub-ba a mu-x[ . . . ]
4. i ⸢gub⸣-ba še m[u- . . . ]

The reverse is difficult to read. The first four preserved lines are illegible to me
and would require detailed study of the original tablet, which is unavailable to me at
present. Many of the Susa practice tablets of this type have on the reverse a syllabic
version of the Sumerian lines from the obverse, followed by an Akkadian translation,
and it may be that this lentil was of that kind. The first lines of the obverse were
therefore probably syllabic; then came the translations of the two lines. I can only
read the final preserved lines:
i-na ša-ri-im ne-ḫi-im
za-ri-a-am šu-li-i

N8 has three unique lines between 25 and 28:

[ . . . ]x a gal-gal-la dù-a igi-ni im-m[a- . . . ]
[ . . . l]ugal-g̃u10 g̃éštu-g̃u10-⸢šè?⸣ [ . . . ]
[ . . . ]x zi mu la?-x-x-[ . . . ]
 5. Šulgi to Aradmu 2
(ŠAr2, 3.1.13.1, RCU 8)

Sources
N1 = Ni. 9703 (ISET 2 120) iii 2′–9′ =1–8
Tablet: prism.
1. I
árad-m[u-ra ù-(na)-a-dug4]
2. ⸢dšul⸣-[gi lugal-zu na-ab-bé-a]
3. I
⸢a⸣-[ba-in-da-sá-a ugula érin zú-kešda (lugal)]
4. ⸢lú⸣ [. . .]
5. ⸢inim-zu-šè⸣ [. . .] h[é- . . .]
6. érin-bi-šè x [. . .] nu-x[. . .]
7. ba-ni-ib-zà[h?1 . . .] i-[. . .]
8. érin-b[i . . .] x [. . .]
rest of text broken

1
[Speak to] Aradm[u], 2 [saying (the words) of Š[ulgi, your king]:
A[baindasa, captain of the royal army,] 4 a man . . . 5 According to your mes-
3

sage . . .6 To those troops . . . not . . .7 He escaped? . . .8 Those troops . . .

1. Only HA (of HA.A = zàh) is preserved. The only other possible restoration would be
ha-[lam. . .].

325
 6. Šulgi to Aradmu 3
(ŠAr3, 3.1.61, RCU 16)

Composite Text
1. I
árad-mu-ra ù-na-a-dug4
2. Id
šul-gi lugal-zu na-ab-bé-a
3. u4? Ia-ba-an-da-sá ugula érin zú-kešda
4. [x] ù-na-a-dug4-bi šu-ni mu-un-tak4-a
5. [x x]-šè? dugud(-)RI-dè NIR-da íl-la-zu hu-mu-un-ši-in-gi
6. a-na-aš-àm érin-bi-ta mu-un-zi-zi
7. en-nu-ùg̃-g̃á mu-ni-in-ku4
8. [sag̃? ba]-e-tùm-tùm-ma NIR-da šà-zu-a ba-e-ši-íl-la
9. [lú]-kúr-ra ba-ra-è-a érin-bi-ta gi4-gi4-mu-un-na-ab
10. [x (x) ur]-dnamma a-a ugu-g̃u10-ta
11. [x x]x-ra ha-ra-an-kalag šu? x-nam
12. [x x]-bi ba-ab-g̃ar-re-en-a
13. x x-bi/ga-šè ha-ra-an-kalag x-nam ha-ba-zu-zu
14. u4 ù-na-a-dug4-mu šu-ni šu tag4
15. érin-bi-šè gi4-gi4-mu-un-na-ab
16. [. . .]-bi sa6-ga-zu pàd-dè
17. uru?  ki-bi nam-ba-an-pe-el-le-en
18. nam-gur4-bi érin-bi-šè níg̃ mu-ra-ab-dug4
19. ki-sag̃-g̃ál-la igi-zu-šè g̃išgu-za-àm ha-ra-ab-dúr-dè-en
20. a-ma-ru-kam
1
Speak to Aradmu, 2 saying (the words) of Šulgi, your king:
3
When Abaindasa, captain of the armed forces, 4 sent that letter (to me/you)
5
. . . important . . . so that he could confirm the punishment that you imposed on him.
6
Why did you remove him from that regiment 7 and throw him in prison? 8 Having
reduced the punishment that you had imposed by your own volition, 9 now that the
enemy is coming against you, reinstate him into that regiment!
10
[By the order of ] Ur-Namma, the father who begot me, 11. . . fortress . . .12. . .I/
you establish/appoint . . .13. . . fortress . . . 14As soon as my letter concerning him has
326
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 327

been sent, 15 reinstate him into that regiment! 16 . . . 17 You must not diminish (the
importance) of that city: 18 its importance to that regiment is something that has (al-
ready) has been explained to you, 19 so you should install him in a stronghold before
you as if on a throne! 20 It is urgent!

Sources
N1 = Ni. 9702 (ISET 2 122) i 1′–10′ 9–20
X1 = AN1922-1631 (OECT 5 26) 1–20
X1 has deteriorated since it was copied and since I first collated it in 1985.2
Tablet typology: Prism: N1, Type III: X1.
Bibliography: Edition: S. N. Kramer, OECT 5 13–14.

Textual Matrix
1. X1 ⸢I⸣
árad-mu-ra ù-na-a-dug4
2. X1 ⸢I⸣d
šul-gi lugal-zu na-ab-bé-a
3. X1 ⸢u4?⸣ Ia-ba-an-⸢da⸣-sá ugula érin zú-kešda
4. X1 [x] ⸢ù⸣-na-a-dug4-bi šu-ni mu-un-tak4-a
5. X1 [x x]-šè? dugud(-)RI-⸢dè⸣ NIR-⸢da⸣ íl-la-zu hu-mu-un-ši-in-gi
6. X1 [a-n]a-⸢aš⸣-àm érin-bi-ta mu-un-zi-zi
7. X1 [e]n-⸢nu⸣-ùg̃-g̃á mu-ni-in-ku4
8. X1 [sag̃? ba]-e-tùm-tùm-ma NIR-da šà-zu-a ba-e-ši-íl-la

9. [lú] kúr-ra ba-ra-è-a érin-bi-ta gi4-gi4-mu-un-na-ab

N1 o o o o o oo o o o o . . o o o
X1 o . + . . . . + + + . . o . + +
10. [x (x) ur]-dnamma a-a ugu-g̃u10-ta
N1 o o o . + ++ + . o
X1 o o o . . o o + + +
11. [x x]x-ra ha-ra-an-kalag šu? x-nam
N1 [ ]x + + + - . . x o
X1 o ooo o . + + o o .3

1. Formerly Ashm. 1922-163.

2. Much of the decay has affected the upper part of the reverse. The current state of the tab-
let can be seen on the digital photographs included here; a scan of an older museum photograph
is included for comparison. The transliteration is based on the earlier state.
3. Followed by the traces of a line on lower edge.
328 6. Šulgi to Aradmu 3

12. [x x]-bi ba-ab-g̃ar-re-en-a

N1 [ ] + + + + . . o
X1 o oo o o . + + +
13. x x-bi/ga-šè ha-ra-an-kalag x-nam ha-ba-zu-zu
N1 o x + + + + - . o o + + o o
X1 o o o . . . . o x . . + +.
14. u4 ù-na-a-dug4-g̃u10 šu-ni šu tag4
N1 + + + - + + ab o o o
X1 o . + ++ + + + + +4
15. érin-bi-šè gi4-gi4-mu-un-na-ab
N1 + + + + . o o o o
X1 . . . + + + + + +5
16. [...]-bi sa6-ga-zu pàd-dè
N1 Omits or on previous line.
X1 [...] . . . . . +
17. uru?ki-bi nam-ba-an-pe-el-le-en
N1 .? + + + + + + + . o
X1 o o o o o o o . . +
18. nam-gur4-bi érin-bi-šè níg̃ mu-ra-ab-dug4
N1 + + + + + + x o o o o
X1 o o o o . . + . . + +
19. ki-sag̃-g̃ál-la igi-zu-šè g̃išgu-za-àm ha-ra-ab-dúr-dè-en
N1 + + ki + + + . o + + + h[é]o o o o o
X1 o . . o . . + +. . - . . ++ + +
20. [a]-ma-ru-kam
N1 omits or on previous line.
X1 o . + +

In N1 followed by ArŠ3 (7).

Colophon D (X1)

4. There must have been half a line of text before this in X1.
5. As in the line above, in X1, this version had words at the beginning of this line that are
not present in N1.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 329

Commentary
The reconstruction of this letter is highly tentative, and there may be less har-
mony between the two sources than meets the eye. X1 has more of the text than N1
but is an inferior manuscript, with many errors. The difficulties are compounded by
the current state of preservation of the former. The translation offered here is highly
provisional, and everything is subject to revision. The pronominal elements in ver-
bal forms are difficult, and third person may be used when first person is intended;
therefore érin-bi may have to be rendered “his regiment,” rather than “that regi-
ment.” It is possible that this and ŠAr2 (letter 5) are variant recensions of the same
letter.
4/14. šu . . . tak4, “to dispatch,” discussed by M. Civil, AuOr 8 (1990) 109–11,
is used regularly in­administrative letters but not in literary ones. The only other
occurrence is in letter SEpM 4:4, together with ù-na-dug4. The unreliable source
X1 has the form šu-ni šu-tak4 in line 14, but this is hardly correct; N1 clearly had
something else but only the sign ab- is preserved.
5/8. NIR-da, read either nir-da or šer7-da, has been v­ igorously discussed, most
recently by M. Civil, FS Hallo 75–78, who­argues for the meaning “capital offense.”
The use of this noun with the verb í l is otherwise unattested in Sumerian, but it may
be a calque of Akkadian šērta našû, “to bear punishment,” or even of šērta emēdu,
“to impose punishment.” Compare perhaps Šulgi Hymn B 229: NIR-da sag̃ ì-túm-
túm-g̃ á ma-da gal-gal-g̃ á suhuš ma-ab-ge-en-ge-en, “As I reduce punishments/
offences, I solidify the foundations of my great far-flung lands.”
5. The sign before dugud appears to be -šè, but this is hardly certain. The interpre-
tation of dugud(-)RI-dè is problematical, because there is no other evidence for /dr/
as the final consonant of the root.
18. The níg̃ before the finite verb form, preserved only in X1, makes little sense, as
one would expect the verb to be subordinated. One cannot be certain, but the poor
remains of the equivalent sign in N1 resemble mu more than níg̃ .
19. The interpretation of this line, as well as the preceding ones, is highly conjec-
tural and admittedly makes little sense. The two sources are not in perfect harmony.
For ki-sag̃ -g̃ ál, possibly “secure place, stronghold,” see S. Tinney, Nippur Lament
165. N1 has ki-sag̃ -ki(-)g̃ ál, and therefore perhaps we should think of Izi C iii
12–13 [MSL 13 177]): ki-sag̃ -ki = (a-šar) [. . .], ki-sag̃ -ki = MIN sak-ki-e, “place
of s.-rites:”
 7. Aradmu to Šulgi 3
(ArŠ3, 3.1.5, SEpM1a, RCU 7)

Composite Text
1. lugal-g̃u10-ra ù-na-dug4
2. árad-mu árad-zu na-ab-bé-a
3. I
a-ba-in-da-sá ugula érin zú-kešda lugal níg̃ lugal-g̃u10­ ma-an-gi4
4. lugal-g̃u10 bar inim-ma ha-ba-zu-zu
5. u4 zi-mu-darki-ra-šè igi-g̃u10 bí-in-g̃ar-ra
6. kaskal lugal-g̃u10 érin zi-ga-g̃u10
7. I
a-ba-in-da-sá érin-bi igi ù-bí-in-kár
8. min li-mu-um érin-bi nu-g̃ál
9. x x-ne nu-un-DU nu-un-gi4
10. ha-ra-kalag lugal-g̃u10 mu-un-tag4 mu-un-dab5
11. NIR-da-bi NIR-da lugal-g̃u10 [ba-e]-dugud
12. [. . .]-ma lugal? [. . .] x
13. [. . .]x ni x[. . .]-g̃ar
14. níg̃ lugal-g̃u10 ab-bé-na-g̃u10
15. lugal-g̃u10 hé-en-zu
1
Speak to my king, 2 saying (the words) of Aradmu, your servant:
3
(Concerning the matter of) Abaindasa, captain of the royal armed forces, that
my king sent me (a message) about; 4my king must be informed about the matter.
5
When I focused my attention on Zimudar, 6 I was in the process of mustering
troops for my king’s military service,1 7 but when Abaindasa inspected those troops,
8
2,000 of those men were missing. 9 He had not gone to . . ., nor had he returned.
10
He had abandoned the fortress, o my king, and then (re)captured (it)! 11 That crime
was a very serious crime against my king! 12–13 . . .
14
Whatever you, my king order me to do, (I will do)! 15 Now my king is informed
(about all of this)!

1. Alt. transl.: my king’s expedition.

330
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 331

Commentary
In some redactions of SEpM, this composition takes the place of SEpM1. In all
four extant manuscripts, it is followed by SEpM2 or by its catch line (see p. 323
above).
4. I know of no other example of bar inim-ma; the translation is conjectural, based
on bar . . . ak, “because of.”
5. I know of no other example of kaskal lugal in Sumerian. On the face of it, it
should mean “royal expedition,” but even if it meant that earlier, in OB times it was
probably understood as a qalque from Akkadian ḫarrān šarrim, which, according to
M. Stol, FS Houwink ten Cate 300–303 and idem, OBO 160/4 748, meant “royal
military service.” See also J. G and A. Westenholz, CM 33 88, citing this line.
11. The reading of the verb is conjectural; most probably this line is echoed—or
echoes—ArŠ4 (8): 23.

Sources
N1 = 3 N-T 80 (A 30135, SL xxxi) obv. 1–15 =1–15
N2 = CBS 78482+7856 (SL xxxviii) i 1′–10′ =5–15
N3 = Ni. 2786 (ISET 2 120) =3–12; 14–15
N4 = Ni. 4586 (transliteration S. N. Kramer)3 =1–11; 15
N5 = Ni. 9702 (ISET 2 122) i 11′–13′ =1–3

Tablet typology: Prism: N2, N5, Type III: N1, N3, N4.

Textual Matrix
1. lugal-g̃u10-ra ù-na-dug4
N1 o o o . + +
N4 o o . . + .
N5 + + + . o o
2. árad-mu árad-zu na-ab-bé-a
N1 o o o o . + + .
N4 o . . . . . . .
N5 + + + + . o o o

2. First published as PBS 13 46.

3. No photograph is included here; the tablet will be published by Asuman Dönmez.
332 7. Aradmu to Šulgi 3

3. I
a-ba-in-da-sá ugula érin zú-kešda lugal níg̃ lugal-g̃u10­ ma-an-gi4
N1 oo o o o . a + + + + + + . + . . +
N3 .. . . . . o ⸢àga?-ús?⸣ o o o + + + + o o
N4 oo o . . . . àga-ús + . + o o . + . +
N5 .. + + + . o o o o o o o o o o o
4. lugal-g̃u10 bar inim-ma ha-ba-zu-zu
N1 o o o + + + + + + dè
N3 . + + + + + . o o
N4 o o o . . . + + .
5. u4 zi-mu-dar-raki-šè igi-g̃u10 bí-in-g̃ar-ra
N1 . . + + +-+ + + + ib + +
N2 o o o o ooo o . . . . .
N3 + + + + + !. . o o o o o o
N4 o o o o .. . . . . + + .
6. kaskal lugal-g̃u10 érin zi-ga-g̃u10
N1 o o . + + + +
N2 o o o o . + +
N3 + + + + . o o
N4 o o o o . + +
7. a-ba-in-da-sá
I
érin-bi igi ù-bí-in-kár
N1 oo o o + + a + + + ++ + +
N2 oo o o o o o o + ++ - .
N3 ++ + + . . . o o o o o o
N4 oo o o o . . ⸢ba⸣ . . . + +
8. min li-mu-um érin-bi nu-g̃ál
N1 o o . + + + + .
N2 o o o o . + + +
N3 + + + + . + o o
N4 o o o o o . . +
9. x x-ne nu-un-DU nu-un-gi4
N1 o o . + + + + o .
N2 o o o o . . + + +
N3 x x . . . . . . o
N4 o o o o o o o . +
10. ha-ra-kalag lugal-g̃u10 mu-un-tag4 mu-un-dab5
N1 o o o . + + + o + + +
N2 o o o o o o . + o . +
N3 + . + . . + o o o o o
N4 o o o o o o x x . . +
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 333

11. NIR-da-bi NIR-da lugal-g̃u10 [ba-e]-dugud?4

N1 o o . + . o o o x .
N2 o o o o o o o o o .
N3 . . . o o o . o o o
N4 traces
12. [. . .]-ma lugal?[. . .]x
N1 [. . .] + . [. . .]
N2 [ ]x
N3 [. . .]x . . [. . .]
13. [. . .]x ni x[. . .]-g̃ar
N1 o x + x o .
N2 o o o o o +
N3 traces
14. níg̃ lugal-g̃u10 ab-bé-na-g̃u10
N1 o o . + o o o5
N2 o o o o o . +
N3 . . . . . . o
N4 traces
15. lugal-g̃u10 hé-en-zu
N1 o o + o o
N2 o o o . +
N3 + + + + o
N4 o o . . .

In N1 and N2 followed by SEpM2.

Catchline N3: lugal-g̃á ù-na-[dug4] followed by upside down­lugal-g̃á ù-na-dug4
Catchline N4: [. . . -ra ù-n]a-du[g4]
Both catch lines reference SEpM2.

4. Only the very end of the final sign is preserved in both N1 and N2.
5. Possibly room for [ga-ab-ak].
 8. Aradmu to Šulgi 4
(ArŠ4)

Source
X1 = MS 2199/2
collated by Konrad Volk.
Tablet: Type III.

Text Transliteration

1. ⸢lugal-g̃u10-ra⸣ ù-na-a-⸢dug4⸣
2. ⸢árad⸣-mu árad-zu ⸢na-ab⸣-bé-⸢a⸣
3. u4 lugal-g̃u10 kíg̃ ⸢lugal?⸣ è-[dè] mu-e-ši-in-⸢gi4?⸣
4. u4 érin-bi-šè bí-in-⸢te⸣-a-g̃u10
5. ra-bi sí-ik-ka-tum ugula nu-bànda érin dag̃al-⸢la lugal-g̃á⸣-ke4
6. silim-ma lugal-g̃á-ke4 èn mu-un-⸢tar-re⸣-eš
7. lugal-me u4-da-rí-šè hé-ti gù in-na-⸢dé?⸣-eš
8. kíg̃-bi-šè te-g̃á-da-mu-ne
9. kíg̃ lugal-g̃u10 mu-un-gi4 igi ù-bí-kár
10. lú NIR-da NIR-da ⸢šu?⸣ bí-in-šúm
11. lú nam-tag nam-tag bí-íb-íl-e
12. lú kíg̃-bi tab-ba-a-ni mah-bi al-lá-e
13. ⸢á⸣-ni ud-bi-e kù al-lá-e
14. I
a-⸢ba-an⸣-da-sá ugula ⸢érin⸣ ⸢zú⸣-kešda ⸢lugal⸣-g̃á-ke4
15. lú érin-a gi4-gi4 lugal-g̃u10
16. [kí]g̃ lugal-g̃u10 mu-un-šub bàd im-mi-in-dù
17. [lug]al-g̃u10 ⸢inim⸣-ma ⸢nu-húl?⸣-le-dè
18. Id
šul-gi-x-x-x lú-kaš4-e im-⸢mi⸣-in-⸢gin?⸣-na?
19. gú mu-un-dù-a-ak-ke4-⸢eš⸣ lú-kíg̃-gi4-⸢a-g̃u10⸣ nu-x-x
20. x x lugal x di-ne g̃á-e ù-x-du-x
21. x x-bi mu-un-gul NIR-⸢da⸣ bí-íb-⸢íl-e⸣
22. ⸢ù⸣ érin-bi-šè íb-⸢zi⸣-zi

334
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 335

23. NIR-da-bi NIR-da lugal-⸢g̃u10⸣ ba-e-⸢dugud⸣

24. lú mìn-kam-ma šu-ni-ta ha-ba-ab-lá-e
25. ⸢NIR⸣-da ⸢šu⸣-ni-ta ⸢bí-íb⸣-g̃ar
26. [níg̃?] ⸢lugal-mu⸣ ab-bé ga-mu-na-ab-⸢dù?⸣
27. [luga]l-g̃u10 hé-en-zu
28. [u4?]-⸢bi-ta⸣ lugal-⸢g̃u10?⸣ inim-ma nam-⸢ba⸣-ab-šub-bé-en
29. [in]im ⸢lugal⸣-g̃u10 ba-ra-ab-⸢bal⸣-e
Colophon D
1
Speak to my king, 2 saying (the words) of Aradmu, your servant:
3
When my king dispatched me to . . . the task, 4once I approached those troops,
5
the generals, lieutenants, and captains of my king’s far-flung troops 6 inquired about
the health of my king; 7 and shouted out ‘Long Live the King!’” 8 When I was close
to the work(-site), 9 after I inspected the work that my king had sent me to, 10 the one
guilty of a capital offence was handed over for execution, 11 the sentenced had to bear
their punishment. 12 The one who doubled his work-(load) was very well paid, 13 his
wages were paid out in silver for each day.
14
Abaindasa, the captain of the royal armed forces, 15 who had been returned
to the ranks by my king, 16 abandoned the task (assigned by) my king and applied
himself to work on building the fortifications. 17 My king, because the orders were
not being . . . 18 Šulgi-x dispatched? a messenger, . . .19 but because he rebelled . . .
but could not send my messenger. 20 . . . 21 He destroyed/broke . . . and had to bear
punishment 22 and was ousted from that troop. 23 That crime was a very serious crime
against my king! 24 After he was entrusted to a second man 25 (that man) carried out
the punishment.
26
Whatever my king orders me, I will do. 27 My king should know (about all this).
28
From this very [day] on, I will never neglect my king’s orders! 29 My kings [orders?]
must never be transgressed!

Commentary
The transliteration was made from photographs in November of 2005. I was able
to make collations, but due to the imperfect state of preservation of the tablet, a
proper edition will require more time with the original. Subsequently, the tablet was
baked and cleaned, and I was fortunate enough to obtain new photographs courtesy
of Andrew George. Later, in June 2009, Konrad Volk kindly collated my edition
against the original.
The writing on this tablet continues uninterrupted from the obverse to the re-
verse, covering the lower edge. Two of the three lines on that edge (20–21) are
difficult to read; additional conservation may make it all easier to decipher. The
Sumerian of this letter leaves much to be desired, even more so than some of the
other CKU items.
336 8. Aradmu to Šulgi 4

5. The title ra-bi sí-ik-ka-tum is a loan from rabi sikkati/um, a high military rank
in early OB but unattested in Ur III. It may designate the approximate equivalent to
“general,” that is Ur III šakkana and later OB šāpir Amurrî (ugula mar.tu, Baby-
lon, Hammurabi and later) or rabi Amurrî (gal mar.tu, Mari and Ešnunna). 1 The
earliest attestations are found in the literary correspondence of the Isin kings Iddin-
Dagan and Lipit-Eštar (letters SEpM2–5). The sequence of military ranks does not
correspond to anything we know from any specific period and probably represents an
18th-century garbling of early OB titles.
6–7. On this salutation, see the commentary to ArŠ1: 10 (1).
18. The reading of the beginning of the line is highly uncertain but it undoubtedly
contains a personal name that begins with Šulgi.
22. The verb zi, when used of workers/troops, means “to muster,” but here it is used
with the allative case, which is unusual. The broken context does not help matters,
but it is possible that this has to be connected with ŠAr3: 6–7 (6) a-na-aš-àm érin-
bi-ta mu-un-zi-zi, en-nu-ùg̃ -g̃ á mu-ni-in-ku 4, “Why did you remove him from
that regiment and throw him into prison? ” Otherwise, one would have to ignore the
case ending and render the line as “he mustered all of these workers/troops.”
23. This line apparently also occurs in ArŠ3: 11 (6).
28–29. The restorations in these lines are conjectural; one would expect a genitive
construction with lugal-g̃ u10 in both lines. Either this is simply a bad rendition from
the Akkadian (which underlies much of this text, as it does with other letters) or it
is a parenthetical interjection, literally, “From this very [day] on, I will never neglect
orders, O my king! [(Your) orders?], O my king, must never be transgressed!”

1. See R. Pientka-Hinz, FS Haase 53–70. On military ranks in OB times, see, most recently,
D. Charpin, OBO 160/4 282 and M. Stol, OBO 160/4 801–13. For a somethat different Old As-
syrian usage of the title, see, most recently, C. Brinker, AoF 37 (2010) 49–62.
 9. Aradmu to Šulgi 5
(ArŠ5, 3.1.6, RCU 6)

Source
Si1 = CBS 346 (PBS 10/4 8) 1–14
Tablet: Type III.
Bibliography: Editions: C. Wilcke, WO 5 (1969–70) 2–3, B. Sullivan, Sumerian and
Akkadian Sentence Structure, 153–55.

Text Transliteration

Obverse

1. [lugal-g̃u10-ra] ù-ne-[dug4]
2. ⸢Iárad-mu árad-zu na-ab-bé⸣-[a]
3. lugal-g̃u10 inim-zu inim an-na níg̃ nu-kúr-[ru-dam]
⟨ ⟩ a-wa-at-ka a-wa-at a-nim ša ⸢la⸣ [ut-ta-ka-ru]
4. nam-tar-ra-zu dig̃ir-gin7 šu-zu g̃ar-⸢ra⸣-[(àm)]
⸢ši⸣-ma-tu-ka ki-ma DIG ̃ IR šu-ut-lu-ma-[ni-kum]
5. bàd lugal-g̃u10 šu mu-un-gi4 kíg̃-bi ⸢ki?⸣-b[i-šè im-ma]-g̃ar
⟨ ⟩ ⸢ša⸣ be-lí ú-ša-lim-x ši-pí-ir-šu ⸢a?⸣-[na aš-ri-šu aš]-ku-un
6. g̃ìri lú kúr-e kakalam-šè ba-⸢bad⸣-[(re6)]
še-ep na-ak-ri a-⸢na⸣ ma-tim pa-ar-⸢sa-at⸣
7. ⸢mu⸣ mah lugal-g̃u10 ⸢sig⸣ igi-⸢nim⸣-ma
šu-ma-am ṣi-rum ša be-lí-ia ⸢iš-tu⸣ ma-tim e-li-⸢tim⸣ a-na ⟨ ⟩
8. dutu-è-ta u4-šú-uš zag-šè kalam til-la-a ­mi-ni-in-túm-⸢túm⸣-mu
⸢iš⸣-tu ⟨ ⟩ a-na ⟨ ⟩ a-na pa-ṭe4 ⸢gi⸣-mi-ir-ti ma-tim i-tam-mi-⸢ra⸣
9. amurrum gú-érim bí-in-g̃ar ní-bi ⸢im-ma⸣-x-x [. . .]
ki-ša-tum šu? ú-x-al na-ak?-[ri . . .]
10. Ikur-gam-ma-bi ⸢dšul⸣-gi-ra túm-⸢mu?⸣ x [. . .] x(eras.) har-ra-an-kalag igi
hur-⸢sag̃⸣-[g̃á-ka . . .]
ku-un-ši-ma-tum a-⸢na⸣ ⟨ ⟩ [. . .] a-na ḫal-ṣí ša pa-⸢ni⸣ [ša-di-i . . .]

337
338 9. Aradmu to Šulgi 5

11. ⸢ù⸣ a-ba-àm-da-⸢sá⸣ [. . .]

⟨ ⟩
12. ⸢im-sar-re lugal-g̃u10⸣ [. . .]
⸢ṭup⸣-pí x(eras.) be-lí-⸢ia⸣ [. . .]
13. níg̃ lugal-g̃u10 ab-[bé-na-(g̃u10 ga-ab-ak)]
⸢ša⸣ be-lí [i-qa-bu-ú (lu-pu-uš)]
14. [lugal]-⸢g̃u10⸣ [hé-en-zu]
1
Speak to my king, 2 saying (the words) of Aradmu, your servant:
3
My king, your pronouncements are as the pronouncements of An that ­cannot
(ever) be changed. 4 Your destiny has been bestowed to you as to ­a god! 5 And as for
the fortifications that my king commissioned me to finish, I have restored the work
to its previous condition. 6 (As a result) the enemy’s access to the frontier territory
has been blocked. 7–8 My king’s name supreme illuminates (everything) from­North
to South, from East to West, to the borders of the entire­homeland. 9 The enemy
Amorites. . . . 10 Kurgamabi (Akk.: Kunši-matum) to Šulgi . . . the fortress Igihursag̃a
. . . 11 And Abaindasa . . .
1′
The tablet(s)/written (instructions) that my king . . . 2′ Whatever you, my king
or[der me to do, (I will do)].
3′
Now my king [is informed] (about all of this)!

Commentary
The tablet that preserves this letter is most probably from Sippar (Abu Habba;
part of the so-called Khabaza Collection at the University Museum, Philadelphia).
From our vantage point, it is difficult to know if it is the work of a clever, innova-
tive student or of an incompetent one (an unpublished duplicate shows quite a bit
of variation). The pastiche combines standard hymnic language, as in lines 3, 4, and
7, with ideas taken from other CKU letters. The tablet is fragile, overbaked, and has
deteriorated somewhat over the years; the transliteration reflects the state of affairs
before conservation.
1. The writing ù-ne-dug 4 (for ù-na-a-dug 4 ) is found ­primarily in northern and
peripheral texts but also at Ur. As is the case with all known bilingual letters, except
for the Letter to Zimri-Lim and one glossed manuscript of SEpM6 (Uk1), the Akka-
dian version does not include the opening formula.
3. Compare Letter of Ursaga to a King (SEpM 6) 7: inim-zu inim dig̃ ir-ra-gin 7
hur nu-gi 4 -gi 4 -dam, “your command is like that of a god, it cannot be revoked.”
4. šu-zu. . .gar is an unorthodox writing for­šu-zi. . .g̃ ar, as the Akkadian
translation­indicates. It cannot be ruled out that the writer had in mind šu-zu-šè
g̃ ar, because the Sumerian verbs are semantically ­almost equivalent, but the paral-
lel with Lugale I 25 supports the­Akkadian translation (OB: d nin-urta du 11 -ga-
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 339

zu nu-kúr-ru ­n am-tar-ra-zu šu-zi-dè-eš g̃ [a]r, Late: d nin-urta du 11 -ga-zu

­n u-kúr-ra nam-tar-ra-zu šu-šè bí-[. . .] = dMIN qí-bit-ka ul ­ut-tak-kar ši-ma-tu-ka
šu-ut-lu-[ma]). The equivalence­šu-zi. . .g̃ ar = šu-ut-lu-mu-u[m] is also documented
in Nigga B ­132 (MSL 13 118). šu-zi. . .g̃ ar is a poetic equivalent of šúm, just as
the Akkadian šutlumum is a poetic equivalent of nadānum (see­W. P. Römer, HSAO
1 196; T. J. H. Krispijn, FS Veenhof, 253–54).
5. The­first verb is apparently šu. . .gi4 = šullumum, “to guard, to finish (a task).” This
equivalence is also attested lexically (šu-gi4 = šu-ul-lu-mu-um, Nigga Bil. B 139 [MSL
13 118]) but the usage is otherwise unknown in Sumerian, to my knowledge. Once
again, the author was thinking in Akkadian, although the Sumerian is syntactically
somewhat deficient. This makes little sense here; Sullivan, Sumerian and Akkadian
Sentence Structure, 153 proposed reading “kin!” rather than šu, and the Akkadian
equivalent as ú-ša-⟨aš  ⟩-p[i?-ru-n]i, but collation does not support either reading.
The end of the line is now broken, but the tablet at one time had -g̃ ar. The restora-
tion of both versions is tentative and is based on the assumption that the penultimate
visible sign in the Sumerian is ki rather than di. The verb ki-bi-šè. . .g̃ ar means
both “to firm up, consolidate,” as well as “restore” (Å. Sjöberg, ZA 63 [1973] 15–16).
6. It is difficult to gauge if the Sumerian or the Akkadian are primary here. M. Civil
quoted this line in MSL SS 1 90, noting the e­ quivalence between Akkadian šēpa
parāsu and the Sumerian g̃ ìri­ bad. In the MB exercise cited there on p. 89, the Su-
merian is­somewhat different: g̃ ìri si-il-la-ab = še-pa-am pu-ru-us. The usage here
is most likely a back-translation from the Akkadian šēpam parāsum, “to block access.”
See, perhaps, also Šulgi Hymn B 70: gù šubtum-ma ki g̃ ìri ku 5 -da-ba eden-ba
hu-mu-un-si-si-ig, “I silence the clamor (of battle) in ambush at the place where
the road is blocked off, in the wilderness” (translation uncertain).
7. Note the writing ṣi-rum for ṣi-ram.
8. The translation of the verb is based on the Akkadian (namārum). I do not under-
stand the relationship between this and the Sumerian equivalent túm-túm.
9. The scribe clearly had problems with Sumerian; he took apart gú-érim, “vile/
enemy,” and glossed the first element as kiššatum, “totality,” on the basis of gú =
kišādum, “neck,” thinking of gú = napḫārum.
10. I discussed this line in JAOS 95 (1975) 717. Kunšī-mātum, literally “Submit, O
Land,” was the name of the Ur ­princess who was married into the house of the north
Mesopotamian principality of Simanum. Eventually, this led to the ­intervention by
Šu-Sin’s forces, when the royal family of Simanum­was ousted from power. The his-
torical issues are debated in the­JAOS article; here the concern must be philologi-
cal. Kunši-matum is well attested in Ur III sources (see above, p. 159), and it is
unlikely­that a Sumerian equivalent to the name kur-gam-ma-bi would have been
used in a contemporary letter. In order to explain this ­peculiar situation, two pos-
sibilities might be entertained here. ­One envisages an OB scribe providing a learned
340 9. Aradmu to Šulgi 5

translation­of the Akkadian name back into Sumerian. It is likewise possible t­hat
the error was more complex. The original had kur gam-ma-bi,­“the land that had
submitted,” and when that was mistranslated ­as kunšī mātum, “bow down, O land,” it
reminded someone of the Akkadian name­Kunši-matum (attested as an elite priest-
ess name in OB Mari [J. M. Durand, LAPO 18 386–87]), and the Sumerian was then­
reinterpreted as a personal name. It is quite possible, in this scenario, that the OB
scribes had no idea that there actually was an Ur III­princess by that name.
Note that the scribe modified the name of the Bad-Igihursag̃a fortifications into
Harankalag-Igihursag̃a and then translated this literally into Akkadian.
11. Note that there is no personal name classifier in this line; the passage is broken
and therefore it is impossible to ascertain if the scribe was once again confused or
if he intended to refer to the man who is the subject of so many other Šulgi letters.
 10. Aradmu to Šulgi 6
(ArŠ6, 3.1.4, RCU 5)

Source
X1 = IM 13712 (Sumer 15 [1959] pl. 6; TIM 9 39)
Tablet: Type III.
Not collated. P. Steinkeller and J. Black both tried to check the original but the
tablet could not be located in Baghdad.
Bibliography: Edition: J. J. van Dijk, Sumer 15 (1959) 10–12.

Text Transliteration

Obverse
1. ⸢lugal⸣-g̃u10-ra ù-na-a-dug4
2. [(I)árad-m]u árad-zu ⸢na⸣-ab-bé-a
3. [lugal]-⸢g̃u10⸣ ma-da dag̃al-la ⸢nam-en-na⸣-aš mu-ra-an-šúm-ma-a
4. [g]ù-téš-a sì-ke ⸢dím-ma⸣-bi aša-⸢àm⸣
5. [u]n ú-gin7 lu-lu dšul-gi-ra sipa ⸢níg̃?-gi⸣-na-bi
6. [na]m-lú-ùlu sig ⸢igi-nim-ma⸣ dig̃ir-bi za-e-⸢me-en⸣
7. ⸢igi?⸣-bi ⸢ma-ra-ši-g̃ál⸣
8. [u]n dag̃al-la ú-gin7 lu-lu ⸢a⸣ mah ídidigna ídburanun-na-ta
9. [. . .]x ídidigna-⸢šè⸣ ⸢lugal⸣-g̃u10 sá ma-ab-du11-ga
10. [. . .]x ⸢íb⸣-zi-zi
11. […b]a?-⸢da⸣-an-g̃ar
12. [. . .]x-ak-en
13. [. . .]-⸢kal-la⸣-bi
14. [. . .]x x bí-si
Rest of obverse broken

Reverse
1′ [. . .]x
2′ [. . .]-⸢an-tuk⸣-a
341
342 10. Aradmu to Šulgi 6

3′ [. . .]x-me-en
4′ [. . . .]x x x
5′ [. . .] ⸢dumu? ma-da⸣ gu-⸢tu-ú⸣-umki
6′ [. . .]x ⸢ma/má?⸣-rí  ki ù ra-pí-qumki
7′ [x?] x tuk-tuku-ne igi-g̃á ì-g̃ál
8′ níg̃ lugal-g̃u10 ab-bé-na ga-ab-ak
1
Speak to my king, 2 saying (the words) of Aradmu, your servant:
3
Your Majesty, the far-flung territories that have been given to you to rule—4
they are obedient, and of one mind. 5–6 You are the rightful shepherd of Šulgi’s people,
numerous as blades of grass, 6the god of mortals/the population, of the lower and the
upper (lands), 7 they look to you (with reverence)! 8 The teeming peoples, numerous as
blades of grass, from the mighty waters of the Tigris and Euphrates,9 . . . of the Tigris,
that my lord has entrusted to me, . . .
5′
. . . citizens? of the land of Gutium, 6′ . . . Mari? and Rapiqum, 7′ who have . . . are
before me. 8′ Whatever you, my king, order me to do, I will do.

Commentary

3. The line is damaged; without the opportunity for collation, one can only specu-
late on the proper reading. J. J. van Dijk, Sumer 15 (1959) 10, transliterated it as:
[lugal]-mu ma-da-dagal-la nì na[m-r]a-aš mu-ra-an-sì-ma-a but this seems
improbable. One could also restoration the broken section as kadra or níg̃ -ba. In
defense of my reading, see Letter to Zimrilim 14: kur-kur dag̃ a[l nam-en-na-aš
mu-na-an]-šúm-uš = ma-ta-ti [r]a-ap-ša-ti a-na be-li-im id-di-nu-šu, “(and) have
given the far-flung lands to him to rule,” and ŠPu1: 4–5 (14): kur-kur ùg̃ dag̃ al-la
an-né den-lí l-le, nam-en-na-bi ma-an-šúm-mu-uš = mātāti nišī rapāšti Anu u
Enlil, ana bēli iddinūni (reconstructed).
5. Compare Letter of Sin-idinnam to Utu 25: érin-a-ni ú-gin 7 lu-lu-(a)/àm nu-
mun-a-ni dag̃ al-la, “their troops are as numerous as blades of grass, their offspring
far-flung.” The sign before gi-na may have been erased. The most probable reading
would be inim, but the remains are too short for this sign. Note that sipa níg̃ -gi-na
(if correctly read) is an epithet of Nur-Adad and Sin-iddinam.
The syntax of the line is problematical: I take it to be a complex anticipatory
genitive: ug̃ u.gin lu.lu šulgir.ak sipa nig̃ .gin.a.bi.
7. The interpretation of the verbal form igi-bi ma-ra-ši-g̃ ál is conjectural. An-
other possibility is to view this as a variant of igi . . . g̃ ar, “to present the matter,”
commonly found in Ur III protocols of legal proceedings and in the Ibbi-Sin corre-
spondence. See p. 400 below.
9. The final verb is not clear. One could read silim-ma ab-du11-ga, “after having
hailed . . .”
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 343

5′–6′. Two of these three place and “ethnic” names, Mari and Gutium, are known
from Ur III texts; the first requires no comment:
a. Gutium. This geographical/ethnic name is almost always written gu-ti-um(ki)
from Sargonic through Old Babylonian times. In the time frame of interest to us,
it is known from the Utuhegal Inscription, the Curse of Agade (155), as well as from
various royal hymns of Ur III kings (Ur-Namma Hymn C: 90, Šulgi Hymn B: 267,
Šulgi Hymn D: 230, 346), from the Lamentation over the Destruction of Sumer and Ur,
and from the Sumerian King List, always written gu-ti-um(ki) (the Ur III version of
the King List has um-ma-númki [P. Steinkeller, FS Wilcke 280]). All of these are, of
course, known only from Old Babylonian versions and may not reflect Ur III writing
conventions. It is not attested in any Ur III document but occurs in Arad-Nanna’s
dedication to Šu-Sin, where it is written ma-da gu-te-bu-umki (D. Frayne, RIME
3/2 324: 18) and gu-du-ma-ka in an unpublished Ur III clay cylinder with a copy
of the Laws of Ur-Namma (courtesy of M. Civil). An Ur III? tablet copy of a monu-
mental inscription of Ur-Namma preserves dumu gu-tim-um-ma and ma-da gu-
tim-umki (D. Frayne, RIME 3/2: 67: iii′ 4′ and iv′ 4′).
b. Rapiqum, whose precise location has not been determined, is not attested before
Old Babylonian times. It is generally agreed that it was situated on the Euphrates,
either close to Ramadi or to Fallugah (Charpin 1999: 95). Rapiqum was strategi-
cally important in OB times, but there is not a single reference to a place by that
name in Ur III or earlier documents; this suggests that we are dealing here with an
anachronism.
Edzard and Farber, RGTC 3: 157, followed by D. Charpin, FS Renger 102 n. 27,
proposed that the Ur III place name ra-NE  ki is to be read ra-bí/pi5-qí. This is highly
improbable for philological as well as geographical reasons. I know of no other Ur III
example in which final /ki/ could be read in such a fashion in a place name, and the
few occurrences of ra-NEki do not favor a Euphratean setting but instead point to a
trans-Tigridian location. The GN occurs only three times, and in two of the three it
is associated with other localities that lay beyond the Tigris. Thus, in BIN 3 139:3
(AS 7.8.13) and in PDT 2 959 the érin ra-NEki are listed together with those from
places such as Išum, Arman, Tiran, Hamazi, and Karhar, all of which lay in the east.
The third occurrence of this toponym, OIP 122 72, only tells us that there was a man
by the name of za-an-nu-um who was a lú ra-NE ki.
 11. Ur-dun to Šulgi 1
(UdŠ1, 3.1.11.1, 14)

Source(s)
X1 = YBC 5011 = 1–20
Tablet: Type III.
Bibliography: Translation: H. Neumann, TUAT nf 3 (2006) 17–19.

Text Transliteration
1. lugal-g̃u10-ra ù-na-a-⸢dug4⸣
2. ur-dun dam-gàr árad-zu na-ab-bé-a
3. kù lugal-g̃u10 mu-e-ne-šúm-ma
4. kur sù-rá-šè šim g̃išeren-na
5. sa10-sa10-dè mu-e-ši-gi-na
6. u4 kur-šè ⟨BI⟩ ku4-re-na-g̃u10
7. šim g̃išeren-na bí-sa10-sa10-g̃u10
8. I
a-pi-la-ša gal-zu-unken-na ma-an-gi-ma
9. šám-g̃u10 mu-da-an-kar-re-eš
10. ká é-gal-la-ni ù-um-gub
11. lú na-me ka-g̃u10 èn nu-bi-tar
12. I
arad-mu arad-zu ù ba4-ba4-ti pisag̃-dub-⸢ba⸣
13. zi-mu-darki-ra-ta si-mu-ur4-⸢ru⸣-umki-šè
14. ì1-re-eš-ma
15. [(x) i]n-ne-zu-⸢ma⸣
16. [lú-kí]g̃-gi4-a-ne-ne in-⸢ši?⸣-g[i(4)? . . .]
17. [(x)]x lugal-g̃á ba-e-ni-x[. . .]
18. ⸢usu9⸣ nu-tuku á-dar-re-bi nu-mu-⸢da-g̃ar?⸣
19. du11-ga lugal mu-ra-an-šúm
20. níg̃ lugal-g̃u10 ab-bé-na-g̃u10

Colophon F

1. Followed by an erasure.

344
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 345
1
Speak to my king, 2 saying (the words) of Ur-dun, commercial agent, your
servant:
3
My king gave me capital 4–5 and dispatched me to a distant highlands to pur-
chase juniper resin. 6 But once I had entered the highlands 7 and purchased the resin,
8
the prefect Apilaša dispatched (his people) to me, and 9 they appropriated my pur-
chases. 10 When I stood at the gate of his (local) palace, 11 no one wanted to investi-
gate my complaint.
12
And as for Aradmu, your servant, and Babati, the high commissioner, 14 they
had gone 13from Zimudar to Simurum, 15 and to inform them. . . , 16[they have sent]
their messengers. 17 My king. . . . 18 This confiscation cannot be undone without us-
ing force. 19 O king, (my messenger) has given you my accounting (of the matter). 20
Whatever you, my king, order me to do, (I will do).

Commentary
̃ )
This text contains syllabic writings: gi for gi4 (5, 8), bi for bí (11), ba4 (PISAG
for ba (12) and was clearly written or even composed by someone whose grasp of
Sumerian grammar and writing was idiosyncratic, to say the least. The addressee is
not mentioned by name, but one can safely assume that it was construed as a Šulgi
letter. Only letters from his reign mention Aradmu and Apilaša. Indeed, as cleverly
explained by F. Huber (ZA 91 [2001]: 181), the writer of this text used ŠAr1 (1) as
a model for the beginning of this letter. The addition of Babati and of the city of
Simurum, both taken from the Šu-Sin correspondence, is but one more indication of
the spurious nature of this letter.
2. The conventional reading of the name of the sender is uncertain. J. Bauer, BiOr
50 170 and JAOS 115 (1995) 295 prefers Ur-šul and suggests that this is an abbrevia-
tion for a theophoric name such as ur-dšul-pa-è or ur- dšul-šà-ga-na but without
any justification. The name is well attested in Pre-Sargonic Girsu (there is even a
dam-gàr, BIN 8 175: 2–3) and in Ur III. Two Drehem texts provide the explicit
writing ur-dun-na (Trouvaille 24: 7, RA 9 [1912] 55 SA 224); an Umma tablet has
ur-ddun (YOS 4 237: iv 96). The abbreviation appears unlikely, because both Ur-dun
and Ur-Šulpae are common Ur III names and I know of no instance where both mark
the same individual (the name Ur-Šulšagana does not occur during this period).
3. I have understood the final -ma in this line as the Akkadian conjunction, as is
the case in line 8 below. The verb has a third-person plural dative prefix; this can
only be analyzed as an anticipation of the names of Aradmu and Babati in line 12 but
is probably simply wrong, as is the verbal form in line 5. The author had problems
with Sumerian prefixes and confused first and second singular as well as third-person
plural forms.
4. The traditional translation “cedar” for eren is imprecise. It is clear that ancient
plant names did not correspond precisely to modern ones from a taxonomic point of
346 11. Ur-dun to Šulgi 1

view. This label was used in Sumerian for a range of conifers, aromatic woods that
produced sap, perhaps including “cedar,” which the Mesopotamians obtained from
the west, as well as pine and, more precisely, juniper. There is no pollen evidence
that cedars ever grew in western Iran. Juniper ( Juniperus excelsa), however, covered
much of the Zargos in early times. 2 There is evidence, both literary and archival, that
in the third and second millennia, parts of the eastern mountain areas were thought
of as kur g̃išeren-na (P. Michalowski, JCS 30 [1978]: 118), a term that is referenced
obliquely here but is present in another OB literary letter: Letter of Iddatum to Sumu-
tara 3–4: lú-kíg̃ -gi4-a kur g̃ išeren-na zag x[. . .], igi-g̃ u10-šè gú mu-un-g̃ ar-re-
eš-ma, “envoy(s) from the Juniper Mountains . . . have gathered before me.” For a
discussion of the various problems involved, see J. Klein and K. Abraham, 44th RAI:
65–66; the Semitic etymology of eren and the translation “juniper” will be discussed
in detail by Leonid Kogan in a forthcoming study.
5. The writing gi must stand for gi 4, “to send, dispatch,” with the prefix -ši-. The
final vowel a must stand for the copula -àm, hence mu.e.ši.gi.en.am, literally “I
sent to you;” hardly a correct form given the context.
6. In view of the grammatical knowledge and writing habits of this scribe, it is dif-
ficult to second-guess his or her intentions. It seems that after kur-šè the scribe
began to write ŠIM, in dittography from the line above and/or in anticipation of the
following line, thought better of it, and just moved on.
8. The translation is based on the assumption that the verb gi is a syllabic writing of
gi4, as in line 5. One would, however, expect the prefix -ši-.
9. This is a crucial line in the text, because it spells out the actual wrong com-
mitted by Apilaša. The verb is kar (with -da-), in the meaning of ekēmu, “to take
away (by force),” in the third-person plural. The object is šám-mu, which requires
explication. At first glance, one is tempted to understand this as níg̃ -šám, “price”
(P. Steinkeller, Sale Documents 161). This makes little sense; it may be preferable to
view this as a form of níg̃ -šám-ma, “purchases” (note níg̃ -šám-ma, SEpM 15: 14
but here meaning “price”); see now C. Wilcke, Early Ancient Near Eastern Law, 78.
10–11. This is clearly derived from ArŠ1: 9–10 (1) ká é-gal-la-šè gub-a-gu10-ne
silim-ma lugal-g̃ á-ke4 èn li-bí-in-tar. The verbal form nu-bi-tar is incorrect.
The reading ka is based on the assumption that the predicate is a calque from Ak-
kadian pû+PRO šaʾalu; see the examples in CAD Š/1 277.
12. Note the almost automatic arad-zu after Aradmu’s name; note also arad, as op-
posed to árad in line 2. The scribe mindlessly inserted this from his studies of letters
from the prime minister to the king. Note the writing ba 4 -ba 4 -ti for ba-ba-ti; the
value ba 4 of PISAG ̃ is usually used only in the writing of the name of the Kish deity

2. This is a complex issue that requires a longer study; see, conveniently, Naomi F. Miller,
Journal of Ethnobiology 5 (1985): 1–19.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 347
d
za-ba4-ba4; the only other example of such a writing in this personal name comes
from the OB copy of his seal inscription published by C. Walker, JCS 35 (1983) 91:7.
The figure of Babati, with his title, is taken from ŠuŠa1: 35 (letter 19).
15. H. Neumann, TUAT n.f. 3, 19 n. 91 writes: “Die Zeichenspuren am Anfang der
Zeile (kollationiert) legen einen Kohortativ nahe: [g]i4-in-ne-zu-m[a].” I do not see
the remains of gi4 at the beginning of the line. I also doubt that the OB scribe who
concocted this letter would have known about the Ur III usage of gi4- to express the
cohortative mode.
18. The restorations in this line are uncertain. The translation is based on á . . . dar,
“to cheat, confiscate,” for which see A. Falkenstein, NSGU II 110, R. de Maaijer and
B. Jagersma, AfO 44/5 (1997–98) 285 and F. Karahashi, Sumerian Compund Verbs,
75; PSD A/II 50 renders the line “not having . . . their illegal seizure (confiscation)
(of the purchased cedar resin) cannot be. . . .”
19. I take the third-person singular agent of the verb to be the messenger who is car-
rying the tablet (“epistolary perfect”).
 12. Aradmu? to Šulgi? 7
(ArŠ7)

Source
Ur1 = UET 6/3 561 (*187) obv.; rev. 1’–19’ =1–20
Tablet: Type III.

Text Transliteration
1. [lugal-g̃u10-ra ù-na-(a)-dug4]
2. [(I)árad-mu árad-zu na-ab-bé-a]
3. [. . .]
4. [. . .]
5. [x] (blank space) è-[x] x x
6. [x x x] x gi gíd? u4-da-gin7 ur5? an gal-ta ⸢an⸣-pa-šè e11-[(x)]
7. [x x] árad é lugal-g̃u10 ba-UD-da x-lu
8. [mu ur-d]un dam-gàr-ra-ke4-eš ⸢níg̃ lugal⸣-⸢ g̃u10⸣ ma-an-gi4
9. [ur-d]un árad-zu-gin7 á-ág̃-g̃á ⸢ì?-ág̃⸣-g̃á lugal-g̃u10 ì-zu
10. [x x]x ur-dun nu-du10-ga-ni-ta mu1-ta-ni-tehi
11. [x] x-g̃á-ni lul sì-sì-ke bí-⸢in⸣-šúm
12. [lugal-g̃]u10 bar-g̃á èn hé-⸢bí⸣-in-tar níg̃-šà-⸢ga⸣-na ha-ma-an-ak?
13. [(x) x]x-g̃u10 a-gin7 me-er-⸢ga⸣ gi4-bi nu-⸢du10-ga-bi?⸣ mu-ra-an-dug4 lugal-g̃u10
ì-⸢zu⸣
14. [x x z]i-ta ur-dun dam-gàr-ra ⸢ur5⸣-gin7 ka bal-bal-e
15. [x x]x⸢ki⸣-šè zag-bi-ta na4-⸢nir7-babbar2⸣-dili na4-duh-ši-a ⸢na4⸣-za-gìn-na na4-
⸢gug⸣ bar-bi sá-a
16. [x x]x na4-nir7!(⟨ZA⟩MIR) x ⸢na4-gug/nir7?⸣(-)zú-lum dili GAM.GAM NUN.
KÁR kù-zu x x-bi-a DUB.DUB-me-eš
17. [x x]x g̃ál-ta ⸢na4⸣ [x] ⸢na4⸣ eme5 gal kár-kár G ̃ IŠ? dili-àm x du -du -⸢ge
10 10
šu -x-àm
?⸣

1. There are additional wedges after mu; either the scribe had problems with the sign or
tried to write du 10.

348
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 349

18. [x x]x-la-g̃u10 ⸢kíg̃⸣-bi in-ne-lá

19. [x x]x-àm ⸢ur⸣-dun ⸢šu in-ne-zi-zi-dè⸣ [. . .]
20. traces

Rest of tablet broken

[1 Speak to my king: 2saying (the words of) Aradmu, your servant:]

[3–4 . . . 5 . . .] 6 . . . like the day/sun, coming out from the great above to the zenith,
7
. . . servant who . . . my master’s estate, . . .
8
Concerning the matter of the merchant Ur-dun, that my master dispatched me
about, 9 Ur-dun, as your servant, was given instructions; but you, my master, know
(this). 10 But Ur-dun approached . . . in deceit. 11 (and) his . . . were full of lies. 12
May my master inquire about my wellbeing, . . . 13 Why did my . . . speak deceitfully
to you not once but twice? But you, my master know (this). 14 By means of. . . , ad-
dressing the merchant Ur-dun in the following terms: 15 “To the city [of x], from its
border . . . pappardillu, chlorite, lapis, carnelian . . .” 16–20 (untranslatable)

Commentary
This letter is preserved only on a broken tablet from Ur. The obverse is almost
completely destroyed, and only a few fragmentary signs on the right edge have sur-
vived. There are traces of a double line three or four lines up from the bottom of the
obverse; this suggests that the letter begins at this point. The traces of the solitary
sign visible at the end of that line may be interpreted as ⸢zu⸣, and it is possible that
this is the remnant of the closing formula lugal-g̃ u10 hé-en-zu.
When two letters are paired on a tablet, one expects a letter to and from the same
individual, usually a king. The sender of the second letter cannot be Ur-dun, because
he is mentioned in the third person, and so the author is most probably Aradmu and
the recipient must be Šulgi. The clues are too sparse to establish if the top of the
obverse contained a similarly unique letter or, less probably, the missive from Ur-dun
to Šulgi (UdŠ1, 11). The only readable signs on the obverse of this tablet are in 3′,
which ends with [. . . -n]a?-g̃ u10. This could be associated with UrŠ1 6 (11): u4 kur-šè
⟨BI⟩ ku4-re-na-g̃ u10. This, however, would require 14 more lines of text, and the Ur
tablet only had 6 or 7 before the double line. If it indeed contained UrŠ1, then the
lines were longer; many of then containing the equivalent of two lines of the one
surviving Yale source for that composition, and some lines may have been omitted.
The lack of duplicates and, above all, the use of rare words suggests that this is an
Old Babylonian scribal concoction, most probably composed in Ur. The text is ex-
tremely difficult, but in view of the contents of the first three preserved lines, it was
possibly a poetic letter of petition rather than a prose literary letter, and therefore the
beginning may have to be restored appropriately. Note the use of vocabulary derived
from the lexical and school epistolary traditions. Needless to say, the translation is a
350 12. Aradmu  ? to Šulgi  ? 7

mere approximation. The tablet was studied in person and on photographs but I also
benefitted from collations kindly done by Steve Tinney.
10. The restoration of the beginning of the line is most uncertain but much depends
on this, because it is not clear from the text, as it presently stands, if Ur-dun is the
villain or the victim.
The adjective nu-du10-ga is most likely a calque from Akkadian la ṭābum,
“wicked, deceitful,” that is normally used of words or utterances; see CAD Ṭ 26–27.
11. The rare lul . . . sì means “to deceive;” see M. Civil, FS Lambert, 109. It is at-
tested in lexical texts and in two Gilgamesh passages (Gilgamesh and Huwawa A
152B and UET 6 58: 20 [Gilgameš, Enkidu, and the Netherworld, Ur Version]). Note,
moreover, Letter of Inim-Inina to Lugal-ibila (SEpM 22) 7–11: na-an-ga-ma lú na-
me lul i-ri-ib-sì-ke, ugu ad-da-na-šè ga-àm-gin a-ra-ab-bé, en-na g̃ iškim
g̃ á-e ù za-e inim ì-bal-en-da-na, lú-(ù) mu-e-ši-in-gi4-gi4-(a), lú-tur šu
nam-bí-bar-re-en, “From now on (be on guard) for anyone for would try to deceive
you and say “I have to go (home)” on the authority of his father! Until you and I
have exchanged passwords and I have sent you (my) representative, you must not let
the youngster out!”
12. For the first half of the line in letters, see Letter of Ursaga to a King (SEpM 6) 10
lugal-g̃ u10 bar-g̃ á èn (li)-bí-in-tar dumu uri5ki-ma-me-en and also MDP 27
104: 1–2 dig̃ ir-g̃ u10 lú kúr-zu nu-me-en ba-ar mi-en-tar-re.
The only other occurrence of níg̃ -šà-ga+PRO . . . ak is in Išme-Dagan Hymn
A+V 97 á-tuku níg̃ -šà-ga-na nu-ak lú lú-šè nu-DI, “so that strong men not do
simply as they please, that one man does not . . . another man.”
13. The word me-er-ga, “one,” is otherwise quite rare and occurs only in texts that
lie outside the Nippurean Old Babylonian school tradition—the three OB references
are from Ur—with one exception in lexical compositions. The only poetic usage
known to me is Rim-Sin Hymn B 35 (to Haya): nam-ereš dig̃ ir-re-e-ne-ke4 me-
er-ga-bi al-ak-e dig̃ ir sag-du nu-tuku, “(Nidaba) uniquely performs the duties
as queen of the gods, and has no divine rival.” Like the present letter, this hymn is
only attested at Ur (it may actually be in honor of Rim-Sin II); see the sequence
mi-ir-ga = iš-te-en, [g]i4-bi = ⸢ša⸣-nu-ú-um in the OB lexical text/commentary from
Ur, UET 7 93:3–4, discussed by Å. Sjöberg, ZA 86 (1996) 220–37 and the Late
Babylonian grammatical text CTMMA 2 246: 33, me-er-ga = iš-te-en (= NBGT IV
33 [MSL 4 164]). See now T. Balke, JCS 62 (2010) 46–7.
14. In UdŠ1 (letter 11), Ur-dun writes about his purchase of juniper resin, but the
only commodities in this letter are precious stones. In the Letter of Šamaš-ṭab to Ilak-
niʾid (SEpM 17): 15 the writer asks the recipient to keep in mind his desire for na4-
duh-ši-a, na4-igi, and na4-nír-gig/na4-nír-muš-g̃ ír/na4-nír-muš-sù-ud. The
na4-nír-babbar(2)-dili stone is otherwise attested in lexical texts (see PSD B 31 and
CAD P 107 sub pappardilû) and is occasionally listed in archival documents (UET 34
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 351

548 2, 3, 10; UET 3 1498 ii 25; HUCA 34 (1963) 14 138 [OB]). The identification
of na4-duh-ši-a as “chlorite” has been proposed by P. Steinkeller, JMS 1 (2006) 2–7.
16. See, perhaps, AAICAB 1/1 Ashm. 1911-240 obv. ii 4:2 na4-nir7-zú-lum ka-ba
kù-sig17 gar, or nir7 zú-lum, and gug zú-lum in YOS 4 267: ii 23, 26 (Ur III). In the
lexical texts, there is only na4-zú-lum = aban suluppi, Hh XXIV 255 (MSL 11 85),
Nabnitu XXI 166 (MSL 16 1961), NB Stone List ii 8 (MSL 10 65).
17. The rare eme5(SAL.HÚB)-gal must be a kind of stone or a qualifier; see 4 gug
zú-lum eme5-gal (YOS 4 267: ii 26–27) and 17 še kù-babbar dalla eme5-gal-šè
(SANTAG 6 336: 3), both Ur III. Perhaps this is an abbreviated writing of algames
(UD.SAL.HÚB), sometimes translated as “steatite”. It is impossible to ascertain if
there was an UD sign before SAL in this line.
18–19. Note the change to third-person-plural dative in the verbs. In line 19, the
verb is uncertain but it is šu . . . zi, “to be angry, cheat, plunder” (F. Karahashi, Su-
merian Compound Verbs, 173).
 13. Puzur-Šulgi to Šulgi 1
(PuŠ1, 3.1.7, RCU 11)

Composite Text
1. lugal-g̃u10-ra ù-na-a-dug 4
2. I
puzur4-dšul-gi šakkana bàd-igi-hur-sag̃-g̃á
3. árad-zu na-ab-bé-a
4. lugal-g̃u10 kù-sig17 na4za-gìn dig̃ir-re-e-ne-ka in-ne-en-dím-dím-ma
5. zi-ni-šè-àm in-nu-ù
6. lugal-g̃u10 zi ugnim ù kalam-ma-ni-šè
7. bàd gal igi-hur-sag̃-g̃á mu lú kúr hul-g̃ál-šè
8. ùg̃ kalam-ma-ni-šè mu-un-dù
9. ugnim lú-kúr-ra im-ma-zi
10. diš-àm lú igi-g̃á záh-bi i-im-túm-ma
11. dib-dib-bé inim ma-an-dug4-ma igi-šè ba-gin
12. g̃iškim lú kúr-ra g̃á-e ì-zu
13. lú kúr im-ma-til usu-g̃u10 ì-tur
14. bàd nu-mu-un-da-kal-la-ge en-nu-ùg̃ nu-mu-da-ak-e
15. nam Ipuzur4-dnu-muš-da énsi ul4-lum-TUR.RAki
16. ninnu nindan uš sag̃ ba-ab-gíd murub4-ba im-ma-an-ri
17. nam Ilugal-me-lám šabra ídšeg5-šeg5
18. iá nindan uš-ni ha-ni-dar-dar
19. nam Ika-kù-ga-ni énsi ma-da murub4ki
20. 35 nindan uš gaba dúr-bi ba-gul-gul
21 nam Ita-ki-il-ì-lí-šu kù-g̃ál ídáb-gal ù ídme-den-líl-lá
22. nimin nindan uš-ni gúr ugu-bi-šè nu-ub-g̃ar
23. u4 lú kúr im-ku-nu-a ugu-bi-šè ù-nu-ub-zu
24. lú kúr mè-šè usu-ni im-til
25. ugnim-bi šà hur-sag̃-g̃á-ka íb-tuš
26. tukum-bi lugal-g̃á an-na-kam
27. 7200 érin lú-kíg̃-ak-ne ha-ma-ab-íl-e ul4-la-bi hu-mu-ši-gi4-gi4
28. 70 àga-ús lú su-da-lu-nu-tumki-a
29. ugu-g̃u10-šè hé-em-su8-bé-eš

352
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 353

30. dím-ma-g̃u10 hé-dab5 ki-tuš-bi ga-ba-da-an-kúr

31. hé-zu g̃i6-ta u4 ul-lí-a-šè nam-tag-ni dugud
32. árad dšul-gi lugal gi-na-me-en1
33. nam-mu-da-til-en
34. lugal-g̃u10 hé-en-zu2
1
Speak to my king, 2 saying (the words) of Puzur-Šulgi,3 general of Bad-Igihursag̃a,
your servant:
4–5
Is it not for the sake of his own well-being that my king fashions (objects)
of silver and gold for the gods? 6 My king, for the well-being of the army and of his
homeland, 7–8 has built the great fortifications of Igihursag̃a for the sake of the vile
enemy and of the people of his homeland.
9
But now the enemy army has mustered (for battle). 10 A certain individual who
was brought before me as a deserter 11 gave me some information as he was pass-
ing (through) and then went back out (again). 12 Now I really know the enemy’s
passwords!
13
The enemy has concentrated (all his forces) for battle but my forces are insuf-
ficient (to keep them off). 14 It is impossible to strengthen the fortifications against
him, nor (properly) guard it. 15 In the sector under the responsibility of Puzur-
Numušda,4 governor of Ullum-ṣeḫrum, 16 a 300 m. section had sagged and collapsed
in the middle; 17 in the sector under the responsibility of Lugal-melam, the overseer
of the Šeššektum canal, 18 30 m. of his section can be breached; 19 in the sector under
the responsibility of Kakugani,5 governor of the inland territory, 20 a 210 m. section,
its face and base are badly damaged, 21 (and) in the part under the responsibility of
Takil-ilišu, canal inspector of the Abgal and Me-Enlila waterways, 22 240 m. of his
section does not have its perimeter laid out yet. 23 Although I cannot know ahead of time
when the enemy will advance against (the fortifications), 24 (it is evident) that the
enemy has concentrated (all) his forces for battle, 25 and his troops are encamped in
the mountain valleys.
26
If my king is agreeable, 27 he will raise for me a very large contingent (viz.,
7200) of workers and send them here immediately. 28–29 Seventy Sudalunutum troop-
ers should also come here to me. 30 I am resolved, and so I shall dislodge them (i.e.,
the enemy), 31 so let this be known, for his (the enemy’s) sins have been grievous
from (primeval) night to the end of days! 32 (Be assured), I am the true servant of
my lord Šulgi,6 33 and I will definitely finish (this work)! 34 Now my king is informed
(about all of this)!7

1. 32a (N4 only): [ù-na]-a-dug 4 -g̃ u10 ⸢níg̃ -gú-šub⸣-bu-bi in-nu-ù.

2. 34a (N4 only): ⸢a⸣-ma-ru-k[am].
3. Var.: Puzur-Numušda, Puzur-Marduk.
4. Var.: Šu-Marduk, Šu-Nunu, Šu-Numušda.
5. Var.: Šu-Numušda.
6. One text adds: 32a My letter, it will not be neglected, will it?
7. One text adds: 34a It is urgent!
354 13. Puzur-Šulgi to Šulgi 1

Commentary
The redactional difficulties of this composition provide a particularly stark ex-
ample of the difficulties of creating a “composite text” of a composition that has a
very fluid textual tradition in witnesses found in different places. Textual variants
cluster in a manner that reveals consistent differences between the Nippur sources
and those from elsewhere, and the solitary Kish witness sometimes goes its own
way. The reconstruction is hampered by the fragmentary state of the Nippur tablets,
which provide good evidence for the beginning and end but do not document well
the middle part of the letter.
Of the four Nippur manuscripts, all of which come from the 19th-century exca-
vations of the site and have no precise provenience, two are one-column tablets (N1
and N4) and two are on collective ones (N2 and N3). Because of the fragmentary
state of these sources, it is impossible to establish if they all had a similar “redaction”
or if the differences from the other manuscripts are limited to one or two of these
tablets. I should stress that one should not think of this as a generic Nippur version,
because it may simply represent the idiosyncrasies of one or two teachers or their stu-
dents. It is unlikely, however, that more-complete sources from the city will surface
in the foreseeable future.
The variants in the opening section are such that rather than indicate differ-
ences in every line, I offer a separate Nippur composite text of the passage:
1. lugal-g̃u10-ra ù-na-a-dug4 N1, N4
2. I
puzur4-dnu-muš-da šakkana bàd-igi-hur-sag̃-g̃á N1, N4
3. árad-zu na-ab-bé-a N1, N4
4. lugal-g̃u10 kù-sig17 na4za-gìn dig̃ir-re-e-ne-ka in-ne-en-dím-dím-ma N1, N4
5. zi-ni-šè-àm in-nu-ù N1
6. lugal-g̃u10 silim-ma ugnim ù kalam-ma-na-šè N1
7. bàd gal igi-hur-sag̃-g̃á mu lú hul-g̃ál-šè N1
8. mu-un-dù N1
9. ugnim lú kúr-ra im-ma-an-zi N1

Speak to my king: 2–3 saying (the words) of Puzur-Šulgi, general of Bad-Igihursag̃a,

1

your servant:
4–5
Is it not for the sake of his own well-being that my king fashions (objects) of
precious metals and jewels for the gods? 6 My king, for the safety of the troops and his
homeland 7–8 has built the great fortifications of Igihursag̃a against the vile (enemy).
9
But now the enemy troops have mustered (for battle).

4. This line is different in all manuscripts.

10–11. The difficulties in these lines were apparently already felt in antiquity, as
shown by the ambiguities inherent in the line division. N1 had both of them on
one line, but N2 apparently divided it in the manner adopted here; this was also the
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 355

interpretation of the scribes who wrote X2 and X4. The student from Kish (Ki1) had
dab5-dab5-bé as part of line 10.
12. giškim is used here as a technical term referring to secret signals or passwords;
on such nuances of the word, see M. Civil, FS Lambert 109.
13. One would expect that usu til would mean that the enemy forces have been
weakened, but as in Nippur Lament 226, the context requires a different interpreta-
tion. Here, as elsewhere in this letter, idiomatic usage reflects Akkadian usage, in
this case, emūqam gamārum, “to concentrate military forces”; see S. Tinney, Nippur
Lament, 170. There is some textual confusion with line 24; the reconstruction of the
latter remains problematical.
15. On the noun nam, see commentary to ŠAr1: 29 (2).
15–22. There is a good deal of variation in the order of these lines and in the per-
sonal names of the officials that are mentioned (on the names and the variants in
lines 15 and 19, see pp. 138–142 above). In view of this, the somewhat arbitrary
order accepted here reflects source X4/5, the only one that preserves the whole se-
quence. X2 begins without an official, at line 18. The distribution and order in each
manuscript can be reconstructed as follows:

N2 N3 Ki1 X1 X2 X4/5
* o 15 19 18 15
16 o 18 16 19 16
15 o 17 17 20 17
18 o 22 18 o 18
17 o 19 21 o 19
22 o 20 22 o 20
19 o 21 15 o 21
20 21 16 20 o 22

16. The compound verb or, perhaps better, idiom sag̃(. . .)gíd, is otherwise attested,
to my knowledge, only in the Uruk Lament 1a 3: [. . .]-ni sag̃ a-na-aš ba-ab-⸢gíd⸣
[ùg̃ sag̃ g̃ i 6 -ga] a-ba-a in-lu-lu-un, which M. Green ( JAOS 104 [1984: 266)
read gíd as su13 and translated the line “Why was . . . expanded? Who was it who
made [the black-headed people] become so numerous (anyway)? ” with reference to
the outline in her commentary (p. 278), rendering it as: “he expanded (the wall) 50
G̃ AR.UŠ but let it collapse in the middle.” It is doubtful if this verb has anything to
do with sag̃ . . . gíd = nekelmûm, “to be angry,” for which see F. Karahashi, Sumerian
Compound Verbs, 137.
21–. After line 21, the two Nippur tablets have a line order that is different from all
the other texts from Kish and elsewhere and possibly even from N1. They both seem
to repeat line 14; note that X1 omits lines 24–25. Ideally, the Nippur order should
have been used for the reconstruction of the composite texts, but the state of the
manuscripts makes this impossible at present.
356 13. Puzur-Šulgi to Šulgi 1

N2:
[u4 lú kú]r im-ma-ku-nu [igi-bi]-⸢šè⸣ ù-nu-ub-zu = 23
[nam Ita-ki-i]l-ì-lí-šu / [kù-g̃ál ídabgal] ⸢ù⸣ ídme-den-líl = 21
[? ] ⸢usu⸣-g̃u10 i-im-til = 24
[bàd nu-mu-un-da-kal]-la-ge / [en-nu-(ùg̃) nu-mu]-⸢da-ak⸣-e = 14
[ugnim-bi šà hur-sag̃]-⸢g̃á?⸣ íb-tuš = 25
[. . . .]x mu-da-ti = 33?
[. . .]-gi4-gi4 = 29?
[. . .]-x-⸢dugud?⸣ = 31?
[. . .]-⸢me?-en?⸣ = 32?
[. . .]-x
rest of column broken
N3 i′ 1′–7′:
⸢u4?⸣ [lú kúr im-ma-ku-nu igi-bi-šè ù-nu-ub-zu] = 23
nam ⸢Ita⸣-[ki-il-ì-lí-su] / kù-g̃ál ⸢íd⸣[abgal ù ídme-den-líl-lá] = 21
lú kúr m[è-šè usu-ni/g̃u10 im-til] = 24
ug[nim …]. =? (25?)
bà[d nu-mu-un-da-kal-la-ge] = 14
ug[nim-bi šà hur-sag̃-g̃á í b-tuš] = (25?)
rest of column broken

22. The interpretation of this line follows a suggestion by E. Robson.

24. The reconstruction of this line is highly uncertain; there is some confusion with
line 9.
26–29. These lines are clearly intrusive and were derived from the Šu-Sin corre-
spondence, specifically from ŠaŠu1: 17; 27–30 (18) and ŠuŠa1: 31–33 (19). The
result was somewhat untidy and resulted in some confusion among teachers or stu-
dents. The Nippur sources, which already differed in lines 21–25, are broken at this
point. The same process is evident in the answer to this letter, ŠPu1: 20–26 (14).
27. Every manuscript has a different version of this line. The X4 includes people
who are to “carry” the g̃išdupsik (see ŠaŠu1: 16; 30, letter 18). This can be taken
literally, implying that they are to carry the “corvée basket” or as an expression,
probably calqued from Akkadian, that stands for “carrying our corvée labor,” i.e., OB
ilqam našûm. It is usually assumed that corvée labor—that is, military and other work
for the state or for a large organization in exchange for land—is not attested before
the Old Babylonian period and that the Akkadian term ilkum has no equivalent in
Sumerian. It is now clear that corvée labor (dupsik, or “dusu”; on the reading see
now M. Civil, FS Biggs, 13) has an earlier history; for Ur III, see M. Sigrist, RA 73
(1979) 103; P. Michalowski, JNES 45 (1986) 327; C. Wilcke, Early Ancient Near
Eastern Law, 34 with earlier literature.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 357

The number 7,200 is not to be taken literally; it simply means “a very large con-
tingent.” See, for example, the Letter to the Generals (SEpM 11) 9–10: tukum-bi dutu
nu-um-ta-è, šár-šár érin ugu-ba nu-ub-gub, “if the sun does not come out, not
even a very large contingent of workers will prevail against it.” The number occurs
again, used in a similar manner, in ŠaŠu1: 29 (18): 7,200 érin mu-e-ši-in-gi4, and
in IšIb1: 8 (21) 72,000 še gur še dù-a-bi šà ì-si-inki-na-šè ba-an-ku4-re-en.
28. The place-name su-da-lu-nu-tumki (with variants) is otherwise unattested
and seems improbable; this is undoubtedly a garbled place-name that resulted from
a transmission error derived from the intrusive *lú-dnanna énsi zi-mu-dar  ki-ra. It
is also possible that at some point in the chain of transmission confusion arose under
the influence of the Ur III writing LÚ.SU for Šimaški.
30. I have taken dím-ma dab5 as a calque of the Akkadian ṭēmam ṣabātum, “to be
resolved, make up one’s mind.” The line has many variants. Note the third-person
markers in Ki1 and X4, where the idiom may have been misunderstood; translate
perhaps: “his (the enemy’s) mind was made up and he changed his location.”
31. The idiomatic nature of this line presented difficulties for ancient students, as
documented by the high level of variation in the manuscripts.
32a. Although this edition for the most part follows the Nippur text, it seems likely
that this unusual line is an interpolation. The restoration of the first signs, as well as
the translation, is somewhat speculative.
33. There are a number of possible interpretations of the verb in this line. Rather
than interpreting the na- prefix assertively,8 one could take it negatively (“I may
not be able to finish [the work]”) in concert with the parallel in Letter to the Gener-
als (SEpM 11) 12: á ma-tur nu-mu-un-da-til-en, “My work force is insufficient
and I cannot finish (the task)” (for other possible translations, see M. Civil, Farmers
Instructions, 183–84). Previous editions all take the root to be ug7; in this case, the
translations would be “may I not perish!” but this is improbable. Note the cluster-
ing of variants; the non-Nippurean texts are all agreement and the Kish manuscript
straddles both.
N1 has the unique fragmentary line 32a, which may perhaps have to be under-
stood as “and has not my (previous) letter been ignored? ”

Sources
N1 = HS 1438 (TMH NF 4 42) 1–14; 30–34
N2 = Ni. 9706 (ISET 2 112) r. iv′ 1′–23′ 10–23+
N3 = Ni. 9854 (ISET 1 189 [131]) ii′ 1′–5′ 21; 24–27+
N4 = N 3773 1–4; 29–34a

8. Steve Tinney suggests that this might be a calque of an Akkadian promissory oath in the
negative.
358 13. Puzur-Šulgi to Šulgi 1

Ki1 = AO 10819 (PRAK 2 D60) 1–34

X1 = A w/n iii 1′–20′ 13–34
X2 = BM 54894 rev. i 1′–11′ 4–14; 18; 15; 20
X3 = Ni. 3083 (ISET 2 115) i 1′–8′ 25–34
X4 = YBC 4606 19–34
X5 = YBC 4654 1–18
Tablet typology: compilation tablets (Type I): N2, N3, X1, X2, X3; all others type III.
N1 collated by C. Wilcke, Kollationen 73, by Steve Tinney, on print photographs pro-
vided by Manfred Krebernik, and on digital photographs provided by Jerrold Cooper.
X5 and X4 constitute a pair, probably written on successive days by the same scribe.
Ki1 has deteriorated since I first collated it.
Bibliography: Edition: C. Wilcke, WO 5, 3–6. Translation: P. Michalowski, Royal
Letters, 78.

Concordance of sigla used here (CKU) and in RCU:

N1 A A N1
N2 C B Ki1
N4 G C N2
Ki1 B E X5
X1 H F X4
X4 F G N4
X5 E H X1

Textual Matrixes
1. lugal-g̃u10-ra ù-na-a-dug4
N1 o o . ++ +.
N4 . . . +. o o
Ki1 + . o . + +.
X5 + + + . + +.
2. I
puzur4- dšul-gi šakkana bàd-igi-hur-sag̃-g̃á
N1 oo oo . + o . + + +
N4 ++ d
nu-m[ušda] . + + o o o9
Ki1 -. d
amar.utu . + + + . . ⸢ke4? ⸣
X5 -+ .. . . + + + + .
3. árad-zu na-ab-bé-a
N1 o o o . + +
N4 + + + . o o
Ki1 + + + . . +
X5 . . + + - +

9. N4: ⸢šakkana⸣ bàd-igi-[hur-sag̃-g̃á] /    I puzur 4 - d nu-mu[š-da].

 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 359

4. lugal-g̃u10 kù-babbar kù-sig17 dig̃ir-re-e-ne-ka in-ne-en-dím-dím-ma

N1 [ ] sig17 na4za-gìn dig̃ir-re-e-⸢ne⸣-ka [in]-⸢ne⸣-en-⸢dím⸣-dím-⸢ma⸣
N4 ⸢lugal⸣-g̃u10 ⸢kù-sig17⸣ [ ]
Ki1 lugal-g̃u10 kù-sig17 kù-babbar ⸢dig̃ir⸣ gal-gal in-ne-⸢dím-dím-ma⸣
X2 ⸢lugal-g̃u10⸣ kù-babbar kù-⸢sig17⸣ d[ig̃ir ]-dím-dím-ma:
X5 lugal-g̃u10 ⸢kù-babbar ⟨kù⟩-sig17⸣ dig̃ir-⸢re⸣-e-ne in-dím-d[ím ]
5. zi-ni-šè-àm in-nu-ù
N1 . o . + . + .
Ki1 ++ + + . . .
X2 +o o o o o o
X5 ++ + . + + .
6. lugal-g̃u10 zi ugnim ù kalam-ma-ni-šè
N1 . +silim-ma . . . + na + :
Ki1 . + + + + + + . .
X2 + + + . o o o o o
X5 + + . + + + + + +
7. bàd gal igi-hur-sag̃-g̃á mu lú kúr hul-g̃ál-šè
N1 + . . + + +/ . + + . . +:
Ki1 + + + . + + . . . . . -
X2 + + + + + + + . o o o o
X5 + + + . . . . . . + + - :
8. ùg̃ kalam-ma-ni-šè mu-un-dù
N1 - - - - - + + +
Ki1 + + . . . + + . ⸢a⸣
X2 Probably on same line as 7
X5 - + + + . . + +
9. ugnim lú kúr-ra im-ma-zi
N1 . + + + + + +
Ki1 . - - + . + zi
X2 + - - - + + o
X5 ì-ne-éš . - - - . +an+
10. diš-àm lú igi-g̃á záh-bi i-im-túm-ma
N1 . . + + + + + ++ + + :
N2 o o o o o o o oo . .
Ki1 . . . . . + + -+ . +:
X2 + + . + + + . oo o o
X5 xx10+ + . + . . ++ + +

10. Looks like ⸢diš zal⸣.

360 13. Puzur-Šulgi to Šulgi 1

11. dib-dib-bé inim ma-an-dug4-ma igi-šè ba-gin

N1 + + + + + + + + + - . +
N2 o o . . . . . . + . ⸢ba-an-gin⸣
Ki1 + + + /+ + + + o DU igi-⸢šè?⸣ ba-gin
X2 + + + + + + . o o o o o
X5 . . . . . + . . - - + +
12. g̃iškim lú kúr-ra g̃á-e ì-zu
N1 . + + + + a +.
N2 + + + + + + +.
Ki1 + + + . + + ++
X2 + + + + + . oo
X5 . . . + . . +.
13. lú kúr im-ma-til usu-g̃u10 ì-tur
N1 . . . . . + + +.
N2 + + + + . . . ++
Ki1 lú kúr mè-šè usu-ni im-til
X1 . . . o o o o oo
X2 Omits or on same line as 12.
X5 o o o o . . + al +
14. bàd nu-mu-un-da-kal-la-ge en-nu-ùg̃ nu-mu-da-ak-e
N1 o o o o o . . o o o o o o o o o
N2 . + + + . . . . + + - + + + + +
Ki1 + + + . + + + ⸢ke4⸣ en-nu-ùg̃-da g̃á-g̃á
X1 . + + . . + . o o o o o o o o o
X2 + + + + + + - . o o o + . o o o
X5 o o o o . + + + + + . x o o ⸢g̃á⸣-g̃á
N2 additional line (?)
15. nam I
puzur4-dnu-muš-da énsi ul4-lum-TUR.RAki
N2 . ++ ++ + + + + + + - +
Ki1 + +⸢šu⸣ dmarduk . + + + + +
X1 . +šu - nu-nu + + + + + +
X2 + -šu ++ + . o o o o o o
X5 o o oo . + + + + + . +
16. ninnu nindan uš sag̃ ba-ab-gíd murub4-ba im-ma-an-ri
N2 x . . + + + + + + + + + +
N3 omits or on same line as 21
Ki1 + + + + + - + + + + da - +
X1 + + + +bi + + + . . o o o o
X5 o . o o⸢ba⸣+ - + + + + da + +
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 361

17. nam I
lugal-me-lám šabra íd
šeg5-šeg5
N2 o .. + + + .. .
Ki1 + ++ . + + ì+ +
X1 + ++ + + + ++ . tum
X5 . ++ o . + ++ +
18. iá nindan uš-ni ha-ni-dar-dar
N2 + . + + . + + .
Ki1 + + + - + + + +
X1 + + + + + + + +
X2 + +àm + + ⸢hu?⸣ o o o
X5 + + a + hé + + +
19. nam ka-kù-ga-ni
I
énsi ma-da murub4ki
N2 o oo . . . + + + . .
Ki1 + +. . + + + + . . -
X1 . +šu-dnu-muš-⸢da⸣ . o o o o
X4 . ++ + + + + . + + +
20. 35 nindan uš gaba dúr-bi ba-gul-gul
N2 o o o . . + + + + lu
Ki1 . + ga-ba-⸢ab-gul-gul⸣
X1 + + + + + + + . +
X2 . . ⸢àm⸣ . x o o o o o
X4 . + a + + ba+ . + +
21. nam I
ta-ki-il-ì-lí-šu kù-g̃ál áb-gal
íd
ù me-den-líl-lá
íd

N2 o oo o . + + + o o oo o . ++ ++ + +
N3 + .. o o o o o + . .o o o oo oo o o
Ki1 + ++ + + + + +nu-ub + ++ + + ++ ++ + +
X1 . .+ + + + +iš su /énsi +abgal + ++ ++ . -
X4 . ++ +11 + + + sú +x12+ / +. + + ++ ++ . +
22. nimin nindan uš-ni gúr ugu-bi-šè nu-ub-g̃ar
N2 o o o x x . . . . . +
Ki1 + + + - + + + + + + +
X1 ùšu + + + + + ⸢ba⸣ + ù-nu-ub-zu
X4 25 . ⸢a⸣ + gul + + ba - + . +
23. u4 lú kúr im-ma-ku-nu-a ugu-bi-šè ù-nu-ub-zu
N2 o o . + + + + - o o . ++ ++
N3 #
Ki1 + + + + + + + + + + dúr nu-ub-g̃ar
X1 + + + + + + + + . ⸢ba⸣ + + + + +
X4 + + . . + + + + . ba . - . . .

11. Written di.

12. Erased g̃ ál.
362 13. Puzur-Šulgi to Šulgi 1

24. lú kúr mè-šè usu-ni im-til

N2 o o o o . g̃u10 i-im-til
N3 + + . o o o o o
Ki1 lú kúr ì-ku-na-a usu-ni im-til
X1 #
X4 + + + + ⸢á⸣ a+ + +
25. ugnim-bi šà hur-sag̃-g̃á-ka íb-tuš
N2 o o o o o . - + +
N3 . o o o o o o o o
Ki1 + + + + + + ke4 + +
X1 #
X3 o o o o o . . . .13
X4 + . + + + + + . o
26. tukum-bi lugal-g̃á an-na-kam
N2 ?

Ki1 . + + + + + ka
X1 . . + + + + .
X3 o o o o . + +
X4 + + . . + + +
27. 7200 érin lú-kíg̃-ak-ne ha-ma-ab-íl-e ul4-la-bi hu-mu-ši-gi4-gi4
N2 [ ]-gi4-gi4
Ki1 ⸢7200⸣ érin lú-⸢g̃iš⸣[dupsik?] ⸢íl?⸣ kíg̃-kíg̃-bi ⸢ul4⸣-[la-bi?] ⸢hé-em⸣-su8-ge-eš
X1 7200 érin lú-kíg̃-gi⸢-gi⸣ ul4-la-bi hu-mu-ši-gi4-gi4
X3 [ ul4]-⸢la⸣-bi hu-mu-ši-gi4-gi4
X4 ⸢7200⸣ érin lú-kíg̃-ak-⸢ne⸣ g̃išdubsik-a ha-ma-ab-íl-e / ⸢ul4⸣-la-bi
                           hu-mu-ši-[in]-gi4-gi4-⸢ma⸣
28. 70 àga-ús lú su-da-lu-nu-tumki-a
N2 traces
Ki1 . + + + su-dal-tumki-a
X1 + + + + su-da-x-⸢nu⸣-tumki-a
X3 o . . . ⸢su-da⸣-lu-nu-tumki-⸢e?⸣
X4 +àm + + . [ d]a-lu-nu-t[um...]:
29. ugu-g̃u10-šè hé-em-su8-bé-eš
N2 traces
N4 . . o o o o o o
Ki1 ⸢ul4-la⸣-bi ⸢hu⸣-mu-ši-in-gi4-gi4
X1 + + + ⸢hé-em-su8⸣-bé-eš
X3 . + + ⸢hé⸣-em-ta-⸢dab5⸣-bé-eš
X4 x o o ⸢hé⸣-en-su8-⸢bé⸣-[ ]

13. It is possible that X3, like X1, omitted this line and that the traces may have to be inter-
preted as the end of the previous line, because the traces are somewhat ambiguous; but without
recollation, this reading must stand.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 363

30. dím-ma-g̃u10 hé-dab5 ki-tuš-bi ga-ba-da-an-kúr

N1 o o o o . ⸢bé⸣ . . . ⸢ga⸣-ba-da-⸢an-kúr⸣
N4 + + . o o/ + + + ⸢ga⸣-[...]
Ki1 . + ni ⸢in⸣-dab5 + + + in-kúr
X1 + + + hé-⸢en-na⸣-dab5 + + + ga-ba-ni-ib-kúr
X3 . + + hé-dab5 + + + ga-ba-ni-kúr
X4 + + bi [hé-en?-na?]-dab5 + + + im-ma-⸢kúr⸣
31. hé-zu g̃i6-ta u4 ul-lí-a-šè nam-tag-ni dugud
N1 o o . . + + +++ + + + +
N4 + + + . o o o o o/ + + + o
Ki1 + + g̃i6 zu-àm u4-na-me na-da +
X1 + + + da + + ++- . o o o
X3 x x x ⸢da⸣ x + + ++- + + ⸢bi⸣ +
X4 + + + x o . + + aš + . - +
32. árad d
šul-gi lugal gi-na me-en
N1 o o. + + g̃á + + + +
N4 . ++ + + . o o o
Ki1 + ++ + . + + + +
X1 . -. + + + + o o
X3 o .. + + + + + +
X4 + +. . + + + + +:
32a. N1 [ù-na]-a-dug4-g̃u10 ⸢níg̃-gú-šub⸣-bu-bi in-nu-ù

33. nam-mu-da-til-en
N1 nam-mu-da-til-en
N4 nu-mu-da-til-[en]
Ki1 nam-ba-da-⸢til-àm?⸣ :
X1 ⸢nam-ba-til⸣-e-dè-en :
X3 ⸢nam⸣-ba-til-dè-en :
X4 nam-ba-til-e-dè-en
34. lugal-g̃u10 hé-en-zu
N1 + + + + +
N4 + + + . o
Ki1 . . . + +
X1 . o o o o
X3 + + + + +
X4 . . + + +
34a. N4: ⸢a⸣-ma-ru-k[am]
Colophon G (Ki1)
Colophon H (X5)
Colophon I (X4)

In X1 and X3 followed by ŠPu1 (14), in X2 by ŠuŠa1 (19).

 14. Šulgi to Puzur-Šulgi 1
(ŠPu1, 3.1.08, 3.1.10, RCU 9, 10)

This letter presents unique challenges for the editor. In the past, two different
redactions have been considered separate letters, but upon reflection, I have decided
to edit them together. The main reason for separating them was their sequence one
after the other on a single tablet (X1/X3), but this should not preclude us from con-
sidering them as different versions of the same composition.
The redactional history of the letter is undoubtedly complex, and we only have
glimpses of the long history of the permutations of the text. The four earlier sources
of unknown provenience can be grouped into two sets that have been edited sepa-
rately here. The letter that it answers, PuŠ1 (letter 13), is known from four Nippur
witnesses and one from Kish, in addition to four of undetermined origin, and it is
more than probable that ŠPu1 was concocted outside of Nippur to create a pair with
that epistle. One of these is X4, which may be MB; see the discussion of this tablet
on pp. 56–56 above. The bilingual Susa tablet (ŠPu1MB1 = Su1S/A) with syl-
labic Sumerian dates to the 14th or 15th century (see pp. 42–43 above) and
seems to be derived from the tradition of OB1a, with the additions of lines 9–19;
the first part of this section, lines 9–14, were lifted literally from ArŠ2 (part B, letter
3). The differences between the two OB traditions appear to be concentrated at the
beginning and end of the letters. Moreover, interpretation is often made difficult by
the idiosyncratic Sumerian orthography of ŠPu1MB1. The scribe of this tablet uses
unusual values, often indicates crasis, but also plays with different ways of writing
the same word. The Akkadian version shows definite signs of post-OB composition.

Šulgi to Puzur-Šulgi OB 1a (ŠPuOB1a, 3.1.08)

Sources
X1 = A w/n iii 1–12; 1′–10′ (–7′, 8′, 9′)
X2 = BM 108870 13–23; 1′–10′
Tablet typology: compilation tablet: X1, X2 Type III (landscape).

364
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 365

Transliteration 1
1. X1 I⸢puzur4-šul-gi⸣ šak[kana bàd igi-hur-sag̃-g̃á-ra] 1
2. X1 ù-⸢na-a⸣-[dug4] 1
3. X1 d⸢šul-gi lugal⸣-zu na-ab-⸢bé⸣-[a] 2
4. X1 ⸢u4 bàd igi⸣-hur-⸢sag̃⸣-g̃á mu-dù-⸢a⸣ 3
5. X1 kur-⸢kur⸣ ⸢ùg̃⸣ dag̃al-la an-né den-líl-⸢le⸣ 4
6. X1 nam-en-⸢na-bi ma-an-šúm-mu-uš⸣ 5
7. X1 g̃á-e x[. . .] x x x x [. . .]
8. X1 uru!? ka[lam?-ma? ma]-da? ma?-[da-bi] 6
9. X1 ⸢un kalam dag̃al-la⸣ [ú sal-la ì]-n[ú] 7
10. X1 ⸢ki níg̃ dag̃al-bi-a ki-tuš ne?-ha?⸣ [mu-un-tuš?] 8
11. X1 ⸢ki-tuš⸣ traces
12. X1 ⸢énsi? šabra⸣ l[ú?-bi hé-eb-túm] 2 23?
13. X2 uru-uru-bi ha-ra-⸢ab⸣-zi-zi-ne 23
14. X2 lú sag̃ kíg̃-bi hé-⸢en⸣-dab5 24
15. X2 ki bàd šub-ba ki-bi-šè ⸢hu⸣-mu-un-g̃ar 25
16. X2 hé-en-dag ù hé-⸢en⸣-dù 26
17. X2 ⸢šà⸣ iti diš-kam á šub-ba ⸢ha-ba⸣-til 27
18. X2 kíg̃-⸢bi⸣-šè èn mu-na-⸢tar⸣-re-⸢en⸣ 28
19. X2 ⸢a-da-lam⸣-ma tidnum(PIRIG ̃ .PIRIG
̃ )-e kur-bi-ta ⸢ma-ra⸣-an-⸢gur?⸣
20. X2 I⸢lú⸣-d⸢nanna⸣ énsi ma-da zi-mu-dar-⸢ra⸣ki-⸢ke4⸣ 29
21. X2 é[rin-na-n]i-ta im-mu-⸢e⸣-ši-⸢ri⸣ 30
22. X2 [ninda kaskal-l]a-ni-ta mu-ra-⸢g̃ál⸣ 31
23. X2 [níg̃-á-tak]a4 ba-ra-⸢na-g̃ál⸣ 32
23. X2 [u4?] ⸢bàd?-bi?⸣ x [. . .] x x [. . .] ⸢DU?⸣ 33?
1′. X1 traces
2′. X1 [. . .] hé-⸢bí-ib-gi4-gi4⸣
3′. X1 [. . .] al-til-la-aš
   X2 traces
4′. X1 [Ilú-dnanna én]si ⸢ma-da zi⸣-mu-⸢dar⸣-ra-ke› 35
X2 ⸢Ilú⸣-d⸢nanna⸣ [énsi ma-da] ⸢zi-mu⸣-dar-ra⸢ki⸣3
5′. X1 [érin-na-ni-ta] ⸢ù⸣-mu-un-šub-bu-un-zé-en 36
   X2 érin-na-ni-ta ù-mu-e-šub-bu-un-⸢zé⸣-en
6′. X1 [za-e Iárad-mu] nam-ma-ab-lá-e-zé-en 37
   X2 za-e Iárad-mu na-ma-ab-⸢bal-le-en⸣-zé-en
7′. X1 * 39
   X2 á-ág̃-g̃á kala-ga á-zu-ne-ne-a ⸢nam-ba-e-še-bé⸣-en-zé-⸢en⸣

1. The corresponding line numbers in the Middle Babylonian version (ŠPŠMB1) are indi-
cated in the right column.
2. This is the last line of col. iii; there are at least x lines broken at the beginning of col. iv.
3. Read perhaps [ki]-⸢ka⸣.
366 14. Šulgi to Puzur-Šulgi 1

8′. X1 * 38
   X2 g̃i6 an-bar7 kíg̃ ⸢hé⸣-en-dù
9′. X1 *
   X2 g̃i6 an-bar7 ù ⸢nu⸣-ku-ku-⸢un-zé⸣-en hé-zu-un-⸢zé⸣-en
10′. X1 [a-ma]-⸢ru⸣-kam 40
   X2 ⸢a⸣-ma-⸢ru⸣-kam
Colophon J (X2)
1–2
Speak to Puzur-Šulgi, general of Bad-Igihursag̃a, 3 saying (the words of) Šulgi,
your king:
4
When I had constructed Bad-Igihursag̃a, 5–6 An and Enlil gave me to rule all the
lands and far-flung peoples. 7 And as for me . . . 8 the cities of the homeland, province
by province, 9 as well as the peoples of the far-flung homeland rested in safe pastures.
10
[I made them dwell  ] in teeming places and peaceful habitations. 11 . . . dwelling(s) . . .
12–13
Have the governors and the overseers [bring their men] and mobilize all their
cities, 14 and have someone take charge of the beginning of the work; 15 wherever the
fortification has deteriorated, it must be restored, 16 torn down, and then rebuilt, 17
and (the repairs to) the fallen sides (of the wall) must be finished in the course of one
month! 18 You/I will then ask him ([Aradmu?] for a report) about this work.
19
And now the the Tidnumites have returned to (help) me from the highlands.
20
(Moreover), Lu-Nanna, governor of Zimudar province, 21 is coming to you with his
worker troops. 22 He will have his own [travel provision]s for you, 23 . . .
1′
. . . 2′ . . . dispatch . . . 3′ [When the work/fortifications] are finished,4′ then, after
Lu-Nanna, the governor of Zimudar 5′ has left both of you with his worker troops,
6′
you and Aradmu must not cease supervising/alter your assignment, 7′and you must
not neglect the important orders that are in your hands. 8′ The work must progress day
and night; 9′ neither of you is to sleep by night or day—you must both know about
this! 10′ It is urgent!
Commentary
The synchronization of the two OB sources is provisional at best; the reconstruc-
tion of lines 21–24 is particularly suspect, because the texts may have differed at this
point.
19. This line makes little sense here and is not present in any other version; it seems
to have been adopted from line 33 of a non-Nippur version of IbPu1 (24):
ì-ne-éš amurrum kur-bi-ta den-líl á-dah-g̃u10 im-ma-zi
N1 ++ + + + + + ++ + . + + + + +
N3 ++ + + + + + + + + + + + + + +?
Si1 [ì-n]e-éš ti-da-nu-um [. . .] / den-líl kur-bi-ta á-d[ah-g̃u10-šè im-ma-(an)-zi]
X1 ì-ne-éš ti-da-ma-rum amurrumki-a/den-líl-le kur-bi-ta á-dah-g̃u10-šè im-ma-an-zi
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 367

The difference is in the verbal root, which seems to be gur in the present text. This
is probably due to the fact that Akkadian našûm is an equivalent of both zi and gur.
21. I take the verbal root ri as e-re, the plural perfect root of the verb du/gin, “to
go.” All the other versions of this line have gin.

Šulgi to Puzur-Šulgi OB 1b (ŠPu1OB1b, 3.1.10)

Sources
X3 = A w/n iv 7′–35′ 1–29
X4 = Ni. 3083 (ISET 2 115) i 10′–16′ 1–6
Tablet typology: both compilation tablets (Type I).
Transliteration 4

1. X3 ⸢puzur4-šul-gi šakkana⸣ bàd-igi-hur-sag̃-g̃á ⸢ù-na⸣-a-dug4

[I]
1
   X4 I
puzur4-šul-gi šakkana bàd-igi-hur-⟨sag̃⟩-g̃á ù-na-dug4
2. X3 [dšul-gi] ⸢lugal⸣-zu na-ab-bé-a 2
   X4 šul-gi lugal-zu na-ab-bé-a
3. X3 [u4 bàd gal igi] hur-sag̃-⸢g̃á⸣ mu-dù-a 3
   X3 u4 bàd gal igi hur-sag̃-g̃á mu-un-dù-a
4. X3 [amurrum kalam-š]è nu-è-dè-dè
   X4 ⸢amurrum⸣ kalam-šè nu-è-dè-dè
5. X3 [gú áb-gal gú] ⸢ídidigna⸣ ídburanun-na-bi-da a nu-nag̃-nag̃-dè
   X4 gú áb-gal gú ídidigna ídburanun-na-bi nu-nag̃-nag̃-dè
6. X3 [ùg̃ kalam dag̃al-la ú sa]l-la nú-dè 7
   X4 traces
7. X3 [ki-tuš-bi-ta nu-h]u?-luh-e-dè
8. X3 [. . .]x-ni ⸢tùm⸣-ù-dè
9. X3 [. . .]x-g̃ál ⸢har⸣-ra-⸢an kaskal?-la?⸣ ì-DU-dè
10. X3 [. . .]x x ⸢bí⸣-dù ⸢in-nu⸣-ù
11. X3 [. . .]x mu-e-⸢gi4⸣
12. X3 [. . .]-šè á mu-da-an-⸢ág̃⸣
13. X3 [. . .]-ne-e-dù
14. X3 [uru-uru-bi ha-(ra)-ab]-⸢zi-zi-eš⸣ 23
15. X3 [lú sag̃ kíg̃-bi] ⸢hé⸣-éb-dab5 24
16. X3 [hé-en-dag] ⸢ù⸣ hé-en-dù 26
17. X3 [. . .]x-ma ha-ma-gi4-gi4
18. X3 [kíg̃-bi-šè èn] ⸢a?⸣-ra-⸢ab⸣-tar-re-en 28
19. X3 [Ilú-dnanna énsi ma-da] ⸢zi-mu⸣-dar-ra-ke4 29
20. X3 [érin-na-ni]-⸢šè⸣ hé-mu-e-ši-gin 30

4. The corresponding line numbers in the Middle Babylonian version (ŠPŠMB1) are indi-
cated in the right column.
368 14. Šulgi to Puzur-Šulgi 1

21. X3 [. . .]x-en-na-a
22. X3 [. . .] ⸢ha⸣-ra-ab-tuš
23. X3 [. . .] ⸢ha-ra-ab-gi4-gi4⸣
24. X3 [. . .] ⸢g̃ál⸣-le-en
25. X3 [. . .]- ⸢e⸣ ì-zu-zu
26. X3 [éren . . . nam-b]a-e-šub-bé-⸢en⸣. 36?
27. X3 [. . .] ⸢ki?⸣-ba ù-bí-tuš
28. X3 [. . .]-en-zé-en. 37/39?
29. X3 [a-m]a-ru-kam 40
1
Speak to Puzur-Šulgi, general of Bad-Igihursag̃a, 2 saying (the words of) Šulgi,
your king:
3
When the great fortifications of Bad-Igihursag̃a were being built—4 so that the
Amorites could not descend on the homeland, 5 nor water (their herds) at the banks
of the Abgal as well as the Tigris and Euphrates, 6 that [the people of the far-flung
homeland] rest in sa[fe pastures], 7 and not be terrori[zed in their dwellings], 8 to
bring . . . 9 to go on the roads . . .10–13 . . . 14 let them mobilize [all their villages, one
by one] 15and appoint [the man in charge of the construction]. 16 [The fortifications
must be torn down], and then rebuilt. 17 . . . send me swiftly. . . .
18
After I consult you about this undertaking,19–20 Lu-Nanna, governor of Zimu-
dar province is to come to you with his worker troops. 21–25 . . .26 You (sing.) [should
not allow the worker troops] to leave. 27 . . . 28 neither/both of you is to [. . . !] 29 It is
[ur]gent!
Commentary
4–5. These lines are clearly a paraphrase of ŠaŠu1: 4–7 (18) igi-zu ma-an-g̃ ar-ma
amurrum ma-da-aš mu-un-šub-šub-bu-uš, bàd dù-ù-dè g̃ ìri-bi ku5-ru-dè,
íd
idigna ídburanun-na-bi-da, gú-g̃ ìri-bi a-šà-e nam-ba-e-šú-šú á-šè mu-e-
da-ág̃, “and presented your views to me as follows: “The Amorites have repeat-
edly raided the province.” You commanded me 5 to rebuild the fortifications, to
cut off their (infiltration) route, thus to prevent them from swooping down on the
fields through a breach (in the defenses) between the Tigris and Euphrates.” Note
that these lines are absent in all other versions; moreover, they clearly contradict
ŠPu1OB1a: 19 above.

Šulgi to Puzur-Šulgi MB 1 (ŠPu1MB1, ŠPŠ1, 3.1.08)

Sources
Su1S = Susa A XX/1 1962/3, Sumerian version (MDAI 57 pl. 1; photograph only 5)
1–41
Su1A = Susa A XX/1 1962/3, Akkadian version (ibid.) 4–41

5. Note that the photograph of the edge in MDAI 57 is upside-down.

 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 369

Reprise of OB 1a:
X1 = A w/n iii 1–8
X2 = BM 108870 23–41
The Susa tablet is in Tehran and was collated from photographs kindly provided by
Shahrokh Razmjou and Mahboubeh Ghelichkhani with the help of Parsa Danesh-
mand. X2 is possibly from Sippar.
Tablet typology: compilation tablets: Su, X1. Type III: X2
Bibliography: Edition of ŠPu1MB1, D. O. Edzard, MDAI 57 (1974) 18–30.

In the comparative matrix, * marks an ideal reconstructed Middle Babylonian

version. The reconstruction is intended only as an aid in understanding the inter-
pretation and translation of the syllabic text, and not as a posited original version.
Comparison of Manuscripts

1. X1 ⸢puzur4-šul-gi⸣ šak[kana bàd igi-hur-sag̃-g̃á-ra]

I

X3 ⸢puzur4-šul-gi šakkana⸣ bàd-igi-hur-sag̃-g̃á ⸢ù-na⸣-a-dug4

[I]

X4 I
puzur4-šul-gi šakkana bàd-igi-hur-⟨sag̃⟩-g̃á ù-na-dug4
* I
puzur4-šul-gi šakkana bàd igi-hur-sag̃-g̃á-ra ù-ne-dug4
Su1S i1Ipúzur-dnu-muš-da-á-ra mu-un-ne-du
2. X1 d
⸢šul-gi lugal⸣-zu na-ab-⸢bé⸣-[a]
X3 [šul-gi] ⸢lugal⸣-zu na-ab-bé-a
X4 šul-gi lugal-zu na-ab-bé-a
* d
šul-gi lugal-zu na-ab-bé-a
Su1S 2Id
šul-gi lú-gal-zú na-ap-pa-a
3. X1 ⸢u4 bàd igi⸣-hur-⸢sag̃⸣-g̃á mu-dù-⸢a⸣
X3 [u4 bàd gal igi] hur-sag̃-⸢g̃á⸣ mu-dù-a
X3 u4 bàd gal igi hur-sag̃-g̃á mu-un-dù-a
* u4 bàd igi-hur-sag̃-g̃á mu-dù-a
Su1S 3
up-pa-ad-giigigi-hu-ur-sag̃-ga mu-un-4ta-a
4. X1 kur-⸢kur⸣ ⸢ùg̃⸣ dag̃al-la an-né den-líl-⸢le⸣
* kur-kur un dag̃al-la an-né den-líl-le
Su1S kur-kur-re un di-am-ga-al-la an-ne 5dd+en-líl-le
Su1A mātāti nišī rapšāti Anu u Enlil
5. X1 nam-en-⸢na-bi ma-an-šúm-mu-uš⸣
* nam-en-na-bi ma-an-šúm-mu-uš
Su1S mu-be mu-un-na-an-šu-um-ma-6ta
Su1A ana bēli iddinūni
370 14. Šulgi to Puzur-Šulgi 1

6. X1 uru!? ka[lam?-ma? ma]-da? ma?-[da-bi]6

* uru-didli ma-da ma-da-bi
Su1S 8
⸢uru⸣-di-id-di ma-da-ma-da-be
Su1A ālāni mātu ina mātiša
7. X1 ⸢ùg̃ kalam dag̃al-la⸣ [ú sal-la ì]-n[ú]
X3 [ùg̃ kalam dag̃al-la ú sa]l-la nú-dè
X4 traces
* ùg̃ kalam dag̃al-la ú sal-la ì-nú
Su1S 10
ùg̃ kalam dam-gal-lá ú sal-lá i-nu
Su1A nišī mātāti rapšāti aburrī u⟨šarbiṣ⟩
8. X1 ⸢ki níg̃ dag̃al-bi-a ki-tuš ne?-ha?⸣ [mu-un-tuš?]
* ki níg̃-dag̃al-bi ki-tuš ne-ha mu-un-tuš
Su1S 12ki níg̃-dam-gal-be ku-tu-uš ne-ha mu-un-13šu-ub
Su1A ina šubtišu mugallita u⟨l ušarši ⟩
9. * nita-bi-e-ne munus-bi-e-ne
ArŠ2 nita-bi-e-ne munus-bi-e-ne
Su1S 14nitata-be-e-en-ne munus-e-en-ne
Su1A zikarūšunu sinnišātušunu
10. * nita-bi ki šà-ga-na-šè ì-du
ArŠ2 nita-bi ki šà-ga-na-šè ì-du-ne
Su1S 16nitata-be ki šà-ga-an-ne e-du
Su1A zikaršu ēmi libbišu illaka
11. * munus-e g̃išbala g̃iškirid-da ⟨har-ra-an⟩ šà-ga-na al-⟨du⟩
ArŠ2 munus-bi g̃išbala g̃iškirid-da šu ba-e-si-ig har-ra-an šà-ga-na du-ù-ne
Su1S 18munus-še bala g̃išgi-ri-iš šà-ga-an-ne al ⟨ ⟩
Su1A sinništu qadu pilakkiša u kirissi⟨ša . . .⟩
12. * eden-na níg̃-dag̃al-bi g̃á-rig7 ù-mu-g̃ar
ArŠ2 eden níg̃-dag̃al-la-ba g̃á-rig7 mu-ni-ib-g̃ar
Su1S 20eden-na níg-dam-gal-be na-ri ù-mu-g̃arár
Su1S ṣēra rapša tabīnī umal⟨ li  ⟩
13. * za-lam-g̃ar maš-gána-bi-da ki um-ma-ni-in-g̃ar-g̃ar
ArŠ2 za-lam-g̃ar maš-gána-bi ki um-mi-g̃ar-g̃ar7
Su1S 22za-la-am-ga-na-be-et-te ki um-ni-in-23g̃ar-g̃ar
Su1A kuštārīja ina pani taštanakkan

6. The first two signs look more like g̃ á-⸢e⸣.

7. TPT Var.: za-lam-g̃ ar maš-gána-⸢bi⸣-ta ú-sal mu-un-nú-nú.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 371

14. * lú-kíg̃-ak lú-gud-apin-lá a-šà-ga u4 mi-ni-ib-zal-zal-e-ne

ArŠ2 lú-kíg̃-ak-bi lú-apin-lá a-šà-ga u4 mu-un-di-ni-ib-zal-e
Su1S 25lu-ú-ki-im-ki-ik-ki lu-ú-a-pil-lá a-ša-⸢gu⸣-gu ú
mi-ni-ib-26za-al-za-al-⸢le-en⸣-ne
Su1A ēpiš šipri u errēšū ina eqli ušteberrū
15. * énsi šabra . . .
Su1S 28im-sik šà-ab-ra-a níg-da-ra-ta-⸢an-ne⸣
Su1A iššakku u šabrû mali dūri šâtu līpušu
16. * kin bàd-bi ak-ka bàd-bi nir-g̃ál hé?-bí-ib-du11-ge
Su1S 30ki-im ⸢be⸣-ed-be ak-ka-a-a ba-⸢ad⸣-31be ne-er-ga-al li-bi-ib-tu-ul-le
Su1A šipir dūri epēša etelliš lā aqbi
17. * zi ugnim ù zi ma-da-mu-šè
Su1S 33zi um-ni-im ù da-šà-an-34ne-et-te
Su1A ana napištija u napišta mātija
18. * silim-ma-šè šà-kúš-šè bàd mu-na-an-dù
Su1S ši-li-ma 36šak-ku-še ša qa-al mu-un-na-an-du
Su1A ana šullumi aštāl amtallikma dūra šâtu ēpuš
19. * ì-ne-èš ugnim im-ma-an-gin
Su1S 38e-ne-eš-še um-ni-im im-ma-an-gin
Su1A inanna ummānu itteḫā
20. * kin bàd-ba lú kíg̃-bi hé-em-dù
Su1S 40ki-im bàd-be lu-ú ki-ig-be he-em-tu
Su1A šipir dūri ēpiš dūri lipušū
21. * ì-ne-èš árad-mu mu-e-ši-in-gi4
Su1S 42ne-e-še ur-du-um-gu ši-im-gi
Su1A inanna Urdumgu ubteʾʾi
22. X1 ⸢énsi? šabra?⸣ l[ú?-bi hé-eb-túm]
* énsi šabra lú-bi hé-eb-túm
Su1S ii1im-sik šà-ab-ra-a lu-ú-be he-eb-du-m[u]
Su1A iššakku u šabrû mali dūri šâ⟨tu⟩
23. X2 uru-uru-bi ha-ra-⸢ab⸣-zi-zi-ne
X3 [uru-uru-bi ha-(ra)-ab]-⸢zi-zi-eš⸣
* uru-uru-bi ha-ba-an-zi-zi
Su1S 3
uru-uru-be ha-pa-an-di-iz-zi-ja
Su1S āliš āliš udekkâkku
372 14. Šulgi to Puzur-Šulgi 1

24. X2 lú sag̃ kíg̃-bi hé-⸢en⸣-dab5

X3 [lú sag̃ kíg̃-bi] ⸢hé⸣-éb-dab5
* lú sag̃ kíg̃-bi mu-un-?
Su1S 5
lú sag̃ gi-in-ne mu-un-e
Su1A awīlu ina qaqqad šiprišu ana bīti
25. X2 ki bàd šub-ba ki-bi-šè ⸢hu⸣-mu-un-g̃ar
* ki bàd šub-ba ki-bi-⟨šè⟩ ha-ma-gi4-gi4
Su1S 7ki-im ga-al šub-ba ki-be ha-pa-gi-⸢gi⸣
Su1A ašar dūru maqtu ana ašrišu litūr
26. X2 hé-en-dag ù hé-⸢en⸣-dù
X3 [hé-en-dag] ⸢ù⸣ hé-en-dù
* hé-en-dag ù hé-en-dù
Su1S 9
he-em-ta-ak-lu ú he-em-du
Su1A liqqur u līpuš
27. X2 šà iti diš-kam á šub-ba ⸢ha-ba⸣-til
* šà iti aš-kam bàd ha-ra-ab-til
Su1S 11šà iti aš-ka bàd ha-ra-ab-ti-il-le
Su1A ina libbi ištēn warḫi dūru šû lū quttu
28. X2 kíg̃-⸢bi⸣-šè èn mu-na-⸢tar⸣-re-⸢en⸣
X3 [kíg̃-bi-šè èn] ⸢a?⸣-ra-⸢ab⸣-tar-re-en
* kíg̃-bi-šè èn nam-ta-ab-tar-re-(en?)
Su1S 13
ki-ig-be-eš-še en nam-tab-ta-re
Su1A šipir dūri ēpiš dūri līpuš
29. X2 I
⸢lú⸣-d⸢nanna⸣ énsi ma-da zi-mu-dar-⸢ra⸣ki-⸢ke4⸣
X3 [Ilú-dnanna énsi ma-da] ⸢zi-mu⸣-dar-ra-ke4
X3 lú-dnanna énsi ma-da zi-mu-dar-ra
Su1S 15
lú-dnanna im-sik ma-ta zi-im-mu-16un-dar-ra
Su1A Lu-Nanna iššiak māt Zimudar
30. X2 é[rin-na-n]i-ta im-mu-⸢e⸣-ši-⸢ri⸣
X3 [érin-na-ni]-⸢šè⸣ hé-mu-e-ši-gin
* érin-a-ni-šè ha-ma-ši-du
Su1S an-ne-ne-šu ha-pa-ši-im-tu
Su1A qadu ṣabīšu aṭṭardaku
31. X2 [ninda kaskal-l]a-ni-ta mu-ra-⸢g̃ál⸣
* si-di-se hé-em-da-an-tuku
Su1S 19zi-be-is-šè he-em-da-am-du-ku
Su1A ṣidīssu našiku
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 373

32. X2 [níg̃-á-ta]ka4 ba-ra-⸢na-g̃ál⸣

* níg̃-á-taga4 la-ba-ra-an-tuku
Su1S 21níg̃-dag-ka la-ba-nam-da-at-ta
Su1A tēkīta lā iraššiku
33. * u4 bàd ti-la dub-zu-ne-ne hé-bí-in-gin
Su1A 23up-pa-at ti-il-la du-ub-ne-en-ne-24en-ne he-pi-níg-gin
Su1A ūmi dūru šû quttû ṭuppakunu lillika
34. * u4 igi-zu-ne-ne mu-un-du8-re-eš-a
Su1S 26
ù igigi-zi-ne-en-ne mu-un-da-re-eš-še
Su1A ūmi īnkunu taštaknāni
35. X1 [Ilú-dnanna én]si ⸢ma-da zi⸣-mu-⸢dar⸣-ra-ke4
X2 ⸢Ilú-dnanna énsi ma-da zi-mu⸣-dar-ra⸢ki-ke4⸣
Su1S 28lú-dnanna im-⸢sik⸣ ma-⸢ta⸣ zi-im-mu-29⸢un⸣-dar-⸢ra-ak-ke⸣
Su1A Lu-Nanna iššiak māt Zimudar
36. X1 [érin-na-ni-ta] ⸢ù⸣-mu-un-šub-bu-un-zé-en
X2 érin-na-ni-ta ù-mu-e-šub-bu-un-⸢zé⸣-en
X3 [érin nam-b]a-e-šub-bé-⸢en⸣
* érin-na-ni-šè ha-ba-ši-in-tak4?
Su1S eri-ne-⸢eš⸣-še ha-pa-ši-im-tu
Su1A qadu ṣabīšu ezbāniššuma
37. X1 [za-e Iárad-mu] nam-ma-ab-lá-e-zé-en
X2 za-e Iárad-mu na-ma-ab-⸢bal-le-en⸣-zé-en
* za-e árad-mu na-ma-ab-bar?-e
Su1S 32
ša-e ur-du-um-gu nam-be-eb-le-e
Su1A atta u Urdumgu lā tuḫḫarāni
38. X2 g̃i6 an-bar7 kíg̃ ⸢hé⸣-en-dù (after 39)
Su1S 34ge-e ab-ra-a ki-ig-be he-em-tu
Su1A mūši u urri šipru linnepuš
39. X2 á-ág̃-g̃á kala-ga á-zu-ne-ne-a ⸢nam-b/ma-e-še-bi⸣-en-zé-en
*
Su1S 36a-ga zi kal-ka a-ga-mu-uš-ne-en-ne 37⟨e-ma-ru-uk-ka⟩
Su1A tērtakunu lā dannat rittakunu
40. X1 [a-ma]-⸢ru⸣-kam
X2 ⸢a⸣-ma-⸢ru⸣-kam
X3 [a-m]a-ru-kam
* e4-ma-ru-kam
Su1S 39
e-ma-ru-uk-ka
Su1A ⟨ap⟩puttu
374 14. Šulgi to Puzur-Šulgi 1

Translations
Sumerian
1
Speak to Puzur-Šulgi, general of Bad-Igihursag̃a, 2 saying (the words of) Šulgi,
your king:
3
After I had constructed Bad-Igihursag̃a, 4–5 An and Enlil gave me to rule all the
foreign lands and the teeming multitudes; 6 all the various cities, province by prov-
ince, 7 as well as the peoples of the far-flung homeland rested in safe pastures. 8 I made
them dwell in teeming places and peaceful habitations.
9
As for their men and women, 10 their man goes wherever he wishes, 11 and the
woman holds spindles and needles, wandering on whatever roads they wish. 12 Hav-
ing established their animal pens in the far-flung wildeness, 13 and pitched their tents
and encampments all over, 14 the laborers and tenant farmers then spend their days
(working) in the fields.
15
The farmer(s) and the overseers(s) . . . 16 Proudly I ordered the wall-work on
the fortification! 17 For the well-being of my army and of my frontier territory, 18 I
made inquiries, I consulted about bringing about peace, and (decided to) (re)build
this fortification. 19 Now the army has arrived 20 and so make the wall builders do
that work!
21
And now I am (also) sending Aradmu to you. 22 Have the farmers and the over-
seers bring their people, 23 mobilize all their cities for you, 24 and have him appoint the
man in charge of the work. 2 5Wherever the wall has deteriorated, it must be restored,
26
torn down, and then rebuilt; 27 the fortifications must be finished in one month!
28
You/I will then ask (Aradmu for a report) about this work.
29
Lu-Nanna, governor of Zimudar province, 30 is coming to you with his worker
troops. 31 He will have his own [travel provision]s for you, 32 and he should not com-
plain to you. 33 When the fortifications are finished, then and you shall both send
your written report (to me). 34 When both of you have inspected (the work), 35 and
after Lu-Nanna, governor of Zimudar 36 has left you both with his worker troops,
37
you and Aradmu must not alter your assignment! 38 The work must progress day and
night, 39 and you must not neglect the important orders that are in your hands!
40
It is urgent!
Akkadian
⟨1 To Puzur-Šulgi, the general of Bad-Igihursag̃a, speak: 2 Thus says Šulgi, your
king:
3
After I had constructed Bad-Igihursag̃a,⟩ 4–5 An and Enlil gave me to rule all the
foreign lands and the teeming multitudes; 6 then all the individual cities, province by
province, 8 as well as the peoples of the far-flung lands I made rest in safe pastures, 9 I
did not allow anyone to terrorize them in their homes.
9
As for their men and women, 10 their (lit., its) man goes wherever he wishes,
11
and the woman with her spindle and ⟨her⟩ needles ⟨ ⟩. 12 When she filled the far-
flung wilderness with animal sheds, 13 she pitched tents before (them). 14 The laborers
and cultivators spend their days (working) in the fields.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 375
15
The farmer(s) and the overseer(s) are to do all the work that is required on
that fortification. 16 Proudly I ordered the wall-work on the fortification! 17 For my
own well-being and well-being of my land/frontier territory, 18 I made inquiries; I
consulted about bringing about peace, and (decided to) (re)build the fortification.
19
Now the army is approaching 20 and so make the wall-builders perform the task of
(re)building the fortification!
21
And now (also) I have sought out Aradmu (for you). 22–23 The farmers(s) and
the overseer(s) have mobilized the villages for you on my behalf, one by one, as much
as the (work on) this fortification requires. 24 May the man in charge of the work
⟨ ⟩ to the house. 25 Wherever the fortification has deteriorated, it must be restored,
26
torn down, and rebuilt; 27 that fortification must be finished in one month! 29 Make
the workers perform the task of building the fortification!
29–30
I have dispatched to you Lu-Nanna, governor of Zimudar province, together
with his worker-troops. 31 He is bringing you his own travel provisions, 32 and he
should not complain to you. 33When the fortification is finished, then and you shall
both send your written report to me. 34After you have both personally inspected (the
work), 35–36 then leave behind Lu-Nanna, governor of Zimudar, together with his
worker troops, 37 but you and Aradmu should not tarry! 38 The work must progress day
and night! 39 Your assignment is of vital importance, your . . .. 40 It is urgent!

Commentary

1–3. As is the case with almost all bilingual letters, in MB1, the Akkadian does not
render the opening formula (see p. 338 above). Here, however, unlike in the other
letter on the same tablet (ŠIš1, 15), the first line of the body of the message is also
not rendered into Akkadian.
1. The writing púzur(MAN) is definitely post-OB; see Aa II/4 153–54 (MSL 14
284), Ea II 161 (MSL 14 254).
4–5. Compare Letter to Zimrilim 14: g̃išg̃ idri níg̃ -si-sá šu-ni-šè g̃ á kur-kur dag̃ a[l
nam-en-na-aš mu-na-an]-šúm-uš = gišgidri ù mi-ša-ra a-na qa-ti-šu iš-ku-nu-ma
ma-ta-ti [r]a-ap-ša-ti a-na be-li-im id-di-nu-šu and ArŠ6: 3 (10): [lugal]-g̃ u10 ma-da
dag̃ al-la ⸢nam-en-na⸣-aš mu-ra-an-šúm-ma-a.
4. The scribe of Su1S was inconsistent in recognizing Sumerian g̃; e.g., sag̃ -ga in
line 3 but di-am-ga-al-la (dag̃ al) in this line. As an example of the different real-
izations of the same word, compare this with dam-gal in lines 7, 8, and 12.
8. The Sumerian and Akkadian do not agree here. As D. O. Edzard, MDAI 57 25,
has noted, the Akkadian version of lines 8–9 is similar to CH xlvii 38: nišī dadmī
aburrī ušarbiṣ mugallitam ul ušaršīšināti “I let the inhabitants of all settlements lie in
safe pastures, I did not permit anyone to terrorize them.” Indeed, this may be the
very source of this line, but see also the passages cited below. Interestingly, the other
version of the letter seems to have had a Sumerian line corresponding more closely
376 14. Šulgi to Puzur-Šulgi 1

to the Akkadian of this version (ŠPu1 OB1b: 6–7) [ùg̃ kalam dag̃ al-la ú s]al-la
nú-dè, [ki-tuš nu-h]u?-luh-e-dè. The hu sign may actually be dù, which would
connect dù-luh, “troublemaker,” with our passage. The word is rare; it is attested
late with the equivalent mu-gal-[li-tu] in Antagal B 209 [MSL 17 193] but also in an
unusual OB lexical text from Uṣar-Lulu (Tell Dhibāʿī): lú dù-luh-ha (AOAT 25,
3 vi 9). It must be from hu-luh (galtu) and is so documented in a similar Sumerian
passage from a Hammurabi hymn (TLB 2 3: 23 [ZA 54 (1962) 52]): ⸢ma-da-g̃ u10⸣
ú-sal-la mi-ni-in-nú ùg̃ -g̃ á lú-hu-luh-ha nu-mu-ni-in-tuku “my country
rested in safe pastures, no one terrorized it,” and even more appropriately, in a royal
inscription of Samsuiluna (E4.3.7.8: 61–62, D. Frayne, RIME 4 390, but see A.
George, BSOAS 55 [1992] 539): ki-tuš ne-ha tuš-ù-dè lú hu-luh-ha nu-tuk-
tuku-dè = šu-ba-at ne-[eḫ-tim] a-na šú-šu-b[i-im] m[u-gal-li-tam a-na la šu-ur-še-em]
“that (the inhabitants) dwell in safe pastures, that no one terrorize them.”
The expression ki-tuš ne-ha is characteristic of Isin, Larsa, and Babylon I royal
texts and occurs also in the Nippur Lament; see S. Tinney, Nippur Lament, 183.
9–21. This passage is not in the OB version and may have been introduced in stages
into the composition. Lines 9–14 were borrowed from letter ArŠ2: B3′–7′ (letter 3;
for comparison, the ArŠ2 composite text is provided in the matrix). Then, the fol-
lowing passage is bracketed by two almost identical lines (15=22), both possibly cor-
responding to line 15 of ŠPuOB1a. This is a trace of a rather crude editorial process.
11 (= ArŠ2 B4′). The scribe clearly had problems with the source text; he abbrevi-
ated the Sumerian, which he clearly did not understand, and therefore did not render
the end of the line into Akkadian. One should note that the writing munus-še can-
not be used as evidence for the reconstruction of the final consonant of the Sumerian
word for “woman,” because the Susa text frequently uses various /š/ signs for /s/, and
the playful orthography cannot be used as evidence for any language norms.
12 (=ArŠ2 B5′). The context makes it easy to make a guess as to the meaning of g̃ á-
rig7, although the other available evidence is ambiguous; see J. Krecher, SKLy 153. A
clue to the meaning of the word may be found, perhaps, in CT 15 18:37 and its un-
published duplicate CBS 145 rev. 6′ (cited by M. Civil, AfO 25 [1974–77] 65 n. 2):
mu-lu G ̃ Á.RIG -ga-na ugamušen ba-e-dab = mu-lu-mu da-ga-na uga bí-dab ,
7 5 5
“a man captured a raven in his dwelling.” Here the syllabic text substitutes da-ga-na
̃ Á.RIG . I am therefore assuming that the writing G
for G ̃ Á.RIG .GA.NA represents
7 7
daggan ga-na
rather than g̃ á-rig7-ga-na. This is, then, another writing of da-ga-na /
da-gána, “sleeping quarters.” Perhaps the distinction is one of human versus animal
shelter. Here the Sumerian has the otherwise incomprehensible na-ri, which may
be an attempt to render /g̃ arig/, and the Akkadian is tabīnu, “shelter, shed” a word
that is, with two exceptions, otherwise only known from post-OB contexts; in lexical
texts, it translates á-bàd, “lean-to.” 8

8. The only OB attestation is in two PNs; see CAD T 27. I am grateful to Martha Roth for
providing me with a copy of the entry prior to publication.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 377

It is difficult to understand how the Sumerian verbal root g̃ ar, usually šakānu, came
to be translated by mullû; perhaps the writer recognized some resonance of the com-
pletely unrelated expression ana ṣirî mullû, “to fill to the brim” (CAD Ṣ 210).
13 (= ArŠ2 B6′). The words za-lam-g̃ ar and maš-gána are not common in Sume-
rian. Here they are used in hendiadys; note maš-gána = [a]-ša-šum, za-lam-g̃ ar =
ku-uš-ta-ru-um (OBGT XI v 18′–19′ [MSL 4 117]; this must be derived from Proto-Izi
I 336–37 [MSL 13 28]).
15=22. As things now stand, neither of these lines is securely attested in the OB
version; the restoration of ŠPuOB1a: 15 is most uncertain. With the exception of the
first two words, I cannot interpret the Sumerian of line 15. The word níg̃ may stand
for níg̃ -a-na = mala / mali, but the lines are clearly corrupt.
In both 15 and 22, the Akkadian line writes the two occupations as IM.SIG and
ŠÀ.AB.RA.A, using two unique logographic writings, and the same signs are used in
the Sumerian version as well. The scribe of this tablet writes three signs in a similar
fashion: UD, ÉRIN, and SIG, but maintains distinctions. There can be little doubt
that šà-ab-ra-a (Sum.) and ŠÀ.AB.RA.A (Akk.) attempt to render šabra = šabrû,
“overseer, chief administrator,” but the word has essentially gone out of use already in
the later part of the OB period (CAD Š/1 14), and it is probable that the MB writer
did not know very much about this administrative title. It is possible that the source
of this is the proximity of the words énsi and šabra in Hh II 10 and 12 (MSL 5 51).
16. Edzard plausibly reconstructed the end of the Sumerian line as *nir-g̃ ál li-bí-
ib-tur-re and translated it “Cette muraille ne doit pas diminuer son prestige.”
17–18. These line seem to refer to PuŠ1: 4–8 (13): lugal-g̃ u10 kù-sig17 na4za-gìn
dig̃ ir-re-e-ne-ka in-ne-en-dím-dím-ma, zi-ni-šè-àm in-nu-ù, lugal-g̃ u10 zi
ugnim ù kalam-ma-ni-šè, bàd gal igi-hur-sag̃ -g̃ á mu lú kúr hul-g̃ ál-šè, ùg̃
kalam-ma-ni-šè mu-un-dù, “Is it not for the sake of his own well-being that my
king fashions (objects) of precious metals and jewels for the gods? My king, for the
well-being of the army and his country has built the great fortifications of Igihursaga
against the vile enemy for the sake of his people and his country.” This is the only
allusion in this letter to the missive that it was designed to answer.
18. The Sumerian of this line is difficult to understand. ši-li-ma must be silim,
rendered by šullumu in Akkadian. The sequence qa-al may be bàd, as is ga-al in line
27, and the verb must be dù. At some point in the transmission process, èn-tar was
rendered by the Emesal form aš-tar.
23. Note the rare use of the D-stem of dekû.
24. The otherwise unattested lú sag̃ kíg̃ , which is already present in the OB ver-
sion a, must be a back-translation from Akkadian.
The Susa text appears to be garbled. While the Sumerian can be harmonized with
the OB version, the Akkadian makes little sense. Instead of a verb that corresponds
378 14. Šulgi to Puzur-Šulgi 1

to mu-un-e, the scribe wrote ÉŠ É; in the orthography used here, this should cor-
respond to ana bīti, which makes little sense in this context.
27. The OB and the later text differ here, once again. The older text has á šub-ba
but the SuS1 has bàd. á šub is not attested in any narrative but is found once in
a lexical text: i-du ma-aq-tum (Proto-Izi II Bi. A iii 17′ [MSL 13 57]), which CAD
renders as “limp arm” (M/1 255) but which must refer to the side of the wall; note á
bàd = i-di du-ri two lines later in the same lexical text. It is possible that this is an un-
usual back-translation of aḫa nadû, “to be careless, negligent,” usually gú. . .šub in
Sumerian, and that the line should be rendered “the delayed work must be finished
in the course of one month.”
28. In this line, X2 and Su1S agree on the Sumerian verb, but the Akkadian has a
completely different predicate.
29–32; 35–36. These lines are clearly derived and adapted from the Šu-Sin cor-
respondence; see the commentary to lines 26–29 of the previous letter (PŠu1, 13).
31. The Akkadian ṣidītu corresponds well to the Sumerian ninda kaskal-la; see
ninda kaskal-la: NINDA KASKAL.[L]A = ṣi-di-[tum], a-ka-al ḫa-[ra-ni  ] (OB Diri
“Oxford” 387–88 [MSL 15 45]). The syllabic text of Su1S has zi-be-iš-šè he-em-
da-an-du-ku, which seems at odds with this. Edzard suggested that this might have
been a composite beginning with zì; more likely, it is a pseudo-loan in Sumerian
from ṣidītu.
32. Edzard reconstructed the underlying text as níg̃ kal-ka la-ba-da-TAG4.TAG4.
The CAD (T 326) recognized that the first word was níg̃ -á-taka4, KA-taka4 =
tēkītu, “complaint.” The Sumerian word is otherwise known only from lexical sources
and from the post-OB Examination Text A: 52. The OB version 1a 23, although
broken at the beginning, has the verbal root g̃ ál and therefore seems equivalent to
tēkīta rašû, “to complain,” an idiom well attested in OB letters, which is found in the
Akkadian version of the Susa text. The latter, however, has the verbal form la-ba-
nam-da-at-ta, syllabic for la-ba-ra-an-tuku/taka4.
36–37. The verbs in both lines differ from what is found in the OB versions; some-
where in the chain of transmission, misunderstandings crept in that were then re-
solved by somewhat convoluted means. Already in the OB manuscripts, the predi-
cates differ: lá in X1 and bal in X2. Is one a hearing mistake for the other, or has
there been a reinterpretation? In either case, it is difficult to decide which version,
if any, might be primary. If lá is to be taken literally and not as a syllabic rendering,
then it is probably used here similarly to Akkadian la imaṭṭi; see CAD M/1 433. It
is also possible that it means “do not allow the (work) to slacken.” In view of the
syllabic writing on the later version, it is unclear which of the two was passed down.
Most probably it is bal. The unique rendering of bal by uḫḫuru is possibly derived
from a confusion with bal = ḫerû, “to dig,” an explanation that is not out of line with
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 379

other interpretations found in the text. The whole issue was complicated by the fact
that two Akkadian verbs, ezēbu and uḫḫuru, are both associated with the same Sume-
rian roots in the lexical tradition (mostly Diri): tag4 and bar (CAD E 416 and CAD
U 42 sub uḫḫuru A (provided pre-publication, courtesy Martha Roth). This is where
the combination of bar and bal resulted in the Akkadian translation.
38–39. There was clearly some transmission confusion about these lines, which are
only in one of the two extant OB witnesses, albeit in reverse order from what we find
in the MB version.
38. g̃ i6 an-bar7 corresponds to Akkadian mūšu u muṣlalu as well as to mūša u urra
(see the dictionaries); note the post-Ur III letter AS 22 7:3–16 i-na mu-ši-im ù i-na
mu-uṣ-la-li-im ma-ṣa-ar-tum i-na dú-ri-im la úr-ra-dam, “The watch must not come
down from the wall night and day!” It is possible that, idiomatically, this might
refer to periods when work is not normally done, to the night as well as daily siesta
(muṣlalu), as suggested to me by J. Cooper.
39. The Sumerian and Akkadian versions of the Susa text are clearly corrupt. Some-
where along the line of transmission, á-ág̃ -g̃ á was rendered as têrtu, but the rest of
it was misunderstood. Somehow á became rittu, “hand,” but then the interpretation
came to a dead end, and the rest of the line seems to be incomplete. The scribe
finished the line with e-ma-ru-uk-ka, then realized that this should be a separate
line, inscribed the Akkadian translation, and then repeated the word, translating it
defectively (⟨ap⟩-pu-tu).

Transliteration of the MB Susa Manuscript 9

Su1S/A = Suza A XII/I i 1–ii 39 (MDAI 57 pl. 1)

i 1. púzur-dnu-muš-da-á-ra mu-un-ne-du
2. d
šul-gi lú-gal-zú na-ap-pa-a
3. up-pa-ad-giigigi-hu-ur-sag̃-ga mu-un-
4. ta-a kur-kur-re un di-am-ga-al-la an-ne
5. dd+
en-líl-le mu-be mu-un-na-an-šu-um-ma-
6. ta U KUR.MEŠti ni-ší ra-ap-šà-ti ANnu
7. ù dKUR.GAL ÉŠ be-li id-di-nu-ni
8. ⸢uru⸣-di-id-di ma-da-ma-da-be
9. URU.MEŠni ma-tu TA ma-ti-šà
10. ùg̃ kalam dam-gal-lá ú sal-lá i-nu
11. ni-ší KUR.MEŠti ra-ap-šà-ti a-bur-ri ú

9. The scribe used U to separate Sumerian and Akkadian and double/triple lines to separate
sections.
380 14. Šulgi to Puzur-Šulgi 1

12. ki níg̃-dam-gal-be ku-tu-uš ne-ha mu-un-

13. šu-ub U TA šu-ub-ti-šu mu-gal-li-ta ù
14. nitata-be-e-en-ne munus-e-en-ne
15. NITA.MEŠ-šu-nu MUNUS.MEŠ-šu-nu
16. nitata-be ki šà-ga-an-ne e-du
17. NITA-šu e-mi li-ib-bi-šu DUka
18. munus-še bala g̃išgi-ri-iš šà-ga-an-ne al
19. MUNUStu qa-du gišBALA-šà ù ki-ri-is-sí
20. eden-na níg̃-dam-gal-be na-ri ù-mu-g̃arár
21. EDENra ra-ap-šà ta-bi-ni ⸢ú⸣-ma-al-⟨li  ⟩
22. za-la-am-ga-na-be-et-te ki um-ni-in-
23. g̃ar-g̃ar U ku-uš-ta-ri-a TA IGI ta-aš-
24. ta-G ̃ AR.G ̃ ARan U lu-ú-ki-im-ik-ki
25. lu-ú-a-pil-lá a-šà-⸢gu⸣ gu ú mi-ni-ib-
26. za-al-za-⸢le-en-ne⸣ U ⸢DÍM ši?⸣-ip ši-ip-⟨ri   ⟩
27. ù ⸢er-re⸣-šu TA A.ŠÀ uš-⸢te⸣-be-er-ru
28. im-sik šà-ab-ra-a níg̃-da-ra-ta-⸢an-ne⸣
29. IM.SIK ù ŠÀ.AB.RA.A ma-li BÀD šà-⸢tu⸣
30. ⸢DÍM⸣ U ki-im ⸢be⸣-ed-be ak-ka-a-a ba-⸢ad⸣-
31. be ne-er-ga-al li-bi-ib-tu-ul-le
32. ši-pir BÀD e-pe-šà e-te-el-li-iš lu-ú
33. aq-bi U zi um-ni-im ù da-šà-an-
34. ne-et-te ši-li-ma U ÉŠ ZI-a ù
35. ZI KURti-a ÉŠ šu-ul-lu-mi
36. šak-ku-še ša qa-al mu-un-na-an-du
37. aš-ta-al am-ta-li-ik-ma BÀD šà-tu
38. DÍM U e-ne-eš-še um-ni-im im-ma-an-gin
39. i-na-an-na um-ma-nu it-te-ḫa-a
40. ki-im bàd-de lu-ú ki-ig-be he-em-tu
41. ši-pir BÀD DÍM DÍM BÀD DÍM
42. ne-e-še ur-du-um-gu ši-im-gi
43. i-na-an-na ur-du-um-gu ub-te-eḫ-i
—————————————————————
ii 1. im-sik šà-ab-ra-a lu-ú-be he-eb-du-m[u]
2. IM.SIG ù ŠÀ.AB.RA.A ma-li BÀD šà
3. uru-uru-be ha-pa-an-di-iz-zi-ja
4. URU iš URU iš ú-di-ik-ka-ak-ku
5. lú sag̃-gi-in-ne mu-un-e
6. LÚ TA SAGad ši-ip-ri-šu ÉŠ É
7. ki-im-ga-al šub-ba ki-be ha-pa-gi-⸢gi⸣
8. a-šar BÀD ŠUB.BA ÉŠ aš-ri-šu li-tur
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 381

9. he-em-ta-ak-lu ú he-em-du
10. li-iq-qú-úr ù li-pu-uš
11. šà iti aš-ka bàd ha-ra-ab-ti-il-le
12. TA ŠÀ ITI AŠ BÀD šu-ú lu-ú qú-ut-⸢tu⸣
13. ki-ig-be-eš-še en nam-tab-ta-re
14. ši-pir BÀD DÍM BÀD DÍMšu
15. lú-dnanna im-sik ma-ta zi-im-mu-
16. un-dar-ra an-ne-ne šu ha-pa-ši-im-tu
17. lú-dnanna IM.SIK ma-at zi-im-
18. mu-un-dar qa-du ÉRIN.MEŠ-šu at-ta-ar-da-ak-ku
19. zi-be-is-šè he-em-da-am-du-ku
20. ṣi-di-is-sú na-ší-ku
21. níg̃-dag-ka la-ba-nam-da-at-ta
22. te-ki-ta la i-ra-aš-ší-ku
23. up-pa-at ti-il-la du-ub-ne-en-ne-
24. en-ne he-pi-níg-gin
25. u4-mi BÀD šu-ú qu-ut-tu-ú ṭup-pa-ku-nu DU
26. ù igigi-zi-ne-en-ne mu-un-da-re-eš-še
27. u4-mi IGI-ku-nu ta-aš-ta-ak-na-ni
28. lú-dnanna im-⸢sik⸣ ma-⸢ta⸣ zi-im-mu-
29. ⸢un⸣-dar-⸢ra-ak-ke⸣ eri-ne-⸢eš⸣-še ha-pa-ši-im-tu U
30. lú-dnanna IM.SIK ma-at ⸢zi-im⸣-mu-
31. un-dar qa-du ÉRIN.MEŠ-šu ez-ba-ni-iš-šu-ma
32. ša-e ur-du-um-gu nam-be-eb-le-e
33. at-ta ù ur-du-um-gu la tu-ḫa-ra-ni
34. ge-e ab-ra-a ki-ig-be he-em-tu
35. mu-ši ù ur-ri ši-ip-rum DÍMuš
36. a-ga zi kal-ka a-ga-mu-uš-ne-en-ne
37. e-ma-ru-uk-ka te-er-ta-ku-nu
38. lu-ú da-an-at ri-it-ta-ku-nu
39. e-ma-ru-uk-ka ⟨ap⟩-pu-tu
 15. Šulgi to Išbi-Erra 1
(ŠIš1, 3.1.13.2, RCU 15)

Su1 = Susa XII/I ii 40–iv 37 (MDAI 57 pl. 1 [photographs only]). New photo-
graphs kindly provided by Dr. Shahrokh Razmjou and Ms. Mahboubeh
Ghelichkhani.
Tablet: compilation tablet (Type I).
Bibliography: Edition: D. O. Edzard, MDAI 57 20–23.

Text Transliteration1

ii 40. Iiš-be-dèr-ra-á-ra mu-un-ne-du

iii 1. dšul-gi lú-gal-zú na-ap-pa-a
2. inim me-e-ga-na ú-ud-ki-im me-e-hu-le
3. a-na a-wa-at ta-aš-pu-ra da-an-ni-iš aḫ-⟨du⟩ U
4. ⸢e⸣-me-du di-ik-ki-nam mi-in-na na-
5. ar-ra a-ba ma2-an-šu U ÁRAD šà ki-ma ka-⟨ta⟩
6. ta-ak-lu ja-a-ší ma-an-nu i-na-an-di-na
7. a-am-ga lu-ga-al-be šu zi-im-ga-ra a-ba
8. ab-tu-ku-e-še U le-e-a šà a-na be-li-
9. šu šu-ud-mu-qú ma-an-nu i-šu-uš
10. ne-e-še ⸢níg̃9⸣-ga-⸢na⸣ ⸢mu⸣-ši-iq-an-gu
11. i-na-an-na mi-im-ma šà ta-aš-pu-ra
12. g̃iš-ki-im li-gi-in-ne ú-gu-ze-eš-še
13. me-e-ra-am-gi U ù-ul e-gi ÉŠ EDEN-ka
14. aṭ-ṭa-ar-da U ba-ba-tu pi-šà-⸢du⸣-ba-
15. ar-ra at-ta-at-ta e-eg-la-am-gu
16. Iba-ba-ti šà-an-da-ba-ak-ki U li-be-ra
17. ad-ki-ki ad-ki-ki mu-un-da-a
18. la-be-ra mu-un-ta-al-ka šà mi-it-
19. lu-ú-ka i-du-ú

1. The scribe used U to separate Sumerian and Akkadiandand double/triple lines to separate
sections.
2. Written as b a .

382
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 383

20. un ge-eš-tu ku7?-bábbar un ge-eš-tu ku-us-

21. ke-eš še mu-ra-ad-ka
22. ne-er GÚ.UN MA.NA KÙ.BABBAR 60 GÚ.UN MA.NA KÙ.SIG17
23. uš-te-bi-la-ak-ku
24. mu mu-nu-ut-ku-we eg̃er mi-na-an-gu
25. aš-šu mu-nu-ut-ke-e šà EG ̃ ER um-ma-ni-ja
26. šu mu-un-te-em-ga im-ma-ši-im-gi
27. il-qa-am-ma it-ta-al-ka-ak-ku
28. ú-mu-uš eri-na-ak-ke ú-gu-uz-ze-
29. eš-še me-e-ra-am-gi U ṭe-mi um-ma-
30. ni-ja ÉŠ ṣe-ri-ka tu-úr-ku
31. e-ne-er-ra šu mu-un-na ni-ig-
32. na-ma-an-ne ak-ka-a U a-na šà-šu
33. i-di-iš-šu-um-ma šà qa-be-šu DÍMuš
34. e-ma-ru-uk-ka šà-ap-pi hu-un-na-
35. an-gi-ga U ap-pu-tu ŠÀ-šu la i-ma-
36. ra-aṣ-ku U ú za-e kù-sik-⸢ki?⸣ kub-bábbar
37. zu-un-ne-et-ta šu-ú zi-ba-ab
38. ù at-ta KÙ.BABBAR ù KÙ.SIG17 šà ŠU-šu
39. le-qé-ma U šakanka zú-e da-da-
40. be-e šà-a-šà-a-ma-an-ne
41. [KI].LAMat Ì.G ̃ ÁLšu-ú ŠE.AM
iv 1. ší-ta-ʾa-a-ma U šu du-uz-zu
2. ni-ig-nam na-an-nu-le U TA ŠU-ka
3. li-ib-qur-ma mi-im-ma la ta-ar-ru-úr
4. ú-da-da dumumu šà-az-zu-ga-am-⸢gu?⸣-
5. ú de-mi-in U uš-tu u4-mi an-ni-i
6. DUMUrum mu-ṭi-ib li-ib-bi-ja at-ta
7. iri-du kur MAR.TU é-nam du-a-be mu-ra-ga
8. me-e-ek-ke-na-mi du-gu-ut-ta
9. ÉŠ IGI a-mur-ri-i ù NIMti ka-li-šu
10. G ̃ ARna-ta! ki-ma ja-a-ti TUŠib
11. ku-uz-zi barag ku-uz-zi igigi-ne-en-ne-
12. eš-še tu-uš-šà AH BI IR
13. TA ku-us-sí BÁRA KÙ.SIG17 ÉŠ IGI-šu-nu TUŠ-ma?
14. za-na lu-ú ki-im-ga-ne-en-ne
15. he-li-ib-za-za-an-ne
16. ÉŠ ka-šu DUMU.MEŠ ši-ip-ri-šu-nu
17. li-iš-ke-nu-ni-ik-ku
18. du-ru-be-šu uz-zu hu-ur-mi ni-ig-na-me
19. na-an-tu-uk-ku U e-li-šu-nu ú-te-el-
20. li mi-im-ma la te-ne-eḫ-a
21. im-sik zi-ga im-sik zi-im-ga-ra-a
384 15. Šulgi to Išbi-Erra 1

22. IM.SIG ZI.GA IM.SIG G ̃ ARun

23. sag̃-gin ga-ra nu-bànda g̃iš-ki-im ku-ra
24. šà-ak-ka-na-ak-ka G ̃ ARun NU.BÀNDA wu-ud-di
25. lu-ú na-an-ga lu-ú-uk-ka igigi lu-ú-uk-
26. ka hu-la-a U be-el an-ni a-šu-úr
27. uz-ni LÚ qu-ul-li-il
28. ú-ku-uš i-gi-du-uq-qa im-ma-an-sig5-ga5
29. re-e-da-a šà TA IGI-ka id-dam-qú-ma
30. é nam-šul-zu e-ne-er-ra du-mu-
31. un-na šu-um-g̃ar-zu ma-ha
32. Éti eṭ-lu-ti ÉŠ šà-šu DÍM-ma gi-mil-
33. la-ka li-ti-ir
34. ne-e-še níg̃-ga-na mu-ši-iq-qa-an-gu
35. i-na-an-na mi-im-ma šà ta-aš-pu-ra
36. e-ma-ru-uk-ka-az-zu na-ap-pa-le-e
37. ap-pu-tu pi-ka la te-en-na-a
Colophon K

Analytical Reconstruction of Text in Standard Sumerian

Orthography and Akkadian Transcription

1. I
iš-bi-dèr-ra-ra ù-ne-dug4
ii 40 I
iš-be-dèr-ra-á-ra mu-un-ne-du
2. d
šul-gi lugal-zu na-ab-bé-a
iii1d
šul-gi lú-gal-zú na-ap-pa-a
3. inim mu-e-gi4-a-za usu-gin7 mu-e-húl-le-en
2
inim me-e-ga-na ú-ud-ki-im me-e-hu-le
ana awat tašpura danniš aḫdu
4. émedu za-e-gin7 nir-g̃ál g̃á-ra a-ba ma-an-šúm
4
⸢e⸣-me-du di-ik-ki nam-mi-in-na na-5ar-ra a-ba ma-an-šu
warda ša kīma kâta taklu jâši mannu inandina
5. á-g̃ál lugal-bi šu zi g̃ar-ra a-ba ab-tuk-uš
7
a-am-ga lu-ga-al-be šu zi-im-ga-ra a-ba 8ab-tu-ku-e-še
lē’â ša ana bēlišu šudmuqu mannu īšuš
6. ì-ne-šè níg̃ a-na mu-e-ši-gi4-a-g̃u10
10
ne-e-še ⸢níg̃9⸣-ga-⸢na⸣ ⸢mu⸣-ši-iq-an-gu
inanna mimma ša tašpura
7. g̃iškim li-bí-ne ugu-zu-šè mu-e-ra-gi4
12
g̃iš-ki-im li-gi-in-ne ú-gu-ze-eš-še 13me-e-ra-am-gi
ul ēgi ana ṣērika aṭṭarda
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 385

8. ba-ba-ti pisag̃-dub-ba ad-ad-da ì-g̃ál-la-g̃u10

14
ba-ba-tu pi-šà-⸢du⸣-ba-15ar-ra at-ta-at-ta e-eg-la-am-gu
Babati šandabakki
9. libir ad-gi4-gi4 ad-gi4-gi4 mu-un-zu-a
16
li-be-ra 17ad-ki-ki ad-ki-ki mu-un-da-a
labīra muntalka ša mitluka idū
10. gú-un g̃éš kù-bábbar gú-un g̃éš kù-sig17 sá mu-ra-du11-ga-(àm)
20
un ge-eš-tu ku7?-bábbar un ge-eš-tu ku-us-21ke-eš še mu-ra-ad-ka
nēr bilat kaspa šūši bilat ḫurāṣa uštēbilakku
11. mu mu nu-tuku eg̃er ugnim-ma-g̃u10
24
mu mu-nu-ut-ku-we eg̃er mi-na-an-gu
aššu munūte ša warkat ummānija
12. šu mu-un-te-g̃á im-ma-ši-gin
26
šu mu-un-te-em-ga im-ma-ši-im-gi
ilqâmma ittalkakku
13. umuš érin-na ugu-zu-šè mu-(e)-ra-gi4
28
ú-mu-uš eri-na-ak-ke ú-gu-uz-ze-29eš-še me-e-ra-am-gi
ṭēmi ummanija ana ṣērika tūrku
14. e-ne-ra šúm-mu-na níg̃-nam-ma-ni ak-a
31
e-ne-er-ra šu mu-un-na ni-ig-32na-ma-an-ne ak-ka-a
ana šâšu idiššuma ša qabêšu epuš
15. e4-ma-ru-kam šà-ga-ni hul na-gig
34
e-ma-ru-uk-ka šà-ap-pi hu-un-na-35an-gi-ga
apputtu libbašu lā imarraṣku
16. ù za-e kù-sig17 kù-bábbar šu-ni-ta šu ti-ba-ab
36
ú za-e kù-sik-⸢ki?⸣ kub-bábbar 37zu-un-ne-et-ta šu-ú zi-ba-ab
u atta kaspa u ḫurāṣa ša qātišu leqema
17. šakanka za-e dab5-bé še sa10-sa10-ma-né
39
šakanka zú-e da-da-40be-e šà-a-šà-a-ma-an-ne
maḫīrat ibbaššû ū’a šitaʾʾmā
18. šu-du8-a-zu níg̃-nam na-an-ul/r4-en
iv1
šu du-uz-zu 2ni-ig-nam na-an-nu-le
ina qātika libqurma mimma la tarrur
19. u4-da-ta dumu šà du10-ga-mu za-e-me-en
4
ú-da-da dumumu šà-az-zu-ga-am-⸢gu?⸣ 5ú de-mi-in
uštu ūmi annī māru muṭīb libbija atta
20. igi-du kur amurruki elamki dù-a-bi mu-ra-g̃ar g̃á-e-gin7-nam­ tuš-a
7
iri-du kur amurru é-nam du-a-be mu-ra-ga 8me-e-ek-ke-na-mi du-gu-ut-ta
ana pani Amurrī u Elamti kalīšu šaknāta kīma jâti šib
21. g̃išgu-za barag kù-sig17-ga igi-ne-ne-šè tuš-a x x x
11
ku-uz-zi barag ku-uz-zi igigi-ne-en-ne-12eš-še tu-uš-šà AH BI IR
ina kussī parak hurāṣi ana panīšunu tuššabma
386 15. Šulgi to Išbi-Erra 1

22. za-ra lú kíg̃-gi4-a-ne-ne ki hé-ri-ib-za-za-ne

14
za-na lu-ú ki-im-ga-ne-en-ne 15he-li-ib-za-za-an-ne
ana kâšu mārū šiprišunu liškēnunikku
23. ugu-bi-šè e11-dè ur5-gin7 níg̃-na-me na-an-tu-lu
18
du-ru-be-šu uz-zu hu-ur-mi ni-ig-na-me 19na-an-tu-uk-ku
elīšunu utelli mimma la teneʾʾa
24. énsi zi-ga énsi g̃ar-ra
21
im-sik zi-ga im-sik zi-im-ga-ra-a
iššakka usuḫ iššakka šukun
25. šakkana g̃ar-ra nu-bànda g̃iškim du11-ga
23
sag̃-gin ga-ra nu-bànda g̃iš-ki-im ku-ra
šakkanakka šukun laputtâ wuddi
26. lú nam-tag-ga lú-ka igi lú hul-a
25
lu-ú na-an-ga lu-ú-uk-ka igigi lu-ú-uk-26ka hu-la-a
bēl anni ašur uznī awīli gullil
27. àga-ús igi-zu-ka im-ma-sig5-ga
28
ú-ku-uš i-gi-du-uq-qa im-ma-an-sig5-ga5
rīdā ša ina īnika iddamquma
28. é nam-šul-zu e-ne-ra dù-mu-na šu-g̃ar-zu mah-a
30
é nam-šul-zu e-ne-er-ra du-mu-31un-na šu-um-g̃ar-zu ma-ha
bīti eṭlūti ana šâšu epušma gimillaka litīr
29. ì-ne-šè níg̃ a-na mu-e-ši-gi4-a-mu
34
ne-e-še níg̃-ga-na mu-ši-iq-qa-an-gu
inanna mimma ša tašpura
30. e4-ma-ru-kam ka-zu na-ab-bal-en
36
e-ma-ru-uk-ka-az-zu na-ap-pa-le-e
apputtu pīka la tennâ

Translation
Sumerian
1
Speak to Išbi-Erra, 2 saying (the words of) Šulgi, your king:
3
You make me very happy with the news that you sent me. ­4 Who could give
me a house-born slave as reliable as you? ­5 Who has someone so able entrusted to his
lord? 6 Now, concerning all that you have written to me, 7 I am sending you a tablet
with the secret instructions.3
8
The high commissioner Babati, who is (like) a grandfather to me, 9 the judicious
elder, skilled in councel, 10has now arrived before you (with)­six hundred talents of
silver and six hundred talents of gold. 11–12 . . . 13 I have (also) sent you news about
the troops: forward them to him 14 and (do) whatever he asks. 15 Please be careful ­that
his heart does not turn (against you)! 16 And as for ­you, take the gold and silver from
3. Or: passwords.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 387

his care, 17 and buy all the grain at the prevailing market rate. 18 Once it is all in your
possession, you do not have to hurry.
19
From this day on you are ­the son who gladdens my heart. 20 You are established
(as the guardian) against all of Amurru and Elam; sit as my representative! 21 Sit
before them on a throne (set up on) a gold (encrusted) dais, 22 so that you will be the
one before whom their envoys prostrate themselves. 23 Elevate yourself over them,
never turn back! 24 Depose governors, appoint ­governors, 25 appoint generals, assign
lieutenants, 26 punish the guilty by blinding.
27
As for a soldier who finds favor­with you, 28 build for him his (first) adult
house—-your favor will be great. 29 Now, concerning all that I have­written to you, 30
it is urgent, you must not change your allegiance!
Akkadian
1
⟨Speak to Išbi-Erra: 2 thus says Šulgi, your king:⟩
3
I greatly rejoiced at the news that you sent me. 4 Who­could give me a servant
who is as reliable as you? 5 Who has one so ­able who is so exceedingly pleasing to his
lord? 6 Now, concerning all that you have written to me, 7 I respond to you ­without
delay.
8–10
I have now sent to you the high commissioner Babati, 9 the judicious elder,
who is skilled in councel, (together with) six hundred talents of silver and sixty
talents of­gold; 11–12 he has come to you in the matter of the credit balance left over from
what the troops have already received. 13 News of my troops have been sent to you: 14
forward them to him and do whatever he asks. 15 Please be careful that his ­heart does
not turn against you!
16–17
And as for you, take ­the gold and silver from his hand and buy up the all
grain at the­prevailing market rate, 18 and should anyone claim it from you, you
should pay it no mind.
19
From this day on, you are the son who gladdens my heart. 20 You are established
(as the guardian) against all of Amurru ­and Elam; sit as my representative! 21 You sit
before them­on a throne (set up on) a gold (encrusted) dais, 22 so that you will be the
one before whom their envoys prostrate themselves. 23 Elevate yourself over them, so
that you never turn back! 24 Depose governors, appoint governors,­25 appoint gener-
als, assign lieutenants! 26 Keep a check on transgressors, rip off the ears of (­ guilty)
people!
27
As for a soldier who finds favor with you,­28 build for him his (first) adult house
so that he will return your­favor. 29 Now, concerning all that you have written to me,
30
it is urgent, do not change your allegiance!

Commentary

One must keep in mind that this letter is undoubtedly a late Old or­Middle Baby-
lonian pastiche of the Šulgi correspondence and that the one existing manuscript
388 15. Šulgi to Išbi-Erra 1

is post-OB; we have no idea of when and where it was written or whether the Susa
characteristics are primary or secondary. The transliteration follows closely the edi-
tion of D. O. Edzard but has been collated on photographs. The line numbers in the
commentary refer to the analytical reconstruction.
1. As is usually the case with bilingual letters, the Akkadian does not render the
opening formula; see p. 338 above.
3. The form usu-gin7 is an awkward attempt to render the adverbial form danniš;
this suggests that the author either composed the text in Akkadian, and then trans-
lated it into Sumerian, or that he was thinking in terms of Akkadian when he con-
cocted the letter. Note that adverbials in -iš are more characteristic of later stages of
Standard Babylonian (e.g., W. Meyer, OrNS 64 [1995] 161–86]); only five such oc-
currences are known from OB literary texts (N. Wasserman, Style and Form, 132–33).
Nevertheless, this expression harks back to the use of danniš with the verb ṣiāḫum in
OAkk letters (B. Kienast and K. Volk, FAOS 19, 256).
5. Confusions abound here. The Akkadian has the rare šudmuqu, which was clearly
intended as elative; the Sumerian has šu zi . . . g̃ ar, normally šutlumu. The Akka-
dian īšuš is presumably from išū and would correspond to tuku in Sumerian, but it is
possible that the scribe confused išū with ašāšu. The ending -e-še on the Sumerian
verb cannot be the quotative, nor should it be a plural ending, and therefore it is
most likely a mistake, driven by the ‑š(u) ending of the Akkadian verb.
6. Here, once again there are problems with the translation ­of the verb gi4. The
Sumerian has “I have written to you,”­whereas the Akkadian has “you have written
to me.” The same is ­true of line 29. In both cases, logic requires that one prefer­the
Sumerian version.
7. The sign sequence g̃ iš-ki-im li-gi-in-ne cannot be ­reconciled with the Akka-
dian ul ēgi. Once again, someone was translating back from Akkadian, albeit imper-
fectly. The scribe may have confused Akkadian egû with idû, a mistake conditioned
by the rendering of Sumerian /d/ by /g/ in this text, and then understood the Sume-
rian as a form of g̃ iškim . . . dug4, that is, Akkadian uddû, as in line 25. The word
li-gi-in-ne clearly has nothing to do with (im)li-gi4-in = liginnu, “exercise tablet.”
8. The Sumerian has the suspicious ad-ad-da ì-g̃ ál-la-mu,­which is entirely miss-
ing in the Akkadian. In historical terms, Babati was the ­brother of Abi-simti, who
was the mother of Šu-Sin, and therefore he was possibly the brother-in-law of Šulgi.
Later scribes, if they knew anything about the Ur III royal family, undoubtedly be-
lieved the incorrect tradition already established in the OB version of the Sumerian
King List, which automatically registered each ruler as the son of his predecessor.
Anything is possible in this ­text, but this is probably a metaphorical expression of
­respect for his age; it is unlikely that the author ­knew that Babati was šeš ereš,
“queen’s brother,” and incorrectly deduced this grandfather-like relationship in strict
kinship terms.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 389

9. Here the composer used two rare Akkadian words that are otherwise known only
from late sources: muntalku and the relatively rare mitluku. Not having a handy Su-
merian correspondence for either, he drew upon ad-gi4-gi4 = malāku; hence the
awkward repetition of the same word in the Sumerian version. The use of ad-gi4-gi4
for muntalku is attested in two other late bilinguals but not in any lexical text; see
CAD M/II 206. In epistolary literature, see Letter of Inim-Enlila 3: alan sukud-da
dím-ma ad-gi4-gi4 in-tuku.
10. The Sumerian un ge-eš-tu must stand for gun g̃ éš-u, but the measure should
not precede the number. Edzard has already commented on the absurd nature of the
numbers. Note the different verbs in the two versions, as well as the Assyrian/SB
form uštēbilakku; the Sumerian apparently has sá . . . dug4, which normally cor-
responds to kašādu, not šūbulu.
11. The Sumerian is a garbled back-translation from Akkadian. Someone mistook
munûtu, “accounting,” for munutukû, “without heir,” a rare learned loanword from
Sumerian.
15. Note the very Akkadian use of apputtu that is transferred to Sumerian a-ma-
ru-kam, which is otherwise never used in this manner but is only attested in letter
closure formulas. The writing e-ma-ru-uk-ka, here and in line 30, suggests that
the scribe thought that the word for “water” in Sumerian was /e/ and not /a/, as is
traditionally transliterated today, and he may have been correct; how he analyzed
the etymology of the a-ma-ru-kam is another matter.
17–18. I do not understand either version very well. The Sumerian šakanka za-e
dab5-bé (or dab5-dab5-bé; šakanka zú-e da-da-be-e), if properly reconstructed,
does not correspond to Akkadian maḫīrāt ibbaššū; one expects something on the
order of šakanka al-g̃ ál-la. Since this scribe uses -zú for the second-person bound
pronoun, it is also possible that he misinterpreted maḫīrāt as a stative.
In the following line šu-du8-a-zu ( or perhaps simply šu-zu-a-šè) does not in any
way render Akkadian ina qātika libqurma. It is possible that the author confused
b/paqāru with paqādu and interpreted the latter as šu . . . du8. Most probably, the
whole line was garbled as a result of a mix-up between arāru (“to fear”) and arāḫu
(“to hurry”) as well as their Sumerian equivalents ur4 and ul4. For the Sumerian, see
Lipit-Eštar Hymn A 85: níg-nam-e nu-ul4-en eg̃ er-bi kin-kin-me-en, “I never
rush (with my decisions) but search out the background.”
The signs KI.LAM (line 17) are usually read as ganba, although the evidence for this
has never been clear. The lexical lists agree on the Akkadian equivalent maḫiru but
not on the reading. According to MB Diri, the reading should be šaka(n)ka (ša-
ka-an-ka, Diri Ugarit III 178 [MSL 15 82]). The later version offers two readings:
x-ka-ka and x-x-ba (Diri IV 297–98 [MSL 15 162], see also the gloss [š]a-ka-k[a?]
in MSL SS 1 101. The only evidence for ganba is from ana ittišu II 17a′ (MSL 1 26):
KIgán!(G̃Á)-baLAM. See now P. Attinger, NABU 2008/4: 104.
390 15. Šulgi to Išbi-Erra 1

20. IRI.DU is problematical. ­Edzard suggested a connection with Eridu, but that
does not recommend itself. ­A more probable explanation is that IRI.DU is a writing
for igi-du, i.e., palil, which would correspond to ana pani. The use of /r/ for /g/ is
found often in this tablet.
21. I have no explanation for the sign sequence AH BI IR between the Sumerian
and Akkadian versions.
24–26. These lines clearly echo ŠAr1: 20–23 (2): énsi nam-énsi-ta, lú g̃ árza
g̃ árza-ta, ní-te-ní-te-a li-bí-ib-g̃ ar ù nu-ub-ta-gub-bu, lú nu-un-gaz igi
nu-un-hul, “... had not by his very own authority appointed and removed governors
from the office of governor, office holders from official positions, had not (punished
anyone) by death or blinding...”
25. The writing sag-gin for KIŠ.NÍTA has been discussed by E ­ dzard in his com-
mentary; I am more reluctant to use this­text as evidence for the reading of the
Sumerian word for “general.” The matter is complex, but it is more likely that the
proper reading was šak(k)an(a); see the unique gloss ša-ak-an to in KIŠ.NÍTA in
RIIA 47:3, an OB school text (possibly earlier).
The verbal form g̃ iš-ki-im ku-ra cannot be rendered as g̃ iškim ku4-ra (Edzard,
followed by P. Attinger, Eléments, 549). In this tablet k = d and r = g; hence, this
is simply a writing for g̃ iškim . . . dug4, that is, Akkadian uddû, “to mark, inform,
reveal, assign, etc.”
26. Something is very wrong with both the Sumerian and the­Akkadian here. Edzard
struggled with the passage; using some of the same facts, I propose a slightly differ-
ent interpretation. It seems that whatever the “original” may have contained, some
misinterpretation came from a form that had syllabic Sumerian, and the Akkadian
version was either composed after the corruption or was altered to match the new
reading. The model for ­this line must be sought in the royal prerogative for execution­
and blinding that is expressed in two other letters: ŠAr1: 23 (2): lú nu-un-gaz igi
nu-un-hul, and ŠuŠa1: 25 X1 (19): lú gaz-dè lú igi hul-hul-da, X2: lú [ g]az-
dè hul-hul-le-dè (see p. 280, above). One can assume that the “original” text
had a­syllabic version of *lú gaz-a igi lú hul-a, “execute people, blind them.”
Everything went wrong; someone reinterpreted the first part of the line as na-an-
gaz and produced a syllabic writing na-an-ga, which was interpreted as a standing
for lú nam-tag-ga, which the lexical texts render as bēl ar/nni, “transgressor, guilty
person.” The original translation of igi lú hul-a was misread so that i-ni became
uz‑ni. Sum. hul was rendered by Akk. qullulu on the basis of lexical equivalencies
with Akk. g/qullulu, a verb, or verbs, that still present some interpretive difficulties
(see the dictionaries); e.g., al-hul-h[ul] = gu-u[l-lu-ul ], ba-hul-hul = ig-[da-li-li]
(OBGT XI iv 10′–12′ [MSL 4 116]), and hul-hul = gu-u[l-lu-lu-um] (Antagal G 131
[MSL 17 224]). Whatever the line of errors, one can be fairly sure­that at one point
the meaning of the line was “You are permitted ­to execute and blind people.” This
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 391

series of distortions may have also been affected by the association of q/qullulu with
gillatu, “crime,” and its Sumerian lexical counterpart lúg (lu-ú-uk-ka?).
28. The otherwise unattested é nam-šul = b­ īt eṭlūti is problematic. The Akka-
dian eṭlātu is usually rendered by Sumerian nam-g̃ uruš; nam-šul is usually meṭlūtu,
“manliness, maturity,” and it is probable that this is what the author had in mind.
The ‑zu on the Sumerian word is superfluous.
30. The final verbal phrase probably results from a misinterpretation of the Ak-
kadian use of pû + nabalkutu, equivalent to Sumerian ka bal but equating the latter
with enû. The idiom means “to change allegiance/mood” and is similar in meaning
to dím-ma ma-da kúr = ṭēm māti šanû, for which see p. 401 below.
 16. Amar-Sin to Šulgi 1
(AmŠ1, 3.1.12)

Composite Text
1. lugal-g̃u10-ra ù-na-a-dug4
2. I
amar-den.zu-na árad-zu na-ab-bé-a
3. a-šà níg̃ lugal-g̃u10 ma-an-dug4
4. uru g̃á-g̃á-tum g̃á DUB?-ra mu-un-tur
5. árad lugal-g̃u10 g̃á-e al-me-en-na-ta sag̃-ki lugal-g̃u10 igi mu-du8-a-gin7 g̃ištukul-
g̃u10 ba-šub
6. a-šà šà ma-da-ka šu mu-ni-tak4?
7. g̃iš
hur peš10 a-šà? nu-x sag̃ [ma-an-si-ga]1
8. a-šà-bi gú íd-da-šè limmu5 dana-bi nu-tehe
9. pa5 a du11-ga hur-sag̃ nu-nígin? 2
10. a-ša-an-gàr-ra nu-me-e inim lugal-g̃á-ke4 ab-bé-e
11. a-šà-bi nu-mu-un-da-zàh?
12. níg̃ lugal-g̃u10 ab-bé-en-a lugal-g̃u10 hé-en-zu

Speak to my king, 2 saying (the words) of Amar-Sin, your servant:

1

In the matter of the field that my liege spoke to me about: 4 . . . diminished. 5

3

Because I am my king’s servant, as soon as I saw his majesty’s face, I dropped my weapons
(to deal with the issue). 6 I (?) dispatched (someone) to the field in the territory. 7 In the
plans, the riverbank did not . . . the field; it’s side seems much too short for me. 8 That field
does not (even) come close to the river by forty (fifty) km. 9 The irrigation ditch does
not wind around the Hursag. 10 There is no deceit here; (I am obedient) to the orders
that my liege has given. 11 That field cannot be lost (to cultivation)! 12 Whatever
you, my king order me to do, (I will do). . . . Now my king knows (all this)!

Commentary
Two texts of unknown origin form the basis of the reconstruction, and both are
unreliable. X1 is idiosyncratic, difficult to read, and is broken on the right edge. X2

1. Var.: g̃ iš apin a-šà x x sag̃ ma-an-si-ga.

2. Var.: x x šušana ? dana-bi min-àm a-šà engar nu-g̃ ál.

392
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 393

is known only from a hand-copy made years ago by T. G. Pinches that was found
by Irving Finkel, who was kind enough to make it available to me. The “Relph
Collection,” which belonged to Arthur E. Relph, was first studied by Pinches, who
published some Old Babylonian documents from this group in a three-part article in
PSBA 39 (1917). Subsequently, many or all of these tablets came into the hands of
A. O. Haldar, and after his death some of them entered the Danish National Mu-
seum, while others became part of a private collection in Uppsala. For the history of
these tablets, see J. Anderrson, Orientalia Suecana 57 (2008) 5–7. All of my attempts
to locate Relph 16 have been fruitless.3 Until the tablet can be found, or new manu-
scripts surface, this provisional edition will have to suffice.
4. These lines are preserved only in the old copy by Pinches, and it is not at all cer-
tain that he drew the signs correctly.
7. The signs KI.A can be read as peš10, “(river) bank,” or as ki-duru5, “wet place.”
The admittedly speculative interpretation of sag̃ . . . si-ig is based on K. Maekawa’s
discussion of the use of sag̃ si-ig-ga in Ur III land texts (ASJ 14 [1992] 188–89).
8. This line, with a discussion of the verb tehe, “to draw near,” had been cited in
M. Civil, Jacobsen Memorial, 70.
9. It is always possible that hur-sag̃ refers here to a mountain range/ridge or valley, so
that the line might have to be translated: “the irrigation ditch does not wind around
the ridge/valley.” The current rendition is based on the notion that this is a reference
to a specific topographical feature in the vicinity of Apiak, the one that gave us the
fortification name bàd-igi-hur-sag̃ -g̃ á; see Appendix C, pp. 231–232 above.
10. I have assumed that the first word is the rare a-ša-an-gàr-ra = tašgertu,
“deception.”

Sources
N1 = N 2901 = 6–12
X1 = Ni. 3083 ii 2′–9′ (ISET 2 115) = 1–12
X2 = Relph 16 (copy T. G. Pinches)4 = 1–9, +
Tablet typology: compilation tablet: X1. The rest are all Type III. X2 is in landscape
format.

3. I must thank Jakob Andersson (Uppsala) and John Lund (Copenhagen) for their help in
this search.
4. There is a note on the side of the copy that reads: “Relph, no. 16. 59 mm. high, 79 mm.
long.”
394 16. Amar-Sin to Šulgi 1

Textual Matrix
1. lugal-g̃u10-ra ù-na-a-dug4
X1 . + + ++ ++ :
X2 + g̃á - + + + +
2. amar-den.zu-na árad-zu na-ab-bé-a
I

X1 oo oo o o o o o o o o
X2 ++ ++ + + + + + + + +
3. a-šà níg̃ lugal-g̃u10 ma-an-dug4
X1 ++ + + + + + +:
X2 ++ - + + mu-un-gi
4. uru g̃á-g̃á-tum g̃á DUB?-ra mu-un-tur
X1 . x x x o o o o o o
X2 + + + + + + + + + +
5. árad lugal-g̃u10 g̃á-e al-me-en-na-ta sag̃-ki lugal-g̃u10 igi mu-du8-a-gin7 g̃iš
tukul-g̃u10 ba-šub
X1 + + + + +- + + + - + + x + x o + - . oo o o o
X2 + + + + + + + + + .5 + + + + + +x6 + + + ++ + + .

6. a-šà šà ma-da-ka šu mu-ni-tak?

N1 . . . o o o o ⸢ma?⸣ o o
X1 ++ + + ++ +? bí? - +? :
X2 ++ + + + ke4-eš + + + +?
7. g̃iš
hur peš10 a-šà? nu-x sag̃ [ma-an-si-ga]
N1 + + +o o o o .? o o o
X1 + + ++ . + o o o o o
X2 g̃iš
apin a-šà-ge!? x sag̃ ma-an-si-ga
8. a-šà-bi gú íd-da-šè limmu5 dana-bi nu-tehe
N1 ++ + . o o o + . o o o
X1 ++ + + + + + limmu? + + + +
X2 ++ + + + + + + + + + te-eh
9. pa5 a du11-ga hur-sag̃ nu-níg̃in?
N1 + +. o o o . o
X1 + + + + + + + +:
X2 x x šušana? dana-bi min-àm a-šà engar nu-g̃ál
10. a-ša-an-gàr-ra nu-me-e inim lugal-g̃á-ke4 ab-bé-e
N1 ++ + + - . o o + + + o o o o
X1 ++ - + + + + + /+ + g̃u10 + + + +

5. Or: bi.
6. Possibly ⸢e⸣.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 395

11. a-šà-bi nu-mu-un-da-záh?

N1 ++ + . o o o o
X1 ++ + + + + + +:
12. níg̃ lugal-g̃u10 ab-bé-en-a lugal-g̃u10 hé-en-zu
N1 + + . o o o o o o o o o
X1 + + + + + + + + + + + .
N1 catchline: Iamar-de[n.zu-na-ra] ù-n[a-(a)-dug4] (ŠAm1, 17)
X1 followed by ŠAm1 (17).
The reverse of X2 has traces of three lines after line 9, followed by a double line and
then:
[. . .]-x-dab5-bé ⸢ha⸣-mu-un-da-dag-⸢ge?⸣
[. . .]x lugal-g̃u10 kìri šu ⸢gál? nam?-ba⸣-dab5-bé
It is not certain that this is still part of the same text, although imgidas of this type
usually only have one composition.
 17. Šulgi to Amar-Sin 1
(ŠAm1, 3.1.13, RCU 13)

This letter not fully edited here. It is unclear how many lines it had, but it was
undoubtedly short. In X1, it covers 11 lines, and there does not seem to be any room
for more text, because the last four lines are written on the lower edge and the next
column (iii in my reconstruction) starts with the first line of ŠaŠu1 (18).1 The land-
scape format Isin practice tablet, which probably had the whole text, is very poorly
preserved; the obverse has the remains of eight lines, and the reverse seems to have
had only a colophon. It was read from a hand-copy and photograph kindly provided
by Claus Wilcke.
I can only offer a preliminary edition of the first half of the text to assist in future
identification of duplicates:

Sources
Is1 = IB 733 (IM 78644)
X1 = Ni. 3083 ii 10′–20′ (ISET 2 115)
Tablet typology: compilation tablet (Type I): X1. Ib1 is Type III in landscape
format.

Textual Matrix
1. amar-den.zu-
I
na-ra ù-na-a-dug4
Is1 ++ ++ + + + ++ ++
X1 ++ +suʾenx(30) + + + + + +
2. d
šul-gi lugal-zu na-ab-bé-a
Is1 ++ + + + + + + +
X1 -+ + + + + + + +

1. On the reconstruction of X1, see above, p. 56. Even if one were to interpret the obverse
and reverse differently, the letter would only have eleven lines, because this would be the end of
the last column of the tablet.

396
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 397

3. aša5 KA nam? lugal ù-na-a-dug4-ba šu mu-ni-tak4?-a

Is1 + + + + + +2 + + + + + + + +
X1 + + x x ++ ++ + +? - - + x
4. šà gi-na-zu-ta numun nam-lugal za-e-me-en
Is1 + + + + + + + + + ++ +
X1 ne-šè ù-na-a-dug4-g̃u10 ... ?

5. a-na-aš-àm ka-aš-bar a-šà-ga x nu-mu-e-ši-in-šub

Is1 ++ + + + x x +. + x + + - + . o
X1 ++ + + + + + + + + x + + + + + +

Speak to Amar-Sin, 2 saying (the words) of Šulgi, your king:

1

In the matter of the . . . field, concerning which that letter was dispatched: By
3

your righteous birth you are of royal seed! Why have you not . . . the decisions con-
cerning the field? . . . .

The rest of the text cannot be reconstructed at the present time.

Inasmuch as I cannot do more with this composition, it is necessary to comment
on line 4, which seems to indicate that Amar-Sin was Šulgi’s son and was recognized
as crown prince in his father’s lifetime. The line is present only in Is1 and not in
X1. The expression numun nam-lugal is otherwise unattested in Old Babylonian
Sumerian and is surely spurious here, calqued from Old Babylonian Akkadian; this
may reflect zēr šarrūtim, zērum dārium ša šarrūtim, first documented from the time of
Hammurabi (CH ii 13, v 1).

2. ù-na written as na-ù.

 18. Šarrum-bani to Šu-Sin 1
(ŠaŠu1, 3.1.15, RCU 17)

Composite Text
1. d
šu-den.zu lugal-g̃u10-ra ù-na-a-dug4
2. šar-ru-um-ba-ni gal-zu unken-na árad-zu na-ab-bé-a
3. bàd gal mu-ri-iq-tidnim-e dím-me-dè kíg̃-gi4-a-aš mu-e-gi4
4. igi-zu ma-an-g̃ar-ma amurrum ma-da-aš mu-un-šub-šub-bu-uš
5. bàd dù-ù-dè g̃ìri-bi ku5-ru-dè
6. íd
idigna ídburanun-na-bi-da
7. gú-g̃ìri-bi a-šà-e nam-ba-e-šú-šú á-šè mu-e-da-ág̃
8. zi-zi-da-g̃u10-ne
9. gú ídáb-gal-ta en-na ma-da zi-mu-darki-ra-šè
10. éren?-bi ì-zi-dè
11. bàd-bi 26 dana-kam dím-e-da-g̃u10-ne
12. dal-ba-na hur-sag̃ min-a-bi-ka sá di-da-g̃u10-ne
13. dím-me-g̃u10-šè amurrum šà? hur-sag̃-g̃á-ka íb-tuš-a g̃éštu mu-ši-in-ak
14 . si-mu-ur4ki nam-tab-ba-ni-šè im-ma-da-gin?
15. dal-ba-na hur-sag̃ ebihki-ke4 g̃ištukul sìg-ge-dè im-ma-ši-gin
16. ù g̃á-e érin gidubsik ì-íl-íl-eš-àm x ⸢nu?⸣-um-mi-du8
17. g̃iš
tukul sìg-ge-dè gaba-ri-ni-šè ba-gen-en
18. tukum-bi lugal-g̃á an-na-kam
19. érin kíg̃-ak-ne ha-ma-ab-dah-e á ha-ma-g̃á-g̃á
20. u18-ru ma-da sá nu-ub-da-du11-ga inim-bi x x
21. ma-da murub4ki-šè lú-kíg̃-gi4-a mu-ni-gi4
22. ma-da dím-ma-bi ba-da-kúr
23. bàd dù-ù-dè nu-šub-bé-en ì-dù-en ù g̃ištukul ì-sìg-ge-en
24. gal-zu unken-na im-ri-a gu-la-àm hé-em-ma-da-ri
25. dím-ma ma-da nu-ub-da-kúr-ra-aš sá hu-mu-un-e
26. u4 lú-kíg̃-gi4-a-g̃u10 igi-zu-šè mu-e-ši-gi4-a-g̃u10
27. eg̃ir-ra-ni-ta lú-dnanna énsi ma-da zi-mu-dar-raki-šè
28. lú-kíg̃-gi4-a mu-ni-gi4
29. 7200 érin mu-e-ši-in-gi4

398
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 399

30. lú gidubsik íb-si lú g̃ištukul sìg-ge bí-ib-tur

31. tukum-bi lugal-g̃u10 érin kíg̃-ak-ne duh-ù-bé ab-bé
32. ù-šub g̃ištukul ga-àm-da-sìg
33. lú gal-gal ma-da-za lú in-ne-ši-in-gi4
34. igi-ne-ne ma-an-g̃ar-re-eš-ma
35. me-en-dè uru-uru en-nu-ùg̃ nu-mu-da-ak-en-dè-en
36. a-na-gin7-nam ugnim a-ra-ab-šúm-mu
37. lú-kíg̃-gi4-a-g̃u10 mu-na-ni-in-ge4-eš
38. u4 lugal-g̃u10 á mu-e-da-ág̃-ta
39. u4-te g̃i6-ba kíg̃ im-mi-íb-gi4-gi4-in ù g̃ištukul ì-sìg-ge-en
40. mu inim lugal-g̃á-ke4 ì-gub-bé-en ù g̃ištukul íb-lah5-lah5-e
41. usu nu-um-g̃ar g̃ištukul-ta nu-silig-ge-en
42. lugal-g̃u10 hé-en-zu1
1
Speak to Šu-Sin, my king: 2 saying (the words of) the prefect Šarrum-bani, your
servant:
3
You commissioned me to carry out construction on the great fortifications of
Muriq-Tidnim 4 and presented your views to me as follows: “The Amorites have re-
peatedly raided the frontier territory.” 7 You commanded me 5 to rebuild the fortifica-
tions, to cut off their access, 6–7 and thus to prevent them from repeatedly overwhelm-
ing the fields through a breach (in the defenses) between theTigris and Euphrates.
8
As I was leaving (for the assignment), 9 from the banks of the Abgal canal up to
the territory of Zimudar, 10I levied workers there.
11
When I had been working on the fortifications that then measured 26 dana
(269 km.), 12 after having reached (the area) between the two mountain ranges, 13 the
Amorite camped in the mountains turned his attention to my building activities.
14
(The leader of) Simurum came to his aid, and 15 he went out against me between
the mountain ranges of Ebih to do battle. 16 And therefore I, even though I could not
spare corvée workers (for fighting), 17 went out to confront him in battle.
18
If my king is agreeable, 19 he will reinforce my laborers so that I can get to work.
20
Although I have not been able to reach the (main) fortification tower of the frontier
territory, [as soon as I received] information, 21 I sent an envoy to the interior. 22 But
the territory has changed its allegiance, 23 and so I have not neglected to build the
fortifications—(to the contrary), I have been building and fighting (at the same
time). 24–25 Even if (another) prefect were to be selected from the grandest of (military)
units, he would still not be able to attain the goal of preventing the frontier territory from
changing its allegiance.
26
After I dispatched my envoy to you, 27–28 right behind him I dispatched (an-
other) envoy to Lu-Nanna, the governor of Zimudar, and 29 he sent me a very large
contingent (namely, 7,200) of workers. 30 There are enough corvée laborers but not

1. Var.: u4 kur-kur-ra hé-en-dul.

400 18. Šarrum-bani to Šu-Sin 1

enough fighting men! 31 Once my king gives the orders to release the workers (for
military duty), 32 then when (the enemy) raids, I shall be able to fight him!
33
He (Lu-Nanna?) dispatched the (same) man to the nobles of your frontier ter-
ritory 34 and they presented their case to me as follows: 35 “We cannot even guard all
the cities by ourselves, 36 how can (we) give you (more) troops? ” 37 They then sent
my messenger back (to me) through him.
38
Ever since my king commanded me, 39day and night I have been diligently
doing the assigned work as well as fighting (the enemy). 40 Because I am obedient
to my king’s command (to build the fortifications) and I continue to battle again and
again, 41 even though the requisite force has not been assigned to me, I will not cease
fighting. 42 Now my king is informed (about all of this)!2

Commentary
At the present time, this letter is only attested in sources from Ur and from
tablets of uncertain provenience, but it was also known to the compiler of the Uruk
Letter Catalog, which includes the entry: 4′ ⸢šu‑den.zu šar‑ru‑um‑ba‑ni⸣ [ . . . ]
(followed by the incipit of the response).
3–7. The verb igi . . . g̃ ar is used in such contexts to introduce direct speech, as in
PuIb1 (23), although the sources differ on the person who is speaking. In X1, it is the
messenger (igi-ni ⸢ma-an⸣-g̃ ar-ma), in X3 it is the king (igi-zu mu-e-g̃ ar-ma),
and Ur1 has a hybrid form (igi-zu ma-an-g̃ ar-ma). On the other hand, the paral-
lel use of á . . . ág̃ (line 7) in ArŠ1: 8 (1) suggests that we are dealing with indirect
speech. The variants in all manuscripts compound the problem.
Apparently, kíg̃ -gi 4 -a-aš . . . gi4 is used here in the sense of “send work orders”; X1
must have had kíg̃ mu-[e-da-gi4], “sent me an order.” The subordinate temporal
clauses in line 5 require a main clause, and if this is á . . . ág̃ , then only the first
sentence is a direct quotation and the rest is a summary of the instructions.
7. The reconstructed text follows Ur1. The scribe of X2 either missed two signs or
understood the text differently: “so that from a breach in the Tigris and Euphrates
waters should not overwhelm (the land/fields).” Note that a-šà is far from certain,
because the second sign looks more like ba than šà.
8/10. The verb in both lines must be zi(g), “to rise (transitive and intransitive),
levy, etc.” For the form in line 8, compare Ur-Ninurta Hymn A 49: [(im)-u18]-lu-
gin7 zi-zi-da-zu-ne, “when you arise like the south wind.” The meaning here proba-
bly reflects the Akkadian use of tebû, in the meaning “to set out, depart, leave” (CAD
T 311). In line 10, it reflects the more common Sumerian usage, meaning “to levy,”
(dekû). This conforms to what Ur III sources tell us about Šarrum-bani. Presumably

2. Var: May the storm (of my king) cover the land!

 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 401

he was stationed at Apiak, on the Abgal, when he received his order from the king
and he apparently levied workers as he made his way to Zimudar.
11–12. In Ur III, as in later times, the dana was equivalent to ca. 10 2⁄3 km.; see,
most recently, R. Englund, JESHO 31 (1988) 168 n. 40. Therefore, according to
this text, the fortifications at this point measured ca. 269 km. in length. Note the
writing dana (KASKAL.BU), which is standard in OB but in Ur III is used only at
Nippur; it is regularly written da-na (or te-na) in all other archives of that time.
On these lines, see P. Attinger, Eléments 639 n. 1839; he considers min-a-bi-kam/
àm as mistake (for a-ba), but it is more likely that this is an example of a morpho-
phonemic writing.
16. The reading of the first signs of the final verb is uncertain. I have read ⸢x nu-⸣,
because the remains of x do not resemble the expected igi. One could translate: “and
as for me, as soon as I had released . . . the corvée workers.”
For dupsik, “corvée,” see the comments on PuŠ1: 27 (13) above. Such workers, like
éren, could do both labor and military duties.
19. The second verb in the line is difficult. Normally, á . . . g̃ ar is interpreted as “to
win, oppress, defeat” (F. Karahashi, Sumerian Compound Verbs, 76–77), and this would
result in a translation “he will reinforce my laborers so that he will assure my victory.”
While I would not rule this out, with some reservations, I suggest that á . . . g̃ á-g̃ á
is idiomatically equivalent to Akkadian aḫam šakānum, “to initiate work” (CAD Š /1
136). Although at present this meaning for the Akkadian is attested only in NA, see
already á g̃ á-g̃ á = a-ḫu-[um . . . ] (OBGT XI iii 12). Perhaps this means simply “to
provide wages” and the line should be translated: “he will reinforce my laborers and
provide me with the (appropriate) wages.”
20. The word u18-ru has been discussed numerous times, without a final consensus
as to its meaning; see, most recently, J. Klein, FS Hallo, 126. It appears that two
different words have to be posited, an adjective that has been translated “valiant,”
“mighty,” or as a noun. The latter has been rendered “tower” by Klein and others,
but this is a guess only.
21. On ma-da murub4ki, see p. 142 above.
22. dím-ma ma-da kúr, “to alter the allegiance/state of the frontier/territory,”
which is not attested in Sumerian outside of CKU, is a calque from Akkadian ṭēm
mātim šanûm; on the Akkadian expression, which is limited to omen texts, see J. Bot-
téro, in A. Finet, ed., La voix d’opposition, 146–49. Ur Lament 230 and Udug-hul vi
560 have dím-ma kalam-ma, “the state of the homeland.”
24. In the lexical tradition, the word im-ri-a is generally rendered by kimtum,
šalātum, and nišātum; see the dictionaries and Å. Sjöberg, HSAO 1 202–9. Prior to
Ur III, it is written as im-ru-a; this is still the case in Gudea and in the common Ur
III PN lugal-im-ru-a, at Girsu, Drehem, Ur, Nippur, and in the Turam-ili archive.
402 18. Šarrum-bani to Šu-Sin 1

In Ur III, im-ri-a is attested only in single occurrence of the PN lugal-im-ri-a

(AUCT 1 300:5) from Drehem and twice in a summary of an Umma legal proceed-
ing, NSGU 201 (TCL 5 6059). While generally translated “family, kin-group,” or the
like, the exact meaning of im-ri-a in early texts is difficult to determine. The Gudea
Cylinders include mention of the im-ri-a of Ningirsu, Nanše, and Inana (Cyl. A
xvi 18–27); these seem to be corporate groups, not necessarily related by kinship
ties, that have labor and possibly military obligations to the state. Something similar
seems to be the case in Šulgi Hymn B 98–99: g̃iškak-pana-ta zú-kéš-g̃ á na-me,
im-ri-a diš-àm lú na-ma-ta-éd-e, “And as for (shooting) arrows, not one man
from any unit among my regiments could outdo me!” Here there can be no doubt
that im-ri-a is a military unit of some kind; it might be kin-based but this cannot be
established at present.
In this line, the term is qualified by the adjective gu-la, which is usually found in
geographical names and in cultic texts but is rare in main-dialect Sumerian school
compositions. The meaning of the word is still open to debate; it is usually viewed
as a phonetic variant of gal but it is more likely that it is a superlative, as in ur-gu-
la, which, like ur-mah, is one of the various words for “lion” in Sumerian (see my
forthcoming study of this feline terminology). Note, in epistolary literature, Letter
of Inim-Enlila 8–9: nam-tag-g̃ u10 nu-zu nam-tag-g̃ á g̃ éštu la-ba-ši-g̃ ál, nam-
im-ri-a šár-ré ? i-si-iš-bi í b-gu7-en, which I would translate, with all due caution,
“I have no idea of my transgression, I have not been told of (the true nature of my)
transgression; because (of the shame that this has brought) on (my) numerous family,
I am consumed with sorrow.” It is therefore possible that the present line also refers
to a kin group rather than a military unit.
24–25. The verb in line 25 and the syntax of both lines are problematical. The form
sá hu-mu-un-e is third-person, and although the non-perfect form normally has
the agent suffixed, this particular verb (dug4/e) is used with a prefixed agent with the
non-perfect root in OB Sumerian literary texts.
30. The verb si is used here in the sense of Akkadian maṭû, “to be sufficient for,”
a usage that is probably derived from Akkadian—almost always in the form (i)-
í b-si—and found mainly in logographic usage in mathematical school texts; e.g.,
PBS and SET 38:3 (see E. Robson, Mesopotamian Mathematics, 105 for a different
interpretation).
The use of tur as a verbal rather than adjectival root is likewise an Akkadism; it is
based on the use of maṭû (normally rendered in lexical and bilingual texts by lal).
Compare, for example, the Old Babylonian letter AbB 14 167:16–18: ù dam.gàr
maš-gán-šabraki 16 érin.hi.a i-sí-ḫu-nim-ma iá kaskal.meš ma-ṭi-a-nim, “And
while the traders of Maškan-šapir have assigned me 16 workers, I still have five work
gangs too little.” Indeed, the phraseology of this line brings to mind the logographic
hé.diri (hé).ba.lal, that is, litir limṭi, “let it be more or less,” in Old Babylonian
documents (CAD A/II 488).
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 403

31. The verb duh is the opposite of kešd; it is used when releasing people from work
or obligations. See Schooldays 8: u4 é-dub-ba-a duh-ù-dè é-šè ì-du-dè, “when
school was let out, I would go home.”
33–37. The shifters seem confusing, but it appears that Šarrum-bani sent a mes-
senger to Lu-Nanna asking for troops. The latter, in turn, addressed the nobles of his
land, who replied that they could not spare any soldiers, addressing Šarrum-bani as
well as Lu-Nanna. It may be that the Lu-Nanna and Šarrum-bani letter (LuŠa1, 20)
contains that response. The lú of line 33 must be the same messenger as the one in
lines 28 and 37; it appears that, after hearing out Šarrum-bani’s envoy, Lu-Nanna
sent him on to the nobles, and they, in turn, had him return directly to Šarrum-bani.
38–39. Alternative translation: “Once my king (issues me new) orders, night and
day I will do the assigned work and fight (the enemy).”
39. See the Ur III letter-order TCS 1 56: 9: ú-la-bi u4-te-ta g̃ i6-ba-šè and OBGT
I 811 (MSL 4 59): g̃ i6-bi-ta u4-te-en-šè = mu-ša-am a-di ur-ri-im.
The interpretation of the verb kíg̃ . . . gi4 is based on TCS 1 326:7 [k]i-g̃ u10-šè
⸢ha⸣-àm-⸢gi4⸣-gi4; see the comments of E. Sollberger.
40. I know of only one other occurrence of g̃ištukul( . . . )lah5-lah5, in Amurrum
Hymn A 50: eškiri zi-⸢da⸣-[na g̃iš]tukul šár lah5-lah5 šà-ga-na lá-a-ni, “when
he is armed with his righteous staff and with his beloved weapon that mows down
multitudes.”
41. X2 has nu-silig-ge-en but X3 reads silig-ge-[en]. The finite verbal form (in
the meaning “to cease”) occurs almost exclusively with the negative prefix; hence,
the latter variant is preferred. For examples, see Å. Sjöberg, TCS 3 64. It is possible
that the author of X3 interpreted the verb as šugašpūru, “to be mighty.” The transla-
tion of this line is uncertain; alternatively, one could also propose a rendition “even
though I have inadequate forces at my disposal, I will not be finished off by force.”

Sources
Ur1 = U. 16885 (UET 6/2 183, No. 1 Broad St.)3 = 1–16; 18–23
X1 = Ni. 3083 (ISET 2 115) iii 1–4 = 1–5
X2 = YBC 4672 = 22–42
X3 = YBC 7149 i 1–ii 20 = 1–42

Tablet typology: compilation tablets: X1, X3, rest Type III (X2 landscape).
Bibliography: Translation: P. Michalowski, Royal Letters, 79.

3. The tablet has deteriorated since it was copied.

404 18. Šarrum-bani to Šu-Sin 1

Textual Matrix
1. d
šu-den.zu lugal-g̃u10-ra ù-na-a-dug4
Ur1 -?. . . . o o . + . . .
X1 -+ - sin + + + + + ++ :
X3 .+ + + + . ⸢g̃á⸣ - + + ++
2. šar-ru-um-ba-ni gal-zu unken-na árad-zu na-ab-bé-a
Ur1 + + + . . + + + + + + . + + +
X1 + . . . . + + + + + + + + . .
X3 + + + + + + + + + + + + + + -
3. bàd gal mu-ri-iq-tidnim-e dím-me-dè kíg̃-gi4-a-aš mu-e-gi4
Ur1 + + + + + PIRIG ̃ .PIRIG̃ -e + + + + + ++ bí - +
X1 + + + - - PIRIG ̃ .PIRIG̃ -e . + ⸢da⸣ . - - - . . o
X3 + + + + + PIRIG ̃ -e + e + + + ++ + ++
4. igi-zu ma-an-g̃ar-ma amurrum ma-da-aš mu-un-šub-šub-bu-uš
Ur1 + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
X1 . ni . . + + . o o o . . . o o o
X3 + + mu e + +/ + + + + + . + + + -
5. bàd dù-ù-dè g̃ìri-bi ku5-ru-dè
Ur1 + + + + + + + - .
X1 o o . . o o o o o
X3 + + + + + + + + .
6. íd
idigna ídburanuna-na-bi-da
Ur1 ++ ++ + . .
X3 .+ ++ + + ta
7. gú-g̃ìri-bi a-šà-e nam-ba-e-šú-šú á-šè mu-e-da-ág̃
Ur1 + + + + +4 + + + + + . + + + + .⸢na⸣.
X3 . + + + - - + bí ib + + + + + . . +
8. zi-zi-da-g̃u10-ne
Ur1 + + + + .
X3 + + + + .
9. gú ídáb-gal-ta en-na ma-da zi-mu-darki-ra-šè
Ur1 + +abgal + . . o o I. . . o o o :
X3 + + + + + + + + . . + da+ + +
10. éren?-bi ì-zi-dè
Ur1 o o oo o
X3 . + +. +

4. The sign looks more like ba.

 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 405

11. bàd-bi 26 dana-kam dím-e-da-g̃u10-ne

Ur1 . . + + ⸢àm⸣ o o o o o
X3 . . + + + . ++ + +
12. dal-ba-na hur-sag̃ min-a-bi-ka sá di-da-g̃u10-ne
Ur1 + + + + + + + . o o o o o o
X3 + + + . . + ++ + + + + + +
13. dím-me-g̃u10-šè amurrum šà? hur-sag̃-g̃á-ka íb-tuš-a g̃éštu mu-ši-in-ak
Ur1 + + + + + x o o o o i+ + - + . o o o
X3 . . . . . . + + . + + + +. . . . .
14. si-mu-ur4ki nam-tab-ba-ni-šè im-ma-da-gin?
Ur1 + + + + + + + . o o o o o
X3 . . o .5 + + + + + + + . .?
15. dal-ba-na hur-sag̃ ebihki-ke4 g̃ištukul sìg-ge-dè im-ma-ši-gin
Ur1 + . . + + . o o oo o o o .? .? ni o
X3 . o o . + . + + ++ + + . . + + +
16. ù g̃á-e éren gidubsik ì-íl-íl-eš-àm hu?-mu?-um-mi-du8
Ur1 traces
X3 . + + + . . + . + + + .? .? . + +
17. tukul sìg-ge-dè
g̃iš
gaba-ri-ni-šè ba-gin-en
X3 ++ . . + . . + + + + .
18. tukum-bi lugal-g̃á an-na-kam
Ur1 . o o o o o o
X3 . . + . + + +
19. éren kíg̃-ak-ne ha-ma-ab-dah-e á ha-ma-g̃á-g̃á
Ur1 . . o o o o o o o . o o o o
X3 . + + + + + . . . + + + + +
20. u18-ru ma-da sá nu-ub-da-du11-ga inim-bi x x
Ur1 + + . . o o o o o o o o o o
X3 DAR-a + + + + + + . . . + x x
21. ma-da murub4ki-šè lú-kíg̃-gi4-a mu-ni-gi4
Ur1 + + . . . . o o o o o o
X3 . . . ++ + + + + + . .
22. ma-da dím-ma-bi ba-da-kúr
Ur1 . . + + + o o o
X2 + + + . . + + +
X3 . + + + + + + +

5. The spacing suggests that this text had si-m[u-ur (4) -ru-um k ] i .
406 18. Šarrum-bani to Šu-Sin 1

23. bàd dù-ù-dè nu-šub-bé-en ì-dù-en ù g̃ištukul ì-sìg-ge-en

Ur1 .[dí]m-⸢me⸣-dè + . o o o . ⸢e⸣ + oo oo o o
X2 + + . . + + + + ++ + + +. ++ . +
X3 + + ++ + + . + + + e. + ++ +. + +
24. gal-zu unken-na im-ri-a gu-la-àm hé-em-ma-da-ri
X2 + + + + + ++ + + + + - + + +
X3 + + + + + +. . + . + + + + +
25. dím-ma ma-da nu-ub-da-kúr-ra-aš sá hu-mu-un-e
X2 + + . . + + + + + - . +6 + + +
X3 + + + + + + + + ++ + + + + +
26. u4 lú-kíg̃-gi4-a-_u10 igi-zu-šè mu-e-ši-gi4-a-g̃u10
X2 + . + + + + + + + + ++ + + +
X3 + + . + + + + + - + + + gi - +
27. egir-ra-ni-ta lú-dnanna énsi ma-da zi-mu-dar-raki-šè
X2 . . . + + +. + + + /. . + + + +
X3 . + + + + +en-ki + + + + + + ++ +
28. lú-kíg̃-gi4-a mu-ni-gi4
X2 + . . ++ + +
X3 + + + ++ + +
29. 72007 éren mu-e-ši-in-gi4
X2 + + + ++ + +
X3 + + + ++ + +
30. lú dubsik íb-si lú g̃ištukul sìg-ge
gi
bí-ib-tur
X2 + +. + + + ++ + + + + +8
X3 + ++ + + + ++ + + + . +
31. tukum-bi lugal-g̃u10 éren kíg̃-ak-ne duh-ù-bé ab-bé
X2 + + + . + + + + + ++ + +
X3 + + + + + + + + + +. . .
32. ù-šub g̃ištukul ga-àm-da-sìg
X2 . . ++ + + + +:
X3 + + ++ + an + +
33. lú gal-gal ma-da-za lú in-ne-ši-in-gi4
X2 o . + + + + + + + ++ +
X3 + + + + + + + + + + - ⸢gi⸣

6. Written ri.
7. Written ŠÁR.ŠÁR in both manuscripts.
8. 10 mark on left margin.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 407

34. igi-ne-ne ma-an-g̃ar-re-eš-ma

X2 o . . + + + + + +
X3 + + + + + + + + +
35. me-en-dè uru-uru en-nu-ùg̃ nu-mu-da-ak-en-dè-en
X2 o . + en + . me + + + + + + + + + +
X3 + + + + + + + + + + + + . . .
36. a-na-gin7-nam ugnim a-ra-ab-šúm-mu
X2 #
X3 ++ + + + ++ . . .
37. lú kíg̃-gi4-a-g̃u10 mu-na-ni-in-ge4-eš
X2 . + + ++ + + + + + +
X3 . . + ++ + + + - ge .
38. u4 lugal-g̃u10 á mu-e-da-ág̃-ta
X2 o . + + + ++ + +
X3 + . . + + ++ + .
39. u4-te g̃i6-ba kíg̃ im-mi-íb-gi4-gi4-in ù g̃ištukul ì-sìg-ge-en
X2 . + _e17 + + + + + + + + + + + ++ . +
X3 + + + + . . . . . . o + ++ + + o9 .
40. mu inim lugal-g̃á-ke4 ì-gub-bé-en ù g̃ištukul íb-lah5-lah5-e
X2 + + + . + + + + + + ++ . + . +
X3 + . + + + + + + + + oo o o o o
41. usu nu-um-g̃ar tukul-ta nu-silig-ge-en
g̃iš

X2 + + + + ++ + + +10 + + :
X3 + + + + ++ + - + . o
42. lugal-g̃u10 hé-en-zu
X2 u4 ⸢kur⸣-kur hé-en-⸢dul⸣
X3 + + + + .

In X3 followed by ŠuŠa1 (19).

Colophon L (X2)

9. A piece of clay has been glued in the break, possibly in the place of ge.
10. It seems that the scribe had problems with this sign and wrote silig(URU×IGI) as
URU×IGI+IGI.
 19. Šu-Sin to Šarrum-bani 1
(ŠuŠa1, 3.1.16, RCU 18)

Sources
X1 = BM 54327 iii 1′–12′ 8–24
X2 = YBC 7149 ii 21–iv 12 1–45
Tablet typology: both are compilation tablets (Type I).
Translation: P. Michalowski, Royal Letters 79–80.

Text Transliteration
1. X2 šar-ru-um-ba-ni-ra ù-na-a-d[ug4]
I

2. X2 šu-⟨den.zu⟩ lugal-zu na-ab-bé-a

d

3. X2 lú-kíg̃-gi4-a mu-e-ši-gi-a-g̃u10 dirig šà-šè x[. . .]

4. X2 ⸢u4-è⸣ á-ág-gá-g̃u10 g̃á-a-gin7-nam ma-[. . .] li1-bí-íb-diri-g[e-(en)]
5. X2 u4 ⸢è-da-zu⸣-ne igi-g̃u10 ⸢i⸣-x[. . .]
6. X2 g̃á-e a-na ma-ab-en-⸢na⸣ x[. . .]
7. X2 šà ma-da-ka gin-a-zu-⸢ne⸣
8. X1 ma-⸢da⸣ [ ]
X2 ma-da-a ba-e-te g̃i6 sá na-[. . .]
9. X1 lú gal-gal-bi-⸢e⸣-n[e . . .]
X2 lú gal-gal-bi-ne KA ù-[. . .]
10. X1 tukum-bi nam-⸢te⸣-n[a? . . .]
X2 tukum-bi ní-te-na-g̃á SU [. . .]
11. X1 #, or on line 10.
X2 umuš-ne-ne SU-a-ni [. . .]
12. X1 lú gal-gal-bi-e-ne ⸢šubtum⸣ (KASKAL.⸢LAGAB×U⸣LAGAB×U )
hé-mu-⸢e-da-su8⸣-[ge-eš]
X2 lú gal-gal-bi-ne KASKAL.TÚG.MU[L ... ]
13. X1 tur-ne-ne ub-ta-ri :
X2 tur-tur-ne-ne ub-ta-⸢ri⸣

1. Preceded by an erased sign (hé ?).

408
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 409

14. X1 e-ne-ne-gin7-nam ma-⸢da⸣ x [. . .]

X2 e-ne-ne-gin7-nam ma!2-da x[. . .]
15. X1 tukum-bi u183-lú g̃árza-bi-e-ne :
X2 tukum-bi ù-⸢lú⸣ [. . .]
16. X1 umuš-bi aša-⸢àm⸣
X2 umuš-bi-⸢ne⸣ aša-[. . .]
17. X1 bùru-da-ne-ne nu-e-da-sì-ke :
X2 bùru-da-ne-ne-a nu-mu-ud-x[. . .]
18. X1 lú kúr-ra g̃ar-g̃ar-bi-⸢da⸣
X2 lú kúr-ra g̃ar-g̃ar-bi-[. . .]
19. X1 uru-bi zag ù-bí-⸢dib⸣
X2 uru-bi zag-bi ù-b[í?-. . .]
20. X1 en-na íb-ta-ab-e11-ne na-ab-ta-⸢bal⸣-e-ne
X2 en-na bàd-bi ab-ta-⸢è⸣-[ne] na-ab-ta-bal-e-[ne]
21. X1 nita-bi ù-gaz
X2 ⸢nita⸣-bi ù-g[az]
22. X1 érin-bi uru ma-da-ka-zu-šè dab5-àm la-ab4-x-x :
X2 munus-bi uru ⟨ma⟩-da-ka-zu-šè ab-dab5-e(-)x[. . .]
23. X1 á-ša mu-e-da-ág̃
X2 á-šè mu-e-da-ág̃-x?
24. X1 a-na-aš-àm g̃á-a-gin7-nam nu-ak
X2 a-na-aš-àm g̃á-a-gin7-nam nu-⸢ak⸣
25. X1 ⸢lú⸣ gaz-dè lú igi hul-⸢hul-da⸣
X2 lú ⸢gaz⸣-dè igi hul-hul-le-⸢dè⸣
26. X2 ⸢uru gul⸣-gul-dè šu-zu-šè nu-g̃ar-ra
27. X2 ⸢nam-nir⸣-g̃ál mu-ra-šúm
28. X2 u4 ⸢bàd⸣ igi-ša!-⸢da⸣-hur dšul-gi ad-da-⟨g̃u10⟩ mu-un-dù-a
29. X2 za-e-⸢en⸣-zé-en in-nu
30. X2 g̃iš
gu-za-⸢g̃á⸣ g̃išgu-⸢za⸣ dšul-gi-ra-ka in-nu
31. X2 I
⟨ lú⟩-den-ki ⸢énsi⸣ ma-da zi-mu-dar-ra!ki-šè
32. X2 hé-mu-e-ši-DU
33. X2 g̃éš ugnim-ma-⸢ka⸣ hé-de6
34. X2 [érin-na-ni]-⸢ta⸣ hé-mi-ib-gi4-gi4
35. X2 [Iba-b]a-ti ⸢pisag̃-dub⸣-ba NE-i-e-da-ág̃-ta
36. X2 [m]u-na-an-⸢šúm-ma-ta⸣ bàd-bi hé-dù-a
37. X2 ⸢ù?⸣ za-e érin šu-zu-ta ì-g̃ál-la
38. X2 [h]i-ri-tumki ba-al-lá
39. X2 [m]a-da dím-⸢ma-bi⸣ nu-ku5-ru-dè
40. X2 [n]am-ba-šúm-mu-⸢un-zé⸣-en

2. Written dím !.
3. Written URU rather than G ̃ IŠGAL.
4. Preceded by an erased ba.
410 19. Šu-Sin to Šarrum-bani 1

41. X2 [e]n-na ma-da mu-un-gi!(nam)-na-ta

42. X2 ⸢érin⸣ nam-mu-un-du8-re-zé-en
43. X2 lú-⸢kíg̃⸣-gi4-a-e-ne á-ág̃-g̃á ma-da
44. X2 d
utu-è-da-bi ha-ma-tùm
45. X2 a-ma-ru-kam
1
Speak to Šarrum-bani: 2 saying (the words of) Šu-Sin, your king:
3
The envoy whom I sent to you, . . . above and beyond. . . . 4 At daybreak my
orders that I had provided, to me . . . you were not to exceed. 5 After you went away,
before . . . 6 As for me, whatever (you) say to me . . . 7 After you set out for to the
center of the frontier territory, 8 you approached the territory and after spending
the night . . . 9 Its nobles . . . 10 If by yourself . . . 11 their understanding . . . his. . . .
12
Their nobles then staged an ambush against you. 13 When their people had been
expelled, 14 like them the frontier territory. . . . 15 If their officer . . . 16 are of one mind,
17
you will not be able to root them out from their hiding places. 18  The enemy all
gathered together. . . . 19 When their cities have been handed over, 20 until they come
out from these fortifications, let no one get through. 21 Once their (fighting) men had
been killed, 22 their women/workers of the citi(es) of your territory, who had been
captured, were not to be [harmed?]. 23 Thus did I command you. 24 Why did you not
act in accordance with my instructions?
25–26
But although it was not (normally) in your power to execute and blind
people, nor to destroy cities, 27 I gave you (that) authority. 28 When earlier ⟨my⟩ fa-
ther Šulgi had built Bad-igihursaga, 29 none of you were there. 30 The throne is mine,
it not the throne of Šulgi! 31 Lu-Nanna,5 the governor of Zimudar 32 is to come to you
and 33 he will bring 60 soldiers. 34 He is to send them [from among his own conscripts].
35
Babati, the high commissioner, in accordance with orders 36 that I have already given
to him, is to build the fortifications. 37–38 But you, with the workers that have been
entrusted to you—dig the moat! 40 You were both enjoined 39 to do nothing that
would alter the allegiance of the frontier territory; 41 until (that) territory is secured,
42  
neither you can demobilize the troops! 43–44 Then, have envoys bring news of the
territory to me each morning! 45 It is urgent!

Commentary
The only two sources for this letter are of unknown origin and both contain
mistakes, omissions, and unorthodox writings, and therefore all precise grammatical
analysis must be taken with a grain of salt. Needless to say, the interpretation of this
letter is highly conjectural. The text of this letter was also known to the compiler of
the Uruk Letter Catalog, according to line 5′: šar‑ru‑um‑ba-⸢ni‑ra⸣.
8. The scribe of X2 may have written e for u4, and the passage may have read u4-te
gi6 sá.

5. Written as I ⟨lú⟩- d en-ki.

 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 411

12. The reading šubtum of KASKAL.LAGAB×ULAGAB×U is documented in lexical texts (the

variant KASKAL.TÚG.MU[L . . .] in X2 is inexplicable to me); see CAD Š/3 172
sub šubtu. The Akkadian word means both “dwelling” and “ambush, military post,”
but the Sumerian loan only encompasses the latter meaning. See, for example, Letter
of Sin-tillati to Iddin-Dagan (SEpM 2) 5: amurrum gištukul-bi-da šubtum-ta im-
ma-zi, “the Amorites sprung an armed ambush against me.”
19–20. These lines were translated differently in PSD B 53a: “its cities, it borders,
and finally right up to its walls—they climbed up, indeed they got over.” Because of
the fragmentary nature of this passage it is not clear just where the previous royal
instructions begin. My translation is based on the understanding that Šu-Sin had
ordered Šarrum-bani to concentrate on building rather than on fighting, because the
province had already been pacified, and for the time being the conquered hostiles
could not break through into Babylonia.
25–27. The nuances of the words nir-g̃ ál and nam-nir-g̃ ál require a full treat-
ment; the meanings cover the conceptual range from “trust” to “authority.” It is pos-
sible that this passage, should be understood as “Although you were not permitted
to execute and blind people nor to destroy cities, (other than that) I gave you (full)
authority.” Compare Šulgi Hymn G 22: é-kur-ta nam-nir-g̃ ál šúm-ma lugal
⸢uri5⸣[ki]-ma, “One Given Authority/Trust by Enlil, King of Ur” (part of a long name
bestowed on the monarch by Enlil).
28. bàd IGI.TA/ŠA.⸢DA.HUR⸣ makes no sense, and the one text that preserves this
line is clearly corrupt. The scribe had problems both with the content and the layout
of the text and had to squeeze it into the line, which may also account for the omis-
sion of the pronoun on ad-da. One may suggest two emendations. The first possibil-
ity is that this is a confused writing of bàd-igi-hur-sag̃ -g̃ á, the name used in other
CKU letters for the fortifications built by Šulgi. The scribe who wrote X2 regularly
abbreviated proper names (šu for Šu-Sin, den-ki for lú-dnanna). He wrote bàd-igi,
then began Akkadian ša-da, followed by hur, and left it at that. The grammatical
case of the Akkadian word is a problem, nevertheless. Note that this is the only
direct evidence that Šu-Sin was Šulgi’s son (but see D. I. Owen, NABU 15 [2001]
19–20). One should also consider another possibility: that the confusion stemmed
from the name of another player in the CKU, namely Puzur-Šulgi. Faced with a badly
written original, the scribe may have assumed that this was the name of Šarrum-
bani’s father and may have understood this all as *u4 bàd igi-ta puzur4-dšul-gi
ad-da-⟨zu⟩ mu-un-dù-a, “when earlier Puzur-Šulgi, your father, had worked on the
wall. . . .” In view of what follows, I have chosen the first interpretation.
29. The plural pronominal form za-e-en-zé-en, “y’all,” is rare; the proper form
seems to be za-e-me-en-zé-en (OBGT I 377–78 [MSL 4 50], Inanna’s Descent
240/267). In the last example, the referent is dual. The only other example of za-e-
en-zé-en known to me refers to more than two: ilimmu za-e-en-zé-en diš-àm šu
te-ba-ab-zé-en, g̃ á-e dili-g̃ u10-ne ilimmu šu ga-ba-ab-ti, “(the fox said:) ‘you
412 19. Šu-Sin to Šarrum-bani 1

all are nine, take one (sheep); I as I am alone, let me take nine!’” (SP Coll 5 Vers. B
74:5–6). It is possible that Sumerian at one time distinguished between “y’all” and
“you two,” but that distinction, if it existed, would probably have been lost on the
OB scribe of this text. Whatever the case, the referent remains elusive, since up to
this point the words of the king were directed to one person, Šarrum-bani.
The only source for this passage has in-nu in 29 and 30; in light of the many irregu-
larities of this text, it is possible that it stands for in-nu-ù and that other versions
may turn up that have it as “Is my throne not the throne of Šulgi? ”
30. The form g̃iš gu-za-⸢g̃ á⸣ may be simply a mistake for g̃išgu-za-g̃ u10. The transla-
tion is based on the assumption that it stands for guza.g̃ u.am. It is also possible that
this is to be interpreted as “it is my throne” and the previous line as “none of you
were there.”
33. The word ugnim does not usually refer to individuals, and therefore it is pos-
sible that the DIŠ sign is to be read diš and that the translation should be: “he will
bring one army regiment.” The rendition here is based on the analogy with the only
other use of a number before ugnim that I am aware of, in the Letter from Nanna-
kiʾag̃a to Lipit-Eštar (SEpM 4) 5–6: šà é-danaki-šè àš me-at ugnim gu-un-gu-nu-
um, Iat-ta-ma-an-nu-um ba-ni-in-ku4, “Attamanum brought (a contingent of)
six hundred soldiers of Gungunum into Edana.”
I cannot explain the double genitive or genitive and locative in this line.
35. NE-i-e-da-ág̃ -ta makes absolutely no sense; I have provisionally understood
this as a garbled form of *á mu-e-da-(a)-ág̃ -ta. Steve Tinney suggests to me that
this may be a visual error from a badly written original: á misread as NE and mu
misread as i-i. See also line 41.
39–45. These lines are addressed to both Šarrum-bani and Babati (or perhaps Lu-
Nanna), like the end of ŠAr1 (2), which is directed at both Aradmu and Apilaša.
38. ba-al-lá must be an imperative form of ba-al, “to dig.” Despite the place-name
classifier, hi-ri-tum = ḫirītum must mean “moat” here. The classifier ki is a mis-
take brought about by the association with hi-ri-tumki, for which see RGTC 3 98.
For a moat associated with fortifications, see, e.g., Samsu-iluna Inscription 8: 66–71
(D. Frayne, RIME 4 E4.3.7.8): šà iti min-kam-ma-ka-àm, gú íd dur-ùl-ka-ta,
bàd-sa-am-su-i-lu-na-a, bí-in-dù, íd hi-ri-tum-bi, im-mi-in-ba-al, “in the course
of two months he constructed Dur-Samsu-iluna (‘Fort Samsu-iluna’) on the bank of
the Diyala and dug its moat.”
39. The writing ku5-ru-dè is undoubtedly a syllabic rendering of kúr-ru-dè, and is
only attested in X2, which is hardly surprising.
41. The verbal root nam makes no sense, and the context strongly suggests that this
is a visual mistake for gi.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 413

43–44. Compare Letter of Šamaš-ṭab to Ilak-niʾid (SEpM 17) 18: u4-da-ta á-ág̃ -
g̃ á-zu hé-em-tùm, “from now on bring me your news (continuously).”
 20. Šu-Sin to Lu-Nanna and
Šarrum-bani 1
(ŠuLuŠa1, 3.3.31)

N1 = Ni. 4164 (ISET 2 117) “obv.” ii′ 5′–11′.

Compilation tablet (Type I).

I had the occasion to collate this tablet briefly, but it is badly preserved and
requires prolonged concentrated analysis that would undoubtedly result in better
readings.
This is a fragment of a multi-column tablet that also contains official letters and
related texts. There are four such compositions in the preserved parts, and the tab-
let undoubtedly contained more. The remains of the “obverse” col. ii′ preserve the
remains of three lines that end with [a]-ma-ru-[kam], that is, the end of a letter
from an official or a king, but I cannot identify this text. It is difficult to reconstruct
what follows; at first glance, it appears to be a letter from Šarrum-bani to Lu-Nanna,
but the narrow columns make it difficult to fit in all that is required in an opening
letter formula. It is therefore more likely that this was a letter addressed to both of-
ficials by King Šu-Sin, or possibly even by the “nobles” (lú-gal-gal) of the territory
of Zimudar (see ŠaŠu1: 33–37 [18]). It may also be a one-off invention by someone
who knew that composition. Whatever the case may be, this text provides the only
evidence we have for the knowledge of the Šu-Sin correspondence in Nippur, if my
analysis of the source distribution is correct (see p. 57). The tablet is important
because it documents, albeit fragmentarily, at least four otherwise unknown literary
letters.
Instinct propels one to reconstruct first two lines as follows:
1. ⸢I⸣lú-dnanna pisag̃-du[b-ba ]
2. [é]nsi ma-da ⸢zi⸣-[mu-darki-ra ù-na-(a)-dug4]
3. ⸢Išar⸣-ru-um-ba-ni x x [x]
4. ⸢gal?-zu?-unken?-na?⸣
etc.
1–2
Speak to Lu-Nanna, high commissioner, governor of the territory of Zimudar,
3–4
saying (the words of) Šarrum-bani, the x, the prefect: . . .
414
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 415

However, there is no room for such a restoration of line 2; rather, I propose to

reconstruct the opening section as:
1. ⸢I⸣lú-dnanna pisag̃-du[b-ba]
2. [é]nsi ma-da ⸢zi⸣-[mu-darki-ra]
3. ⸢Išar⸣-ru-um-ba-ni x x [x]
4. [x] x ⸢gal?⸣-⟨zu?⟩ ⸢unken?-na?⸣
5. [x] x x ⸢ù-na-dug4⸣
6. [(d)šu-den.zu lugal-zu] ⸢na-ab-bé⸣-[a]
remnants of six lines, rest of column broken
5
Speak to 1–2 Lu-Nanna, high commissioner, governor of the territory of Zimudar,
3–4
and to Šarrum-bani, the x, the prefect, x x x, 6 saying (the words of) [Šu-Sin, your
king] . . .

The readings of lines 4–6 are highly uncertain. Note that in this text Lu-Nanna,
uniquely, carries the title “high commissioner,” as well as his customary “governor
of the territory of Zimudar.” There may be confusion here between Lu-Nanna and
Šarrum-bani’s successor in charge of Muriq-Tidnim, Babati, who was identified by the
former title in Ur III texts as well as in CKU. Note also the entry in the Uruk Let-
ter Catalog 12 ⸢pisag̃ ‑dub‑ba⸣ x x [. . .]. It is possible that this refers to a variant
recension of this letter (see p. 26 with n. 23, above).
The one preserved column of the “reverse” has the last ten lines of a letter, pos-
sibly to Šu-Sin, and the remains of the first line of another letter:
1′. [. . .]x x ⸢mu⸣ x x [. . .]
2′. min li-mu-um sag̃-DU [. . .] hu-mu-ni-i[n-. . .]
3′. x-x-bi-ne-ne x x [. . .] hé-im-mi-í[l? . . .]
4′. [ug]nim dugud h[é?- . . .]
5′. [x n]am-nun/zil-ba/zu mu-da-a[n?- . . .]
6′. [x] mu ⸢mah⸣ x [. . .]
7′. [tu]kum-bi ⸢lugal?⸣-[g̃á an-na-kam] x-bi x [. . .]
8′. [t]ukum-bi x [x] x x [. . .]
9′. ⸢eg̃er?⸣-bi šu-g̃u10 x x[. . .] x x x [. . .]
10′. [lugal?]-⸢g̃u10?⸣ hé-en-⸢zu?⸣
11′. traces

Line 11′ must contain the opening line of a letter salutation. Read perhaps [Ilú-
d
nanna pisag̃ ]-⸢dub-ba-ra⸣?
None of this resembles anything that we know at present. The tablet may have
contained a collection of otherwise unattested letters between various officials,
perhaps including the letter of King Šu-Sin concerning the construction of Muriq-
Tidnim. On the other hand, the mention of “two thousand (men)” may link this
missive to the Aba-indasa affair; see ArŠ3: 8 (7).
 21. Išbi-Erra to Ibbi-Sin 1
(IšIb1, 3.1.17, RCU 19)

Composite Text
Version A (Short Version)
1. I
i-bi-den.zu lugal-g̃u10-ra ù-na-a-dug4
2. I
iš-bi-èr-ra árad-zu na-ab-bé-a
3. kaskal ì-si-inki ka-zal-luki-šè
4. še sa10-sa10-dè á-šè mu-e-da-a-ág̃
5. šakanka aš gur-ta-àm še sá ba-an-dug4
6. 20 gun kù-babbar še sa10 RI-dè ba-an-g̃ar
7. inim amurrum lú kúr-ra šà ma-da-zu ku4-ra g̃iš ì-tuk-àm
8. 72,000 še gur še dù-a-bi šà ì-si-inki-na-šè ba-an-ku4-re-en
9. a-da-al-la-bi amurrum dù-dù-a-bi šà kalam-ma-šè ba-an-ku4-ku4
10. erim3 gal-gal-didli-bi im-mi-in-dab5-dab5
11. mu amurrum še ba-sìg-ge nu-mu-e-da-šúm-mu1
12. ugu-g̃u10 mu-ta-ni-kalag ba-dúr-en
13. lugal-g̃u10 g̃éš-u g̃išmá-gur8 120 gur-ta-àm hé-em-duh-e
14. g̃iš
má 12 kal-ga 20 g̃išza-am-ru-tum 30 g̃išillar
15. 30 G ̃ IŠ.G
̃ IŠ 5 g̃išig má ugu má?-e hé-g̃á-g̃á ù g̃išmá dù-a-bi hé-x
16. íd-da íd(-)kur-ra íd(-)pa-li-iš-tum-ta
17. zar? sal-la-šè hé-em-ta-ab-è-dè-eš
18. ù g̃á-e igi-ni-šè ga-àm-ta-è
19. ki g̃išmá kar-bi ugu-g̃á ì-tuku
20. 72,000 gur še dù-a-bi hé-g̃á-g̃á hé-e-silim
21. tukum-bi še-àm ba-ab-tur-re
22 . g̃á-e še ga-ra-ab-ku4-e2
23. lugal-g̃u10 elamki-ma šen-šen-na zi ba-an-ir
24. še-ba-ni ul4-la-bi al-til-la
25. lirum lirum na-an-duh-en

1. Followed by two fragmentary lines in X1.

2. Var. (21–22): tukum-bi še ba-an-tur-re-en / g̃á-e še-bi mu-ra-ku4 .

416
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 417

26. nam-árad-da-ni-šè sag̃-zu na-an-šúm-mu-un

27. ù eg̃ir-ra-ni-šè na-an-du-un
28. še mu udilia-ta-àm šà-gal é-gal-zu ù un dù-a-bi šà uruki-g̃u10-ta-àm ì-g̃ál3
29. uru ì-si-inki ù nibruki-ke4 en-nu-ùg̃ ak-dè ugu-g̃á hé-tuku4
30. lugal-g̃u10 hé-en-zu
Version B (Long Version)
31. lugal-g̃u10 ní nu-te ní nu-gíd-i šà-ba g̃á-e nu-te-BU
32. dig̃ir-didli-bi šà hé-ni-íb-kíg̃-kíg̃-e ki-bi hé-kíg̃-kíg̃
33. ùg̃ dag̃al-bi nam-lú-ùlu-bi mah
34. hé-silim-me-eš numun zi-da hé-en-kal-le-eš
35. uri5ki uru kù-zu an-ki-da mú-a
36. nun gal išib-e dù-a-bi sag̃-ki-bi kal-la
37. me šúm-mu ús g̃iš-hur ge-en-ge-né kur sig igi-nim-ma
38. šu-ta hé-kar-re inim-bi hé-éb-bé
39. é-kiš-nu-g̃ál èš an-ki šú-šú gaba-ri nu-tuku
40. elamki ur idim lú níg̃-ha-lam-ma-ke4
41. šu pe-el nu-ma-ak-e dlama-bi nu-si-il
42. lugal-g̃u10 gù-šúm-šúm gal-gal dùb-tuku mu-si-il-a
43. I
i-bi-den.zu šà-ta è-a-ni dig̃ir ki-ág̃-me-eš
44. an den-líl den-ki igi zi hu-mu-un-ši-bar-re-e-ne
45. [. . .] x x x x x x hé-en-g̃ar igi-bi hé-éb-gi
46. [g̃iš]
ig abul uri5ki-ma g̃ál-tak4-tak4-da-a-a
47. (x) x i-ni-ib-bé a-ba-àm lugal-g̃u10 e-še
48. lugal den-líl-le gaba-ri nu-tuku-me-en
49. x nu x x x x šà-zu na-an-gig-ge
50. x šu mu-un-gi suhuš-bi mu-ri-in-ge-en
51. [. . .]-x šu? nu-du7-a šà-zu hé-en-du10-ge
52. en-na lugal-g̃u10 al-ti-la nam-lugal uri5ki mu-un-ak-e
53. níg̃-na-me lugal-g̃u10 kíg̃ mu-na-ni-í b-gi4
54. a-ma-ru-kam nam-ba-e-šub-dè-en-zé-en
55. igi dutu-kam ka-g̃u10 nu-bal-e

Part A
Speak to Ibbi-Sin, my king, 2 saying (the words of) Išbi-Erra, your servant:
1

You gave me orders concerning an expedition from Isin to Kazallu to purchase

3–4

grain. As the market price of grain was equivalent to (one shekel) per kor, 6 twenty
5

talents of silver was invested in the purchase of grain. 7 Word having reached me that
hostile Amorites had entered your frontier territory, 8 I proceeded to deliver all the

3. Var. ù uru dù-a-zu/bi šu-mu-ta ì-g̃ál.

4. Var. nibru ki isin ki en-nu-ùg̃ ha-ra-ab-ak-e (lugal-g̃ u 10 ) ugu-g̃á hé-(en)-tuku.
418 21. Išbi-Erra to Ibbi-Sin 1

grain—72,000 kor—into (the city of) Isin. 9 But now all the Amorites have entered
the homeland, 10 and have captured all the great storehouses, one by one. 11 Because
of (these) Amorites I cannot hand over the grain for threshing;5 12 they are too strong
for me, and I am made to stay put. 13 Therefore, my king should (order) the caulking
of 600 barges of 120 kor capacity, 14 escorted by 12 armed ships, and load each with 20
swords, 30 bows, 15 load each ship with 30 beams and five (additional) hatches, and
have all the boats . . . 16–17 so that they can be brought down by water, through the
Idkura and the Palištum canals so they can pile up (the grain) in stacks (for drying),
18
and I will myself go out to meet him (i.e., Ibbi-Sin).
19
I shall take responsibility for the place where the boat(s) moor, 20 so that the
72,000 kor of grain—that is all of the grain—will be placed (there), and be safe.
21–22
Should there be a shortage of grain, I will be the one who brings you grain.6
23
My king is troubled by the war with the Elamite, 24 but his own grain rations
are rapidly being depleted, 25 so do not release your grip on power, 26 do not rush to
become his servant, 27 and to follow him! 28 There is (enough) grain in my city to
provision your palace and all the people for fifteen years,7 29 so let the responsibility
of guarding the cities of Isin and Nippur be mine!8 30 Now my king is informed (about
all of this)!
Part B
31
My king, I am neither afraid, nor worried, and (if I were you) I would certainly
not be worried in there (i.e., Ur). 32 Seek out the intentions of the various gods and
attend to them 33–34 so that its teeming people and its expansive populace will be safe
and it’s fertile offspring9 be cherished!
35
Ur, city of wisdom, linking the upper and lower regions; 36 having been built
by Great Prince (Enki), the exorcist, (it is a city) whose façade is precious (to the
people), 37 one endowed with cosmic rites, whose foundations and ground plans are
secure (among all the) lands, south to north, 38 it will surely be spared and its (favorable
divine) decision announced!
39
(Temple) Ekišnug̃al, shrine that envelops the upper and lower regions, without
rival—40 the Elamite, an evil10 vicious beast, 41 will not defile it, nor render asunder
its guardian deities! 42 My king, the loudest noisemakers haveong run away,43 Ibbi-Sin,
beloved by the gods as he came out of the womb—44 An, Enlil, and Enki looked so
favorably upon him! 45 Established . . . so that its front be secure, 46 are ordering that
the doors of the gate of Ur be opened, 47 saying “Who is really king? ” 48 But it is you

5. Followed by two fragmentary lines in X1.

6. Var.: Should you lack grain, I will bring you that grain.
7. Var.: I have at my disposal (enough) grain (to provision) your palace and all of its/your
cities for fifteen years.
8. Var.: Please let me guard Isin and Nippur for you, let me have (that) responsibility (O
my king)!
9. Alt. transl.: seed.
10. Alt. transl.: destructive.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 419

who are the king to whom Enlil gave no rival! 49 So do not. . . , so be of good spirits! 50
(He/they) has/have taken revenge, and secured its foundations for you. 51 Not being . . .
may your spirit be happy! 52 As long as my king is alive, he will exercise kingship over
Ur, 53 and (I will do) for him whatever my king might command me to do! 54 Please,
I will not neglect (your orders)! 55 By Utu, I will not change my allegiance!

Commentary
All well-conserved sources from outside of Nippur have the longer version. The
long version omits the salutation in line 31. Source X5, which has only six lines
preserved, could have had either version but has space for the longer one. However,
it omits two lines within the preserved section, and therefore it is possible that it
originally contained a shorter version of Version B. X4 has the first 29 lines, followed
by a double line—that is, the short version but without the final salutation. One
suspects that it was the first of two tablets with the long version.
The manuscript history of this letter is complex and difficult to trace at pres-
ent. There seem to be at least two different traditions of the long version, with X1
often at odds with X2 and X3, with some lines quite different and others omitted
altogether. The reconstruction presented here is an eclectic text, and it could be
constructed differently due to the wide range of variants; wherever possible, in sec-
tion A it follows the Nippur manuscripts. There is a long section between lines 15
and 34 where no Nippur text is currently available. Ideally, all eight manuscripts of
this composition should be transliterated and translated separately but this is hardly
a practical solution here.
5. For the reading šakanka of KI.LAM, see the commentary to ŠIš1:17 (15).
Two Nippur manuscripts, as well as one of unknown origin, have the non-finite form
sá-di, but a Nippur source (N1), as well as an unprovenienced one (X4), have the
finite, albeit somewhat ungrammatical, predicate sá ba-an-dug 4 ; in these texts,
lines 5–6 should read, in translation: “The market price of grain was equivalent to
(one shekel) per kor; twenty talents of silver was invested in the purchase of grain.”
The expression used here is unique and is probably a calque from Akkadian. The
word šakanka occurs only once in the Ur III documentation (Nik 2 447:9, é šakanka
PN), and the verb sá. . .dug 4 is used in the same sense as Akkadian kašādum, so
that the phrase can either be rendered as “equivalent to,” or “having reached” (CAD
K 275).
6. The otherwise unattested sa 10 (-)RI-dè requires comment. It is present in two of
the Nippur sources (N2 and N3), while N1 and probably X1 have the more obvious
sa 10 -sa 10 -dè. It is probable that the form is a calque from the use of ana šīmi leqû, “to
buy,” although the latter is attested only in Old Assyrian and at Alalakh (CAD Š/3
30). However, when it is equivalent to leqûm, RI is to read de 5 -(g), and one would
expect the writing de 5 -ge-dè. More remotely, one may consider d/ri(g), “to collect,”
420 21. Išbi-Erra to Ibbi-Sin 1

for which see C. Wilcke, BBVO 18 (1999) 321–22 n. 10 but most examples are re-
duplicated and likewise would require an ending in /g/. In this case, perhaps the line
means “twenty talents of silver was invested in collecting the purchased of grain.”
8. E. Robson, “More than Metrology. . .” 351, already observed that this letter reads
suspiciously like an OB mathematical exercise applied in a semi-realistic context. In
view of this, it is particularly troublesome that some of the scribes had problems with
the numbers in this text and in the answer IbIš1 (22). The number and the capacity
of the barges in line 13 and the recapitulation of the full amount of grain in line 20
indicate that 72,000 kor are at stake, but different parts of the letter are reconstructed
on the basis of different manuscripts, and this complicates matters somewhat.11 The
scribe of N3 wrote ŠÁR×30, that is, he wrote one inscribed “10” too many. N2 is par-
tially broken at this point; one can see ⸢ŠÁR×20?⸣ but there may have been another
“10” inscribed here as well. The students are using the “non-mathematical” notation
with inscribed ŠÁR signs instead of the “mathematical” writing of multiples of ŠÁR,
which is what we find in X4 in line 20.
I am at a loss to explain the mathematical difficulties of the scribes who copied the
Išbi-Erra letters; they should have mastered metrological lists at an earlier stage of
their education. For such lists, see, for example, E. Robson, SCIAMVS 5 (2004)
30–37. But, as she observes on p. 35, students had problems with such lists as well.
9. The only full surviving form of the verb among the Nippur texts is ba-an-ku 4 -
re-en (N3). This is clearly incorrect, with the first-person ending most likely dit-
tography from the line above.
11. Note the use of še sìg to designate threshing of grain. M. Civil, Farmer’s Instruc-
tions, 95, has discussed the various terms used in Ur III for this activity; this expres-
sion occurs only once in texts from this period (UET 3 1346).
The syntax and meaning of this line are uncertain. Only one Nippur source has the
verb šúm (N3), which is broken in the other witnesses from that city. The X sources
have a different verb—AK—but also do not have the first part of the line preserved
and may have had a different text. N1 has ⸢sìg⸣-ge-⸢dè⸣, which seems the bet-
ter text (*še sìg-ge-dè nu-mu-e-da-šúm-mu), but N2 and N3 have ba-sìg-ge,
which may have to be translated differently. This line is crucial for the understanding
of the text; see p.189 above.
12. I know of no similar usages of the two Sumerian verbs in this line. The transla-
tion cautiously offered here is based on the idiomatic use of dunnunu with preposi-
tions such as eli and muḫḫi in Akkadian, “to be too strong/much,” although this
attested only in later periods (see CAD D 84 for examples). Note the rare sequence
of prefixes -ta-ni-.

11. The Sumerian capacity measure gur, “kor,” was roughly equivalent to 300 liters.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 421

C. Wilcke, WO 5 (1969) 12, read the final verb as dab 5 . T. Jacobsen, JCS 7 (1953)
39, read it as bu 7 and translated “I shall winnow(?) it.” The reading dúr in N3 is
based on [mu ? -t]a-ni-dúr-ù-dè-en in X1.
13. Three Nippur witnesses have g̃ iš má-gur 8 and X1 and X4 have g̃ iš má. The former
usually refers to a ceremonial barge or boat, and it is not clear if the Nippur usage
reflects OB literary usage, because such watercraft are well attested in Sumerian
poetry, or if there is some irony involved. The non-Nippur texts are more consonant
with Ur III texts, which include boats (g̃ iš má) of 120 gur capacity. The outfitting
of such a boat is detailed in TCL 5 5672 (from Umma), which begins (lines 1–4):
1 má 120 gun ésir hád-bi 204 gun ésir gul-gul-bi 12 gun ésir é-a-bi 2.2.0
gur. If this text is any guide, it took more than 324 talents of bitumen to make such
a boat. This means that it would have required more than 194,400 talents to caulk
600 such vessels: that is, 5,832,000 kg. of bitumen! OB references for expenditures
of bitumen for boats are collected in D. T. Potts, Mesopotamian Civilization, 131–32.
I should note that M. Civil, ARES 4 129, has proposed that the word má-gur8 can
be a ceremonial barge but also refers to large rafts made of reed bundles, sometimes
supported by inflated skins.
The verb duh is a technical term that refers to the caulking of boats with bitumen,
but it can also be used in a more general sense for the repair and maintenance of wa-
tercraft. This is the case in, for example, CT 7 31 (BM 18390), where various wood
parts are listed for the duh of a boat, together with bitumen.
14–15. The state of preservation of these lines, as well as redactional differences,
makes it difficult to provide a credible interpretation. Assuming that the 600 boats/
barges/rafts of 120 gur capacity of line 13 are all that is required to transport 72,000
gur of grain, the boats mentioned in these lines are military escort vessels.
15. The word G ̃ IŠ.G̃ IŠ does not appear in any Sumerian narrative known to me.
In Hh 5 104 and 105 (MSL 6 14), it is equated with nīru and epinnu, that is, with
the “yoke/crossbeam” and the “plough,” so perhaps the former is what is meant here.
The interpretation cautiously suggested here relates it to am-ra = G ̃ IŠ.G
̃ IŠ.MÁ.RA
= am-ru-um (Diri Nippur 2213, MSL 15 20; see also p. 62, line 7′), that is, amrû
“beam.”
14. The word written ⸢g̃iš⸣za-am-ru-tum in X1 and g̃išza-we-⸢ru ? -tum ? ⸣ in X4 is
otherwise attested in Sumerian contexts only in OB HAR-ra I 549 and in HAR-ra
VI–VII OB Forerunner A 124 (MSL 6 152), known in a variety of different writings
(za-am-ru-tum, za-mir-tum, za-mi-ru-tum, za-am-ri-tum, ša-am-ri-tum,
etc.). CAD A 120 lists it under Akkadian samrūtu, with the translation “a rivet or
nail.” In light of the following g̃išillar, it is tempting to think of za-am-ru-tum as
a weapon as well, an interpretation that is supported by the listing in OB HAR-ra
within a section on martial implements; note also the two in EA 22 i 42 (Tušratta,
cited CAD T 415). N. Veldhuis, Elementary Education, 164 renders it “lance” and
422 21. Išbi-Erra to Ibbi-Sin 1

derives it, more properly, from Akkadian zamirītum (p. 183).12 In Ur III, the word
is written zà-mi-rí-tum; these are clearly martial implements made of wood and
copper or bronze, sometimes encrusted with silver.13 In one case, the wood is speci-
fied as hašhur, “apple” (UET 3 547:1). The bronze or copper parts were “blades,”
eme (BIN 10 124:1), but they also had an a-lá sag̃ -è, that is, possibly a knob or
sharp end (UET 3 575: 2–3). The more precious ones are given as gifts: e.g., TIM 6
34:6–7: 1 zà-mi-rí-tum zabar g̃ iš-bi kù-babbar šub-ba, aḫ-ba-bu amurrum,
“One bronze z., its wooden part plated in silver, for Aḫbabu, the ‘Amorite.’” This
individual served the general Abuni, and the context is decidedly military. This sug-
gests that z. was a sword rather than a lance.
The meaning of g̃ iš illar = tilpānu has been a matter of some debate; for the transla-
tion “bow” rather than “throw-stick,” see CAD T 416, although the matter is far
from settled.
16. It is impossible to identify these watercourses. The íd-kur-ra occurs in some
literary texts, but it is not always certain if this is the name of a canal or its descrip-
tion. The same term is documented in the nineteenth year-name of Gungunum of
Larsa, and here the meaning is likewise ambiguous, although one suspects that it is
indeed a proper name: mu inim an den-lí l dnanna-ta ma-al-gi4-a giš tukul ba-
ab-sìg ù é-dana bí-in-gi-na ù íd-kur-ra ka-bi ba-an-dib, “Year: By command
of En, Enlil, and Nanna, Malgium was defeated in war and Edana was established,
and the opening of the Idkura was crossed.” If this year-name can be interpreted in
a manner that associates the watercourse with the vicinity of Edana, it may provide
a rough geographical location, in Old Babylonian times at least, for Idkura, because
the town was probably located east of Isin, on the Iturungal, just upstream of Adab
(D. Frayne, Early Dynastic List, 33–37).
The Palištum canal is known only from an Emar version of Hh XXII, Msk74198b
iv 12′–13′: íd-kur-ra, íd-pa-li-iš-tum (D. Arnaud, Emar VI.2 484 = VI.4 152).
None of the OB forerunners, or the later standard recension, have this sequence, and
it is possible that these entries are in fact quotations from this letter. It is possible that
the translations should read: “so that they can be brought down by water, by a moun-
tain river, through the narrows, so they can pile up (the grain) in stacks (for drying).”
17. The reading zar(LAGAB×ZÀR) is uncertain; the sign is preserved in X4, which
is unavailable for study and known only from J. van Dijk’s hand-copy, in which the
inside of the grapheme is shaded. In RCU, the sign was read as su 7 . If the reading is
correct, then we have here zar . . . sal, the literary means of describing the spread-
ing/piling up of stacks of grain to dry them for threshing (M. Civil, Farmer’s Instruc-
tions 91).

12. I. J. Gelb, MAD 3 182, followed by T. J. H. Krispijn, Akkadica 70 (1990) 8, proposed that
it was a musical instrument, with the name a compound of two instrument names: *zami mirītum.
13. See also zà-bí-rí-tum (MVN 22 199 11) in an account of weapons (g̃iš gíd-da, g̃iš ban).
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 423

The verb è(d) is undoubtedly the equivalent of Ur III e11(d), which is regularly used
for movement of goods up and down watercourses, especially of grain to and from
threshing floors; see M. Civil, Farmer’s Instructions, 92–93, and also the comparable
use of Akkadian elû.
19. The difficult ugu tuku is a calque from Akkadian eli/ina muḫḫi + rašûm, for
which see CAD R 203. See also line 29.
21–22. These lines are only preserved in X1 and X4 and are omitted in X5.
23. There is some question regarding the proper understanding of the syntax of the
first half of the line. An alternative interpretation would be: “My king, the Elamite
(ruler) has become tired of war. . . .”
25. The sequence lirum lirum is unique. The first is probably “power,” but the
second one must be interpreted as kirimmum, “hold.” The only possible parallels
for this line that I know are in Ur Lament 229–30: di 4-di 4-la úr ama-ba-ka nú-a
ku 6-gin 7 a ba-ab-de 6, emeda da lirum kala-ga-bi lirum ba-an-da-duh, “In-
fants lying in their mother’s laps were swept off like fish (borne by) waters, their
nursemaids, (although) holding them strongly, lost their grip (on children)” (also in
later bilingual parallels, for which see CAD K 406, kirimmu), as well as in two OB
incantations: YOS 11 86 33–34: emeda da lirum kala-ga-bi, gal-gal-bi duh-a,
“The nursemaid’s strong grip (on her charge), released with great force,” and TCL 16
89 10: emeda da dumu-da mu-na-te lirum-bi mu-e-duh, “It draws near to the
nursemaid with a child in her care and releases her grip (on her charge).”
26–27. The Nippur manuscript N3, which is broken from line 15 on, picks up here
and may have had a somewhat different from the long version. The traces at the
beginning of both lines differ, as do the predicates. Perhaps the lines read: *árad-da-
ni ba-ra-ab-šúm-mu-un x eg̃ er-ra-ni na-an-du-ù-un (note ù), “don’t even
think of putting yourself in his service, certainly, you could not become one of his
followers!”
36. The reading išib follows a suggestion by Steve Tinney.
40. The Elamites are described here as lú níg̃ -ha-lam-ma, which may be inter-
preted in two interrelated ways. The translation offered here is based on a lexical
entry in Nigga Bil. B 84 (MSL 13 117), where it is rendered in Akkadian as ša le-
mu-ut-tim. However, some OB scribes would undoubtedly have been aware of the
omens in which Ibbi-Sin is associated with just one word, šaḫluqtum, “disaster, catas-
trophe,” which also translates níg̃ -ha-lam-ma in some lexical and bilingual texts
(e.g., CAD Š /1 98).
42. The final verbal forms, preserved only in fragmentary form in X2 and X3, are
uncertain. The signs KA.ŠÚM.ŠÚM can be interpreted as gù . . . sì, “to roar,” as gù
. . . šúm, “to echo,” (for both, see F. Karahashi, Sumerian Compound Verbs, 111–12),
or as inim . . . sì, “to express an idea” (M. Civil, Mélanges Birot, 75). The second
424 21. Išbi-Erra to Ibbi-Sin 1

half of the line is equally enigmatic. The tentative translation is based on dùb-tuku,
“runner” (bēl birkim) and si-il (if that is indeed the proper reading)= nesûm, “to be
distant.” This should properly be the end of a paragraph, but the final -a requires that
the narrative continue here.
43. The sign sequence šà-ta a in X2 and X3 is possibly to be understood as šà-ta-a;
the scribe of X1, who often reinterprets difficult passages, wrote è-a-ni. This leads
to the question of whether the final a is to be interpreted as a variant writing of è or
if we are dealing with different traditions here.
47. The expression a-ba-àm lugal-g̃ u10 is a fascinating allusion to the passage to-
ward the end of the Sargonic section of the Sumerian King List (line 284) that reads
a-ba-àm lugal a-ba-àm nu lugal (with variants), “who was king, who was not
king? ” The Ur III and some of the OB Nippur versions have this passage in Akka-
dian, but sources from other places, like the texts of the letter, offer the Sumerian-
language version (P. Steinkeller, FS Wilcke 279).
54. The line has been lifted from IbPu1: 36 (24), without taking care to change the
second-person plural suffix into the first-person singular, as the new context requires.
This error is found in both X2 and X3; the savvy scribe of X1 does not include this
line or the one preceding it. The verbal root šub followed by dè is a writing for še-
bé-da = egû, “to be negligent.” The expression used here and at the conclusion of
the following letter is a calque from the Akkadian apputtum la teggi, “please, do not be
negligent,” often encountered at the end of Old Babylonian letters (CAD A/2 191).

Sources
Version A (Short version )
N1 = 3 N-T 306 (A 30207) = 1–14
N2 = CBS 2272 (PBS 13 9) = 1–14
N3 = Ni. 3045 + 4093 + 4489 (ISET 2 121) = 1–15; 23–30
Version B (Long version)
X1 = A 7475 i 3–44 = 3–54 (–8, 9, 38, 42, 46–51, 53, 54)14
X2 = AN1922-167 (OECT 5 29) 15
= 29; 31–55
X3 = AN1930-581 (OECT 5 28)16 = 29; 31–55
X4 = IM 44134 (Sumer 15 pl. 6; TIM 9 40) = 1–29
X5 = Ni. 3083 (ISET 2 115) iv 1–6 = 17–25 (–21, 22)

14. X1 has two additional fragmentary lines after 11.

15. Formerly Ash. 1922-167.
16. Formerly Ash. 1930-581. The tablet has deteriorated somewhat since it was copied by
O. Gurney and since I first collated it.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 425

X3 “said to be from Warka,”17 X4 collated by Jeremy Black.18

Tablet typology: compilation tablets (Type I): X1, X5; all others type III.
Concordance of sigla used here (CKU) and in RCU:

N1 C A N2
N2 A B N3
N3 B C N1
X1 F E X4
X3 H F X1
X4 E H X3

Textual Matrix
Part A

1. i-bi-den.zu
I
lugal-g̃u10-ra ù-na-a-dug4
N1 oo o o. + + + . + + ++
N2 ++ . ++ + . o o o o o .
N3 ++ + ++ + + + + ++ - .
X4 xx o o. . . o o + + ++
2. I
iš-bi-èr-ra árad-zu na-ab-bé-a
N1 o. + + + + + + + + +
N2 ++ + + + . o o o o o
N3 . d+ - + + + + + + + .
X4 oo o o o x o o . + +
3. kaskal ì-si-inki ka-zal-luki-šè
N1 o o + + + + + ++ +
N2 + + + + +na . . o o o
N3 + + + + + + + ++ +
X1 o o o o o . o oo o
X4 o o o o o o o o. +
4. še sa10-sa10-dè á-šè mu-e-da-a-ág̃
N1 o . + +19 +20 + + ++ + +
N2 + + . + . ⸢še⸣ . o o o .
N3 + + + + + + + ++ + +
X1 o o o o o o o o o an .
X4 o o o o o o o o o . +

17. OECT 5 p. 45.

18. “Most of the surface is (now) in a worse condition than is implied by the copy and I
can’t really make any specific improvements.”
19. In all Nippur sources, sa10 is consistently written NÍNDA׊E. X1 uses NÍNDA׊E.
ÀM.
20. Preceded by erased á.
426 21. Išbi-Erra to Ibbi-Sin 1

5. šakanka aš gur-ta-àm še sá ba-an-dug4

N1 . + še + + + + + + + +
N2 + + + + + + + - - di
N3 + + + + + + + - - di
X1 o o o o o o . - - di
X4 o o o o o o o . + +
6. 20 gun kù-babbar še sa10 RI-dè ba-an-g̃ar
N1 o o . . . ⸢sa10⸣-sa10-dè ba-g̃ar-ra
N2 + . + + + + + + + - +
N3 + + + + + . + + + + +
X1 o o o o o . - + . . +
X4 o o o o o o o . . . +
7. inim amurrum lú kúr-ra šà ma-da-zu ku4-ra g̃iš ì-tuk-àm
N1 o . - - - . + + za + + + . . .
N2 . . . + . + + + + + + + ++ +
N3 + + - + . + + + + + + + - + .
X1 o o o o o o o . + ku4-ku4-dè [ ]-⸢an⸣-tuk-⸢e⸣
X4 o o o o o o o . . ⸢šè⸣ kur-ra g̃iš bí-⸢tuku⸣
8. 72,000 še gur še dù-a-bi šà ì-si-inki-na-šè ba-an-ku4-re-en
N1 o o o o + . . + + + +o o o o . + + .
N2 ⸢ŠÁR×20⸣ - + . + ++ + + + ++ + . + + . . .
N3 ŠÁR×20 + + + + o . . . . . . + + + . . + .
X1 #
X4 o o o o o o o o o o o. + . o o o o x
9. a-da-al-la-bi amurrum dù-dù-a-bi šà kalam-ma-šè ba-an-ku4-ku4
N1 o o . . - . + + . o21 . . . . + ni o o
N2 ++ ++ + . . . oo + + + + + . . o
N3 . . . . o . + + ++ . . . . + + + re-en
X1 #
X4 . o o o o o o o oo o o o o . . + +
10. erim3 gal-gal-didli-bi im-mi-in-dab5-dab5
N1 o o o o . . + . o o
N2 + + + + + + . o o o
N3 o o . o + + + + + +
X1 o o o o o o x . + +
X4 . . o o o o o o o o

21. There may be more missing at the end of the line. If not, then the scribe ended half the
line two-thirds into the line and then either started a new or indented line.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 427

11. mu amurrum še ba-sìg-ge nu-mu-e-da-šúm-mu

N1 o . . - . . ⸢dè⸣ o o o o o o
N2 + + + + + + + . oo o o
N3 o o . + + . + + ++ + +
X1 o o o o o o ⸢nu⸣-mu-un-da-ak-e
X4 . o o o o o nu-mu]-un-da-ak-e
11a. X1 [. . .]x in-sá-dug4-⸢ne?⸣

11b. X1 [. . .]-e ì-in-ku422

12. ugu-g̃u10 mu-ta-ni-kalag ba-dúr-en

N1 o o o . + + . o o
N2 + + + + + . o o o
N3 o o o . + + + + +
X1 o o o o o . ì-dúr-ù-dè-⸢en⸣
X4 + . . + . . + . o
13. lugal-g̃u10 g̃éš-u má-gur8
g̃iš
120 gur-ta-àm hé-em-duh-e
N1 o o o o o. + . o o o o o o o
N2 + + + + ++ + + . o o . . . o
N3 o o o o o. + . - + + ⸢ha?⸣x o o
X1 o o o o o+ - + + + + + + + +
X4 . . . . -+ - + + + . o x + +
14. g̃iš
má 12 kal-ga 20 g̃išza-am-ru-tum 30 g̃išillar
N1 [. . .] ⸢12 kal?⸣ [. . .]
N2 má-⸢gur8⸣ x[. . .]
N3 [x x x] ⸢má⸣ [x+] ⸢2 kal⸣ x[. . .]
X1 [ ]⸢g̃iš⸣za-am-ru-tum 30-àm g̃išillar
X4 g̃iš
má 60+12 kal-ga 20 g̃išza-we-⸢ru?-tum?⸣ 30 g̃išillar
15. 30 G ̃ IŠ.G̃ IŠ 5 g̃išig má ugu ⸢má?⸣-e hé-⸢g̃á-g̃á⸣ ù g̃išmá dù-a-bi hé-x
N3 traces
X1 [. . .]-⸢mu-àm⸣ G ̃ IŠ.G̃ IŠ ù 5 g̃iš⸢ig má?⸣-a / [. . .-à]m? hé-em-g̃á-g̃á /[ù g̃išmá dù]-⸢a⸣-bi hi?-
x-nam (má=mè?)
X4 50 G ̃ IŠ.G̃ IŠ 5 g̃išig má ugu ⸢má?⸣-e hé-⸢g̃á-g̃á⸣ ù g̃išmá dù-a-bi hé-x

16. íd-da íd(-)kur-ra íd(-)pa-li-iš-tum-ta

X1 o o o o o . + + eš + ⸢šè⸣
X4 + + + + + + + +++ +
17. zar? sal-la-šè hé-em-ta-ab-è-dè-eš
X1 o o o o o b]í-ib-è-⸢dè⸣
X4 . + . . + + + - ++ +
X5 o . + + + + + + ++ .

22. It is not clear if this is a separate line or the indented continuation of the previous one.
428 21. Išbi-Erra to Ibbi-Sin 1

18. ù g̃á-e igi-ni-šè ga-àm-ta-è

X1 o o o o . . + +ma ši .
X4 + + + + + + ++ . .
X5 . + + + ne ne + ++ + +
19. ki g̃išmá kar-bi ugu-g̃á ì-tuku
X1 o oo . . + g̃u10-šè hé-en-tuku
X4 + ++ . + + + ⸢e⸣ +
X5 . ++ + +a+ + + +
20. 72,000 gur še dù-a-bi hé-gá-gá hé-e-silim
X1 o o o o o o ⸢ga-àm⸣-ma-⸢an?⸣-silim ga-àm-ma-⸢an?-kíg̃?⸣
X4 ŠÁR.ŠÁR - + + ++ + + + + + .
X5 ⸢ŠÁR×20⸣ + + + ++ + gar-ra ga-àm-kíg̃?
21. tukum-bi še-àm ba-ab-tur-re
X1 o . . .? . . + +
X4 + + + - ba-an-tur-re-en
X5 #
22. g̃á-e še ga-ra-ab-ku4-e
X1 o o + + + . . .
X4 + + + bi mu-ra-ku4
X5 #
23. lugal-g̃u10 elamki-ma šen-šen-na zi ba-an-ir
N3 o o o o o . . o o o o o:
X1 o o . +23 + + + - + . . .
X4 + + + ma ki + + + + + + .
X5 o o . . . . . - . + - +
24. še-ba-ni ul4-la-bi al-til-la
N3 o o o o o o o o o
X1 o o o + + + + + + aš
X4 + + + + + + + + +
X5 traces24
25. lirum lirum na-an-duh-en
N3 o . . .? .? o
X1 o . nu-⸢mu-e⸣-da-duh-⸢e⸣
X4 + + + + + +
X5 traces

23. Followed by an erased sign (ki ?).

24. Lines 24 and 25 probably on one line.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 429

26. nam-árad-da-ni-šè sag̃-zu na-an-šúm-mu-un

N3 ⸢árad?-da?-ni⸣-šè ba-ra⸣-ab-šúm-⸢mu-un⸣
X1 o o . + + . + na-an-na-šúm
X4 + + + + + . + + + + + +
27. ù eg̃ir-ra-ni-šè na-an-du-un
N3 . + + + - . + +ù .
X1 o . . + + + + + +
X4 + + + + + + + + +
28. še mu udilia-ta-àm šà-gal é-gal-zu ù un dù-a-bi šà uruki-g̃u10-ta-àm ì-g̃ál
N3 + + + + - + . ++ + + + . ++ / .? . . . . . . .
X1 o o . + . + + ++ + + uru + + zu šu-g̃u10-ta ⸢ì-ni/in⸣-g̃ál
X4 + + + + + + + + + +/ + uru + ++ šu-g̃u10-ta ì-g̃ál
29. uru ì-si-inki ù nibruki-ke4 en-nu-ùg̃ ak-dè ugu-g̃á hé-tuku
N3 + + + + . . + + + /+ + + + . + + + +
X1 - [nibru]ki i-⸢si⸣-inki - + + - + + + ⸢ha⸣-[ra]-⸢ab⸣-ak-e - - - -
X2 - + + + . - o o .? + + + ha-ra-ab-ak-e o + + +
X3 - + + ++ - + + a + + + ha-ra-ab-ak-e + + +en+
X4 - + + ++ - + + + + + + +/ lugal-g̃u10 + + e +
30. lugal-g̃u10 hé-en-zu
N3 + + . . +
X1 #
X2 #
X3 #
X4 #

Part B

31. lugal-g̃u10 ní nu-te ní nu-gíd-i šà-ba g̃á-e nu-te-BU

X1 [x x x]x ní[x]-la na-an-te ⸢šà⸣ x x x ⸢bí?⸣-te
X2 + + + + . . . . o . + + . . . .
X3 + . + + + + + + + + + + + + . .
32. dig̃ir-didli-bi šà hé-ni-íb-kíg̃-kíg̃-e ki-bi hé-kíg̃-kíg̃
X1 x x-zu x-bi hé-íl-íl-i ⸢ki?⸣-ba mu-e-⸢kíg̃?-kíg̃?⸣
X2 + + + . . . . o o x . + . . +
X3 . + . . . + . + + + + + - + .
33. ùg̃ dag̃al-bi nam-lú-ùlu-bi mah
X1 [x h]ul-la ⸢nam-lú-ùlu⸣-ba mah-⸢àm⸣25
X2 + + + . . . + +
X3 . . + + + + . .

25. Preceded by erased a.

430 21. Išbi-Erra to Ibbi-Sin 1

34. hé-silim-meš numun zi-da hé-en-kal-le-eš

X1 [ ]x a-⸢ri⸣ numun zi-bi ⸢hé⸣-i-i
X2 + + + . . o o o . + +
X3 + + . . ++ + . ⸢gal⸣ . .
35.  uri5ki uru kù-zu an-ki-da mú-a
X1 [ ] nam + +26 + . . . .
X2 ⸢uru⸣ + . . o o o o . . +
X3   + + . . + + + . . +
36. nun gal išib-e dù-a-bi sag̃-ki-bi kal-la
X1 o o o o o . + + . + . +
X2 x + + + . o o o o . + +
X3 + + + + + o o + + + . .
37. me šúm-mu ús g̃iš-hur ge-en-ge-né kur sig igi-nim-ma
X1 o o o o . + + + + ⸢en⸣ + + + + +
X2 o . . . . o o o o o o . . . .
X3 + + + + + . . + ++ - + . . .
38. šu-ta hé-kar-re inim-bi hé-éb-bé
X1 #
X2 o x + . o o o + + +
X3 + + + + + . . + . +
39. é-kiš-nu-g̃ál èš an-ki šú-šú sukud-rá nu-tuk-a
X1 [x] x [. . .] ⸢uri5⸣ki ⸢an⸣-šà-a-ga sukud-ra nu-tuk-a
X2 oo o o o o o o o o x + + .
X3 ++ + + + + + + + x o . . o
40. elamki ur idim lú níg̃-ha-lam-ma-ke4
X1 o o . + . . + la . +27
X2 o o o o o o . . + +
X3 + + + + + + + + + .
41. šu pe-el nu-ma-ak-e lama-bi
d
nu-si-il
X1 o o x o o . . ++ + x? ⸢sag?-kal?⸣
X2 o o o o o o o ++ . + +.
X3 + + + + + + + ++ + + . .?
42. lugal-g̃u10 gù-šúm-šúm gal-gal dùb-tuku mu-si?-il?-a
X1 #
X2 o o o o o o o o x + ⸢ág̃?⸣
X3 + + + + + + + + + . +++

26. Written su.

27. The space at the beginning of the line, including a fragment of a sign, suggest that there
may have been more here than in X3.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 431

43. i-bi-den.zu
I
šà-ta è-a-ni dig̃ir ki-ág̃-meš
X1 oo o o. . . + ++ + + . o ⸢e?⸣
X2 oo o oo o o . . . . . . . +
X3 ++ + ++ + - - ++ - + + . .
44. an den-líl d
en-ki igi zi hu-mu-un-ši-bar-re-e-ne
X1 . oo o o. + + . . + - ++ . oo
X2 o oo o oo . + .x + . + . . o oo
X3 + ++ + ++ + + + + + + + + + ++
45. [. . .] x x x x x x hé-en-g̃ar igi-bi hé-éb-gi
X1 [. . .] x hé-⸢mu-un-gi? hé⸣-[. . .] ⸢hé⸣-em-d[ug4?]
X2 [. . .] + + + + + + + + + + + . ⸢eb?⸣ +
X3 o o o o o o o . + . o o . . .
46. g̃iš
ig abul uri5ki-ma g̃ál-tak4-tak4-da-a-a
X1 #
X2 o . + + + + + + + + ++
X3 o o o . + - + + + + +.
47. (x) x i-ni-ib-bé a-ba-àm lugal-g̃u10 e-še
X1 #
X2 o + ++ + + + + + + + +.
X3 o o oo o o o o . + + ++
48. lugal den-líl-le gaba-ri nu-tuku-me-en
X1 #
X2 . ++ . . + . + . o o
X3 o oo . - . + + + + .
49. x nu x x x x šà-zu na-an-gig-ge
X1 #
X2 x + x x x x + + + + . .
X3 o o o o o o + + + + + x ⸢en?⸣
50. x šu mu-un-gi suhuš-bi mu-ri-in-ge-en
X1 #
X2 x . + . + + + + + + + +
X3 o o o o . + + + + . . o
51. [x]x šu? nu-du7-a šà-zu hé-en-du10-ge
X1 #
X2 [x]x + + + + + o . + + +
X3 [] x . o . + + + . + +
52. en-na lugal-g̃u10 al-ti-la nam-lugal uri5ki mu-un-ak-e
X1 o o o o o o . . . . o o o + x
X2 o . + + + ++ . . . + + + + +
X3 . o . + + . .a . + . + + + + +
432 21. Išbi-Erra to Ibbi-Sin 1

53. níg̃-na-me lugal-g̃u10 kíg̃ mu-na-ni-íb-gi4

X1 #
X2 o . + + + + + + + + +
X3 + + + . . . . + + + gi
54. a-ma-ru-kam nam-ba-e-šub-dè-en-zé-en
X1 #
X2 o+ + + + + ++ + + + +
X3 ++ + + + . ++ + + . .
55. igi dutu-kam ka-g̃u10 nu-bal-e
X1 [igi dutu-kam ka-g̃u10 nu-ba]l-e ⸢lugal⸣-e hé-en-⸢zu⸣
X2 . ++ + + + + + +
X3 . .+ . + + + + .

In X1 followed by IbIš (22).

Colophon M (X2)
Colophon N (X4)
Colophon O (X1)
 22. Ibbi-Sin to Išbi-Erra
(IbIš1, 3.1.18, RCU 20)

Sources
X1 = A 7475 i 44 – ii 1–24 = IbIš1A
X2 = AN1922-165 (OECT 5 27) = IbIš1B1
Tablet typology: compilation tablet (Type I): X1; Type III: X2.
Bibliography: X2 edited by S. N. Kramer, OECT 5 15–16.

Text Transliterations
IbIš1A = source X1

1. [Iiš-bi-èr-ra-r]a ⸢ù-na-a-dug4⸣
2. [di-bí-den.zu lugal-zu] ⸢na-ab⸣-[bé]-⸢a⸣
Two or three lines broken
1′. x den-líl-lá íb ba-an-ak [. . .]
2′. ⸢ki-šà⸣-bi nu-me-a lú kúr mu-un-zi-ma ⸢kur-kur⸣ i[m-sùh-sùh]
3′. ⸢u4⸣ den-líl-le dumu-ni den.zu-ra im-m[i-gur]
4′. za-e inim-zu g̃iškim bí-in-tuk-à[m]
5′. niš gú-un kù-babbar še sa10-sa102-dè šu bí-⸢in-ti⸣
6′. min6 še gur-ta-àm aš gín-⸢àm⸣ bí-ib-sa10-s[a10 (. . .)]
7′. g̃á-ra-aš še gur-ta3-àm gi4-g̃u10-da
8′. amurrum lú kúr-ra ⸢šà⸣ ma-da-ka ì-gub-ba
9′. usu kalam-ma-g̃u10 érin-bi-ta mu-un-zu-a
10′. a-gin7 ma-da-g̃u10 sag̃ ba-e-šúm-ma bàd gal-g̃u10 mu-e-⸢dab5-dab5⸣
11′. Ipuzur4-d⸢marduk šakkana⸣ bàd-igi-hur-sag̃-g̃á
12′. a-gin7 amurrum an-⸢ta⸣ nam-mu-un-gi4-gi4
13′. u4 na-me-ka g̃ištukul kala-ga-zu li-bí-in-túm-⸢ma⸣
14′. nir-g̃ál-zu-ta x4 uguugu4-bi kur-bi-ta im-ta-x-x-x
1. Formerly Ashm. 1922-165. The tablet has deteriorated in parts since O. Gurney copied it
and since I first collated it many years ago.
2. In this text, sa 10 is written NÍNDA׊E.ÀM.
3. The scribe began to write àm and then wrote ta over it.
4. Possibly an erased ugu.

433
434 22. Ibbi-Sin to Išbi-Erra

15′. á-še ⸢180⸣-àm g̃išmá gu-la g̃išmá 120 gur-⸢ta-àm⸣ im-ma-an-duh-e

16′. ù g̃éš-u-àm g̃išmá g̃éš <gur>-ta-àm im-⸢ma⸣-an-⸢duh⸣-[e]
17′. Išu-den-⸢líl⸣ énsi ⸢kišiki-àm⸣
18′. Inu-úr-é-a énsi èš-nun-na⸢ki⸣-[àm]
19′. Ipuzur4-tu-tu énsi bàd-zi-ab-ba[ki-àm]
20′. ⸢ŠÁR×20?⸣ še gur še šu-zu-ta bí-íb-si-ge-eš
21′. kù šu-zu-ta ⸢ù sá?⸣-dug4 mah?-⸢di?⸣
22′. ŠÁR×20 še sa10-⸢sa10-dè⸣ sag̃-g̃á hé-en-⸢g̃ál⸣
23′. en-na mu-e-ši-in-gi4 nam-ma-ši-du-un
24′. ⸢nibru⸣ki ⸢ì-si-inki⸣ en-nu-ùg̃ aka-dè ugu-zu-⸢šè⸣ ⸢e⸣-tuku a-ma-ru-kam

Followed by PuIb1 (23).

(Colophon O)
IbIš1B = source X2
1. ⸢d⸣
iš-bi-èr-ra-ra ⸢ù-na⸣-a-dug4
2. d
i-bí-den.⸢zu lugal-zu na-ab⸣-bé-⸢a⸣
3. en-na den-líl ⸢lugal-g̃u10⸣ me-šè i-im-du-dè-en
4. za-e ur5-gin7 ka ì-bal-e
5. u4-da den-líl-le g̃á-a-ra hul ba-an-gig
6. dumu-ni den.zu-na-ra hul ba-an-gig
7. uri5ki lú kúr-ra bí-in-šúm-mu
8. ki ⸢šà?⸣-ba nu-me-a lú kúr im-zi-ge kur-kur im-sùh-sùh
9. u4 den-líl-le dumu-ni den.zu-na-ra im-me-gur
10. za-e inim-zu g̃iškim im-ma-an-⸢tuku⸣
11. niš gun kù-babbar še sa105-e-dè ⸢šu⸣ ba-e-ti
12. min6 še gur-ta-àm kù-babbar aš gín-e bí-in-⸢sa10-sa10-e⸣
13. g̃á-a-ra aš še gur-ta-àm za-e mu-un-gi
14. puzur4-dnu-muš-da šakkana bàd-igi-hur-⸢sag̃⸣-g̃á
15. amurrum lú kúr-ra šà kalam-ma-g̃u10-šè a-gin7 im-da-an-ku4-re-en
16. en-na g̃ištukul sìg-ge-dè nam-mu-e-ši-in-gi
17. lú sag̃-du nu-tuku kalam-ma ì-g̃ál-la
18. a-gin7 amurrum-e an-ta nam-mu-ši-in-gi

Translations
IbIš1A
1
Speak to [Išbi-Erra], 2s[aying (the words of) Ibbi-Sin, your king]:
(ca. 5 lines missing)
1′
(Now) Enlil’s heart(?) is angry. . . .

5. In this text sa 10 is written NÍNDA׊E.ÀM.

 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 435
2′
The enemy, although not. . . , has mustered (his army), and has [brought dis-
order] in all the foreign lands. 4′ But then you, according to your statement, had an
omen 3′ (telling you that) now Enlil [has returned] to the side of his son Sin.
5′
You (text: he) received twenty talents of silver to purchase grain. 6′ You (text:
he) purchased grain at the price of two kor per shekel, 7′ only to return it to me6 as if
(you had purchased it) at one kor (per shekel)!
8′
The hostile Amorite, having stationed himself in the frontier territory, 9′ hav-
ing come to know the strength of my homeland and its troops—10′how could you
let him sweep into my frontier zone and capture all my large fortresses? 11′–12′ Why
has Puzur-Marduk, general of Badigihursag̃a, not confronted the Amorite(s)? 13′ Your
powerful forces were never brought into play, 14′ it is because of your self-confidence
the monkey has [been allowed to come down] from its mountain!
15′
Now I am overhauling 180 great barges, each (vessel) with a capacity of 120
kor, as well as overhauling 600 barges with a capacity of 60 kor each. 17′ Šu-Enlil,
governor of Kish, 18′ Nur-Ea (i.e., Nur-aḫum), governor of Ešnunna, 19′(and) Puzur-
Tutu, governor of Borsippa 20′ have handed over 72,000 kor of grain to you, 21′–22′ and
therefore you should measure out the silver that you have as well as what (was set
aside for even) the most exalted allotments to pay for the 72,000 (kor) of grain. 23′ Do
not dare to come back here until you have dispatched (the grain) to me! 24′ Guarding
Nippur and Isin is your responsibility. It is urgent!
IbIš1B
1
Speak to Išbi-Erra, 2 saying (the words of) Ibbi-Sin, your king:
4
You tell me so: 3 “as long as Enlil is my master, where else (in the world but
with you) would I go? ” 5 Right now Enlil is angry with me, 6 angry with his son Sin,
7
and is handing over Ur to the enemy. 8 The enemy, although not (yet) within it,
has mustered (his army), and created disorder in all the foreign lands. 10 But you, ac-
cording to your statement, had an omen 9 that Enlil has reconciled with his son Sin.
11
You received twenty talents of silver to purchase grain. 12 You purchased grain
at the price of two kor per shekel, 13 but you then returned it to me (as if you had
purchased it) at one kor (per shekel).
14
How could you, together with Puzur-Numušda, general of Bad-Igihursag̃a, 15
allow the enemy Amorite(s) to enter into my homeland? 16 Until he returns to you
to fight (them) 17 there will be idiots (running around) in the homeland—18 why has
he not confronted the Amorite(s)?

Commentary
This letter is attested in two different versions. Both accounts are defective and
appear to be variant Old Babylonian concoctions that mix together information
from IšIb1 (21) and the Puzur-Numušda correspondence (23–24).

6. Alt. transl.: return it to me.

436 22. Ibbi-Sin to Išbi-Erra

Both manuscripts are of unknown origin, even if it is possible that X1 comes

from Sippar, but they share certain features, most noticeably a shaky command of
Sumerian verbal morphology. It appears that the authors of these texts used the
third-person animate agreement prefix /n/ indiscriminately, so that forms with this
element often have to be interpreted as first‑ or second-person verbs, and forms with
/e/ are clearly intended as first‑ or third-person. The texts make little sense in the
context of the CKU, and we are at a loss to discern if this is a function of scribal
ineptitude or if there are ironies here that escape us.
A 4′. The idea that an ominous sign presages the victory of Ibbi-Sin is derived from
the Puzur-Numušda correspondence but is turned around, because here it is Išbi-Erra,
not the king, who has received an omen.
A 6′–7′ = B 12–13. These lines are important because they are the source of the
commonly repeated notion that Išbi-Erra blackmailed Ibbi-Sin, asking him to pay
him double for grain he had already received funds to buy in the first place. Although
the grammar of these lines is characteristically flimsy, there can be no doubt that
according to both sources the issue is not blackmail at all; the king of Ur is desper-
ate and offers to take it at double the original price. It is unclear if the writer of A
intended the verbal form in line 7′ as the participial gi.g̃ u.ed.am or as an impera-
tive gi.mu.da.
A 13′. The Sumerian u 4 na-me-ka (for u 4 na-me-kam) is used here in the same
sense as Akkadian matima with a negated verb (“never”).
A 14′. The signs used for writing /ugubi/, “monkey,” are partially destroyed and dif-
ficult to read. From what I can discern, it is either ⸢DUL?.A⸣.SAG.GU5 or possibly
⸢UGU.UGU⸣.GU5.
A 15′–16′. As in the previous letter, the numbers in these lines do not add up
properly. According to line 20′, we are dealing here with 72,000 kor of grain; that is
all that Išbi-Erra wants to send back at the rate of two gur per shekel, because he is
obviously keeping either half the silver he received or half of the grain that he pur-
chased. 180 boats of 120 kor capacity would carry 21,600 kor. According to line 16′,
there were 600 (géš-u) vessels, each of 60 kor capacity, and therefore the tonnage
would be 36,000 kor. Thus, the combined carrying capacity of all the boats would be
57,600 kor. The only way that I can make some sense of this is to assume that the
scribe made a mistake that involved confusion between the decimal and sexigesimal
systems: he wrote 3×G ̃ ÉŠ—that is, 180—but was thinking of 3×100 (i.e., 3 ⟨me⟩) =
300, and thus the total in line 16′ would also be 36,000. If this were indeed the case,
both lines would add up to 72,000 kor. Alternatively, we are dealing with a scribal
error; the correct number would be 5×G ̃ ÉŠ—that is, 300.

A 17′–19′. This passage is clearly derived from PuIb1 36–38 (23). Note that here,
as in the source letter, X1 writes Inu-úr-é-a for Nur-aḫum of Ešnunna.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 437

A 20′. The idiom šu-PRO-ta g̃ ál (šu-zu-ta bí-ib-sì-ge-eš) must be a calque from

Akkadian ana qātim mullûm, “to hand over,” (CAD M/1 187) with -ta functioning as
a locative, as it often does in Larsa and late OB Sumerian texts. Unfortunately, the
translation “they have handed over to you” makes little sense in the context. The
present translation assumes that this is a mistake and that the intention here was to
use a Sumerian equivalent of the Akkadian use of mullûm in the technical sense of
“to load a boat” (CAD M/1 185).
A 21′. The reading and translation of the second half of this line are most uncertain.
B 3. There is some ambiguity in the reading of the verbal root. There are two pos-
sible idioms that could come into play here: me-šè de 6 and me-šè gin; see the
information in CAD A/1 233 sub ajīš, “whereto, whither; where,” and M. Civil, AfO
25 (1974–77) 71. For a very different interpretation of lines B 3–4, see C. Wilcke,
Politik im Spiegel der Literatur, 64: “Bis dahin—(bei) mein(em) Konig Enlil!—wirst
du gehen, wirst du derart die Worte verdrehen? ”
B 4. The verb ka . . . bal provides a direct link to the previous letter, from Išbi-
Erra to the king, which ends with the line (55): igi d utu-kam ka-g̃ u10 nu-bal-e.
B 15. The verbal im-da-an-ku4-re-en is formally first or second person, but this is
most probably a mistake for third person. Alternatively, it is possible that the scribe
intended “how could you allow PN. . . .”
B 17. lú sag̃ -du nu-tuku is translated as la išānu, “weakling, poor person,” in the
late lexical entry in SIG7.ALAN IV 23 (MSL 16 77); in Instructions of Šuruppak, 115,
it seems to designate an idiot; see, most recently, B. Alster, Wisdom of Ancient Sumer
141. Note the use of gi for gi4 here and in the next line; the form ì-g̃ ál-la must stand
for i.g̃ al.am.

Comparison of the Common Part of Versions A and B

(X1 1–2; 1′–7′ and X2 1–13)
1. X1:1 [ r]a ⸢ù-na-a-dug4⸣
X2:1 diš-bi-èr-ra-ra ⸢ù⸣-na-a-dug4
2. X1:2 [ ]-a
X2:2 i-bí- en.⸢zu lugal-zu na-ab⸣-bé-a
d d

3. X2:3 en-na den-líl ⸢lugal⸣-g̃u10 me-šè i-im-du-dè-en

4. X2:4 za-e ur5-gin7 ka ì-bal-e

5. X2:5 u4-da den-líl-le g̃á-a-ra hul ba-an-gig

6. X2:6 dumu-ni den.zu-na-ra hul ba-an-gig

438 22. Ibbi-Sin to Išbi-Erra

7. X1:1′ x den-líl-lá íb ba-an-ak [ . . . ]

X2:7 uri5ki lú kúr-ra bí-in-šúm-mu
8. X1:2′ ⸢ki šà⸣-bi nu-me-a lú kúr mu-un-zi-ma ⸢kur-kur⸣ i[m-sùh-sùh]
X2:8 ki ⸢šà⸣-ba nu-me-a lú kúr im-zi-ge kur-kur im-sùh-sùh

9. X1:3′ ⸢u4⸣ den-líl-le dumu-ni den.zu-ra im-m[i-gur]

X2:9 u4 den-líl-le dumu-ni den.zu-na-ra im-me-gur
10. X1:4′ za-e inim-zu g̃iškim bí-in-tuk-à[m]
X2:10 za-e inim-zu g̃iškim im-ma-an-tuku

11. X1:5′ 20 gú-un kù-babbar še sa10-sa10-dè šu bí-⸢in-ti⸣

X2:11 20 gun kù-babbar še sa10-e-dè šu ba-e-ti
12. X1:6′ min6 še gur-ta-⸢àm⸣ aš gín-⸢àm⸣ bí-ib-sa10-s[a10 ]
X2:12 min6 še gur-ta-àm kù-babbar aš gín-e bí-in-⸢sa10-sa10-e⸣

13. X1:7′ g̃á-ra aš še gur-ta-àm gi4-mu-da

X2:13 g̃á-a-ra aš še gur-ta-àm za-e mu-un-gi
 23. Puzur-Numušda to Ibbi-Sin 1
(PuIb1, 3.1.19, A3, RCU 21)

Composite Text
1. d
i-bí-den.zu lugal-g̃u10-ra ù-na-a-dug4
2. I
puzur4-dnu-muš-da énsi ka-zal-luki árad-zu na-ab-bé-a
3. lú-kíg̃-gi4-a diš-bi-èr-ra ugu-g̃u10-šè ì-gin
4. d
iš-bi-èr-ra lugal-g̃u10 ugu-zu-šè kin-gi4-a im-mi-in-gi4
5. igi-ni ma-an-g̃ar-ma
6. d
en-líl lugal-g̃u10 nam-sipa kalam-ma ka-ka-ni ma-an-šúm
7. gú ídidigna gú ídburanun-na gú ídabgal ù gú ídme-den-líl-lá
8. uruki-bi-ne dig̃ir-bi-ne ù ugnim-bi-ne
9. ma-da ha-ma-ziki-ta en-na a-ab-ba má-gan-naki-šè
10. igi dnin-in-si-na-ka-šè ku4-ku4-dè
11. ì-si-inki nam-g̃á-nun den-líl-lá-šè g̃á-g̃á-da mu tuk-tuk-da
12. nam-ra-ak-ne-ne uru-uru-bi durun-ù-dè
13. d
en-líl-le g̃á-a-ra ma-an-dug4
14. a-na-aš-àm gú mu-da-ak
15. mu dda-gan dig̃ir-g̃á ì-pàd1
16. ka-zal-luki šu-g̃u10 sá hé-eb-bé
17. uru ma-da den-líl-le ma-an-du11-ga-àm
18. šà ì-si-inki-na-ka zag-gu-la-ne-ne ga-bí-ib-dù-dù
19. èš-èš-a-ne-ne-a ga-àm-ak
20. alam-mu šu-nir-g̃u10 en lú-mah ereš-dig̃ir-g̃u10-ne
21. g̃i6-par4-ra-ne-ne-a ga-bí-ib-durunx2
22. igi den-líl-lá šà é-kur-ra-šè
23. igi dnanna šà é-kiš-nu-g̃ál-šè
24. tur-tur-g̃u10 sízkur-bi hé-eb-bé
25. ù za-e lú g̃iškim-ti-zu-um
26. ma-da-ni-ta ga-àm-ta-an-gub-bu

1. Var.: mu d en-lí l lugal-g̃ u 10 ù d da-gan dig̃ ir-g̃ á ì-pàd.

2. KU.KU.

439
440 23. Puzur-Numušda to Ibbi-Sin 1

27. ì-si-inki-na bàd-bi ga-àm-dù

28. i-di-il-pa-šu-nu mu-šè ga-an-sa4
29. bí-in-du11-ga-gin7-nam
30. ì-si-inki-na bàd-bi ba-an-dù
31. i-di-il-pa-šu-nu mu-šè ba-an-sa4
32. nibruki ba-an-dab5 en-nu-ùg̃-g̃á-ni ba-an-g̃ar
33. ù Iníg̃-du11-ga-ni sag̃a nibruki ba-an-dab5
34. I
zi-in-nu-um énsi su-bir4ki-a šag̃a i-ni-in-dab5
35. ha-ma-ziki nam-ra-aš im-mi-in-ak
36. I
nu-úr-a-hi énsi èš-nun-naki
37. I
šu-den-líl énsi kišiki-a
38. ù Ipuzur4-dtu-tu énsi bàd-zi-ab-baki
39. ki-ni-šè ba-an-gur-ru-uš
40. za-pa-ág̃-g̃á-ni3 ma-da gi-sig-gin7 ì-bur10-e
41. d
iš-bi-èr-ra igi érin-na-šè ì-gin-gin
42. bí-in-du11-ga-gin7-nam
43. gú ídidigna gú ídburanun-na gú ídabgal ù gú ídme-den-líl-lá ba-an-dab5
44. I
i-di mà-al-gi4ki-a ba-ni-in-ku4
45. I
gir-bu-bu énsi g̃ír-kalki-ke4
46. gú im-da-bar-re-ma kušguru21-ni ba-an-ku5 ù e-ne ba-an-dab5
47. za-pa-ág̃-g̃á-ni im-ma-dugud
48. ugu-g̃u10-uš igi-ni ma-an-g̃ar
49. lú tab-ba nu-tuku lú nu-mu-un-da-sá-e
50. šu-ni sá nu-mu-un-da-ab-du11-ga-ta
51. ù-mu-un-šub ga-àm-ma-gin lugal-g̃u10 hé-en-zu
1
Speak to Ibbi-Sin, my king, 2 saying (the words of) Puzur-Numušda, governor
of Kazallu, your servant:
3
The envoy of Išbi-Erra came before me (and said): 4 “My king Išbi-Erra, has sent
me to you to you with a message.” 5 He presented the matter as follows: 6 “My master
Enlil has promised me stewardship of the homeland. 13 Yes, it was me that Enlil or-
dered 10 to deliver to Ninisina 7the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, the Abgal and
Me-Enlila canals, 8 their cities, their (city) gods and their armies, 9 from the territory
of Hamazi to the Magan Sea, 11 and having made Isin the storehouse of Enlil, made
it famous,4 12 to (then) settle their war captives in all those cities.
14
Why do you oppose me? 15 I have sworn by my personal god Dagan5 16 that I
shall conquer Kazallu! 17Because Enlil has promised me the cities of the frontier,6 18 I

3. Var. za-pa-ág̃ -g̃ á-ni-ta.

4. Alt. transl.: Isin, which has to be made the storehouse of Enlil and which has to be made
famous.
5. Var.: I have sworn by the name of Enlil, my lord, and of Dagan, my personal god.
6. Alt. transl.: territory/land.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 441

shall build all their (i.e. the city gods) shrines in Isin, 19 I shall celebrate their regular
festivals; 20–21 I shall set up my own statues, my own emblems, (choose by omen) my
own high priests, chief priests, and high priestesses in their special abodes, 24 so that
my subjects may offer their prayers, 22 before Enlil in the Ekur (in Nippur) 23 and be-
fore Nanna in the Ekišnug̃al (in Ur). 25–26 And as for you, I shall chase out the person
you depend on (Ibbi-Sin) from his territory! 27 Isin’s wall I shall rebuild 28(and) name
it Idil-pašunu.”
29
It was just as he had predicted: 30 He rebuilt Isin’s wall 31 (and) named it Idil-
pašunu; 32 he took over Nippur, appointed his own guard over it, 33 and arrested
Nig̃dugani, the chief temple administrator of Nippur. 34 (His ally), the ruler/governor
Zinnum, took prisoners in Subir 35(and) plundered Hamazi.7 36 Nur-aḫum, the gover-
nor of Ešnunna, 37 Šu-Enlil, the governor of Kish, 38and Puzur-Tutu, the governor of
Borsippa 39 came over to his side. 40 His clamor shakes the frontier territory like a reed
fence,8 41 as Išbi-Erra goes everywhere at the head of the troops.
42
It was just as he had predicted: 43 he captured the banks of the Tigris, the banks
of the Euphrates, as well as the banks of the Abgal and Me-Enlila. 44 He installed Iddi
in Malgium,9 45–46 and when Girbubu, governor of Girkal, resisted him and cut off
his (Iddi’s) shield, he (Išbi-Erra) took him prisoner. 47 His clamor has become louder,
48
(and now) he has turned his attention in my direction. 49 I have no ally, no one who
can match him! 50 Although he has not yet been able to defeat me, 51 when he finally
strikes, I will have to flee! Now my king is informed (about all of this)!

Commentary
Although this letter is fairly well documented, there are many variants, and it
is clear that some students did not understand certain lines and attempted to make
their own sense of the text. There are eight Nippur manuscripts, and these are rela-
tively consistent. The clusters of variants between the Ur and Sippar exemplars and
those from unknown sites may be of significance. Of the five unprovenienced texts,
X1 is in almost total harmony with the Sippar tablet Si1, and X3 agrees in almost
all cases with Ur2. See p. 46 above. Note that the composition was also known at
Uruk. The Uruk Letter Catalog contains the following two entries:
6′. i‑bi‑den.zu lugal‑⸢g̃u10⸣ [. . .]
7′. i‑bi‑⸢den.zu⸣ [x x] x x [. . .]

Perhaps the compiler of this catalog was aware of two diverse recensions of this
epistle; it is also possible that he had access to a completely different letter to the last
king of Ur, one that has not yet been recovered.

7. Var.: . . . captured Nig̃ dugani, the chief temple administrator of Nippur, and plundered
Hamazi. (His ally), the ruler/governor Zinnum, took prisoners in Subir.
8. Var.: The frontier territory trembles like a reed fence from his clamor.
9. Alt. transl.: He installed Iddin-Malgium.
442 23. Puzur-Numušda to Ibbi-Sin 1

4–5. The order of these lines consistently differs in Nippur manuscripts and in all
other sources. It is clear that some scribes understood the awkward nature of the
Nippur order and modified it, moving line 5 after line 3 and including it in the ini-
tial statement of Puzur-Numušda. X1 even added a clarifying line after line 5: “Thus
speaks my king Išbi-Erra:” It seems that outside of Nippur the letter began:
1
Speak to Ibbi-Sin, my king, 2 saying (the words of) Puzur-Numušda, governor of
Kazallu, your servant:
3
The envoy of Išbi-Erra came before me 5 (and) presented the matter as follows:
4
“My king Išbi-Erra has sent me to you to you with a message. Thus speaks my king
Išbi-Erra: 6 ‘My master Enlil has promised to make me shepherd of the land. . .’.”

7/43. Note the distribution of variants in the writing of the name of the Euphrates
in these lines. This is not apparent in line 7 because of the state of preservation of
the witnesses, but in line 43 the Nippur texts have buranun(UD.KIB.NUN)-
na, while all the other sources with the exeption of X1 write buranuna(UD.KIB.
NUN) ki . On the use of na and ki in this name, see, in general, C. Woods, ZA 95
(2005) 26.
9/35. On the possible location of Hamazi south of the Lower Zab, see Appendix D.
11. The present translation takes into account the use of /‑da / in the predicates of
this line in the Nippur sources, as opposed to /‑de/ of the surrounding lines. This
distinction between adjunct nonfinite clauses (da) and purpose infinitive clauses
(de) has been elucidated by Fumi Karahashi and is followed here.10 This subtle mor-
phological and syntactic distinction was unknown, or was ignored, by the author of
Ur2; in X1 the first verb has /-da /, while the second has /-de/ (in all other sources,
the verbs are broken). Therefore, in Ur2, and perhaps in other manuscripts, this line
should be translated “to make Isin the storehouse of Enlil, and make it famous.”
13. The translation “Yes, . . .” attempts to render into English the emphatic force
of the independent pronoun g̃ á-a-ra.
14. The interpretation of the rare gú . . . ak as “to be hostile, aggressive” follows
M. Jaques, Le vocabulaire des sentiments, 153 n. 345. It is possibly the opposite of gú
. . . g̃ ál = kanāšum, “to submit,” and therefore the line may have to be translated
“why are you unsubmissive to me? ”
15. In all the Nippur sources and the Sippar manuscript (N5 is very worn at this
point and somewhat uncertain), Išbi-Erra invokes his personal god, Dagan. This is
undoubtedly meant to underline his foreign origins. The texts Ur2 and X3, which
are so often in harmony, add the figure of the main god of Sumer, Enlil, as his mas-
ter. All discussions of this line cite the fuller version. Note the passage in the royal

10. “Nonfinite Relative Clauses in Gudea Cylinder B, Revisited,” paper presented at the
55th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Paris, July 8, 2009. I am grateful to Fumi Kara-
hashi for providing me with a copy of her presentation.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 443

inscription Iddin-Dagan 3:36–37 (RIME E.4.1.3.3, in curse formula): lú-ba d en-lí l

lugal-g̃ u 10 d nin-lí l ereš-g̃ u 10, d da-gan dig̃ ir-g̃ á nam ha-ba-an-da-ku 5-ru-ne,
“May Enlil, my king, Ninlil, my queen, and Dagan, my personal god, curse him.” It
may be that the tradition of Ur2 and X3 was corrupted by the memory of some Išme-
Dagan text, perhaps reinforced by contamination from line 6 above.
16. Tablets N1 and S1 write the bound pronoun on the direct object as g̃ u10. The
oblique -g̃ á, found in texts from other sites (Ur2, X1, X3), is probably more correct.
The idiomatic predicate šu sá . . . dug 4 here and in line 50 is a calque from Ak-
kadian qātam kašādum, “to conquer.” It is otherwise attested, as far as I know, only
in Larsa and Babylon I royal inscriptions (Kudur-mabuk 2 13 [E4.2.13]; Rim-Sin 37
ii 9′ [E4.2.14.14]; Rim-Sin 12 28 [E4.2.14.5]; Samsu-iluna D 33 [E4.3.7.8]); see also
IBPu1: 31 (24).
17. The only complete version of this line is in text Ur2; manuscript X3 was similar.
Note that X1 has an additional emphatic personal pronoun, g̃ á-ra, “to me,” while
the Nippur witness N5 apparently had the epithet lugal, “king,” following the name
of the god Enlil.
My comprehension of this paragraph hinges on the notion of mada as “frontier,” in
this case referring to the area around Kazallu, which is the main issue of the letter.
However, it is probable that even if this were the case at some moments of transmis-
sion, many Old Babylonian students and teachers would have understood it simply
as “land.”
18. The term zag-gu/gú-la / lá has been translated in a variety of ways. S. N.
Kramer, JAOS 69 (1949) 214, rendered it “a kind of chair,” Å. Sjöberg, Nanna-Suen,
63 n. 3, translated it “Ehrenplatz,” i.e., “place of honor,” followed by W. Sallaberger,
Kultische Kalender, 176 n. 820, while G. Selz, FAOS 15/2, 556; SEL 13 (1996) 7,
proposes “Gerätekammer,” an “equipment room.” Literary use of this term is rare; I
know only UET 6/1 67: 23 (Nanna Hymn E) zag-gu-lá šà hi-li mah si-a i[m-
mi-ni ? ]-in-dúr-uš, SLTNi 35 iii 13 (Dumuzi-Inana C1), “(Nanna) has seated (the
gods) in places of honor that fill the heart with sublime pleasure,” where Dumuzi
addresses Inana: zag-gu-la dig̃ ir-g̃ á-ka d inin mu-un-da-tuš-ù-dè-en,11 “Inana,
I will seat you in a chair of honor,” and Schooldays, 53: é-a ù-mu-ni-in-ku 4 zag-
gu-la bí-in-tuš, “after (the teacher) entered the house, he was seated in a chair of
honor.” Clearly, zag-gu-la is a sacred seat of some kind. In ED and Ur III economic
texts, it is written zag-gú-lá, e.g., PDT 1200: 5, CT 32 27 ii 6, TrDr 5521:6, YOS 4
226:10, AUCT 3 413:25, all in Ur III cultic contexts (Drehem, Umma, Garšana);
for OB references to g̃ iš banšur zag-gu-la, see D. Charpin, Archives, 37–38. Note
also Erimhuš VI 188 (MSL 17 86) zag-gu-la = sa-a-gu—that is, sagû, “shrine, holy
room in a temple,” (CAD S 26). While it seems that in literary texts one “sits” or
“occupies” a zag-gu-la, Ur III economic texts tend to support the interpretation of

11. There are illegible signs underneath the verb, most probably an Akkadian gloss.
444 23. Puzur-Numušda to Ibbi-Sin 1

the late Erimhuš, providing evidence that they were located in palaces and temples.
Thus in AnOr 7 87: it is šà ⸢é⸣-gal, in Princeton 1 123:7 šà é-gal uru an-na, in
SET 66:3 šà é [. . .], in AUCT 3 413:25–26 in the house of one Arbitum (undoubt-
edly the wife of the important general Hun-Habur). It seems that rhetorically the
future king intends to follow Ur III customs and impose royal control over cultic
activities from the highest religious offices to the smallest house and temple shrines.
The plural pronouns in this and the following line are somewhat problematical.
They cannot refer to Dagan and Enlil, because the plural shifters are present in
manuscripts that only mention the former.
20. The en, lú-mah, and ereš-dig̃ ir are the highest cultic officials of the land,
distinct from the administrative temple organization functionaries such as sag̃ a and
šabra (on the lú-mah, in many cases the highest priest of a deity, of the same rank
as en, and possibly higher than the ereš-dig̃ ir, see P. Steinkeller, FS Kienast, 632–
37). Most importantly, these were royal appointees, chosen by the gods by means of
omens, and Išbi-Erra is thus claiming divine sanction for his rule. The reading ereš
rather than nin follows Steinkeller.
24. The reading and meaning of TUR.TUR is uncertain in this context; one can
read tur-tur or di 4-di 4. Note that in N1 and possibly in X4 this is followed by ‑ma,
but I am not aware of any other evidence pointing in this direction. On the differ-
ence between tur-tur and di 4-di 4-lá, see M. Civil, OrNS 42 (1973) 32. One could
entertain a translation “even my poorest citizens will celebrate their festivals.” Note
that a technical use of the term is encountered in an Ur III letter-order (W. W.
Hallo, BiOr 26 [1969] 173:1–5): I ba-na-na, ù-na-a-dug 4, 3 (gur) 230 (sìla) še
gur, še-ba TUR.TUR-ne, hé-na-ab-šúm-mu. In such contexts, the word simply
means “servants,” which may be the usage followed in this letter.
26. Two of the Nippur texts (N1 and N2) use the verb gub (with ‑ta-) in the sense
of nasāḫum, “to remove from office,” as in ŠAr1: 22 (2; note that in this text X1
shows the same variant). Apparently, this meaning created problems for some scribes
(at least N4, X1, X3, X3), who simplified the verb (gub-bu) to bu, with a similar but
more forceful meaning. It is, of course, equally possible that this is free variation and
that one cannot assume the primacy of either version of the verb.
34–35. All previous translations have rendered these lines “He captured Zinnum,
the ruler/governor of Subir, and plundered Hamazi.” Although the traditional in-
terpretation should not be completely ruled out, the present rendition is based on
the verbal morphology of these and the preceding lines. In lines 30–33, the verbs all
begin with the negative-focus prefix ba-, which signifies that the agent of the action
(Išbi-Erra) is not mentioned in the clause. In lines 34–35, the verbal prefix changes
to i- (or immi-), and one must assume that Zinnum is the agent of these lines. One
would expect an ergative ending on the agent, but that is not always necessary with
proper names; the author of X1, who seems to try to make sense of things that are
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 445

unclear to him, provides Zinnum with an ergative marker. The unreliable scribe of
N1 may have understood the line in the same manner as most modern renditions.
Note that su-bir ki -a has to be interpreted as a locative (missing only in N1) and not
as a possessive form, hence “in Subir”; this is supported by the locative prefix ni- in
the predicate. See p. 194 above.
The noun written LÚ×GÁNA-tenû(.A) has been read in a variety of ways; the pres-
ently attested readings are šag̃ a, še 29, and heš 5 (for the first two, see P. Steinkeller,
FS Civil, 231; the sign is also glossed he-eš in Diri 6 B:47 [MSL 15 190]). There is
ample evidence for both šag̃ a and heš 5. In the first reading, the second consonant
is /g̃/, as evidenced by the gloss ša-g̃ á (Proto-Ea 628 [MSL 14 56], OB Lu A 496
[MSL 12 172]; see also Šulgi Hymn X 145: ša-g̃ á-aš-šè), indicating the reading šag̃ a.
Though in lexical texts the word is usually written LÚ×GÁNA-tenû, in literary texts
and in royal inscriptions it is encountered as LÚ×GÁNA-tenû.A (i.e. šag̃ a a ); e.g.,
LÚ×GÁNA-tenû.A ha-ni-dab 5 (Šulgi 36 [E3/2.1.2.36] x 6′–7′); see, moreover,
Ur-Ninurta Hymn A 51; Gilgameš and Aka 81, 99; Samsuiluna 8 46 (E.4.3.7.8). It is
clear that the final A is not a grammatical ending but is originally a gloss that became
part of the logogram. On the other hand, syllabic writings indicate that LÚ×GÁNA-
tenû can also be read heš 5 (S. Tinney, Nippur Lament, 180–81); in such instances, it
is often followed by the gloss šè. The difference in meaning is possibly that of “cap-
tive, prisoner” (šag̃ a) vs. “captivity” (heš 5).
The three Nippur manuscripts that preserve the last sign have dab 5 (N1, N3, N7)
as the verb; this is attested only once, in the inscription of Šulgi cited above, and
seems to be the earlier usage. The tradition represented by X1 and X3 bears witness
to a hypercorrection based on the common OB literary use of šag̃ a . . .ak (but dab 5
in the royal inscriptions of Šulgi and Samsuiluna). The ever resourceful scribe of X1
then changed the verb ak of the next line to lah 5 to avoid repetition of the same
word, in accordance with the standard aesthetics of Sumerian literature.
Some students, or teachers, had difficulties with these lines and apparently did not
know if Hamazi was a place (GN) or a personal name (PN). Three of the four Nip-
pur manuscripts treat it as a PN (N3, N5, N7) and omit the postfixed place-name
classifier /ki/, using instead the prefixed PN classifier (broken in N7); one should
therefore really translate the Nippur “version” as “he took Mr. Hamazi prisoner.”
The undependable writer of N1 solved the problem by omitting the line altogether.
Since Hamazi is mentioned as a GN in line 9, it seems to indicate a lack of attention
on the part of the students. The Sippar, Ur, and unprovenianced sources treat it as
a GN. Ur2 and X3, which are often in agreement with each other in opposition to
most other sources of this letter, have the line after 33, with the result that this event
is ascribed by them to Išbi-Erra rather than to Zinnum.
36. Note the variant Nur-Ea (Si1, X1) for Nur-aḫi—properly Nur-aḫum—the
historically attested ruler of Ešnunna. This may suggest that the name Ea was still
446 23. Puzur-Numušda to Ibbi-Sin 1

thought to begin with /ḫ/ or/ḥ/ by some in this period, but it could also be a clue
as to the place in which these manuscripts were written. The form nu-úr-a-ḫi is now
documented in the Ur III text TCCP 2 35:7 (Nippur, ŠS5.-.-).
39. ki-ni-šè gur is otherwise unattested. It has always been rendered “he returned
to their places,” but if this were the case, one might expect ki-ne-ne-šè (is this a
calque from Akkadian ana ašrīšu/ašriš utīršunūti?). Note also that the third-person
marker on the verb, which is consistent in all manuscripts, should refer to the vari-
ous governors as subjects, not objects. It is quite possible that for some this was the
understanding, but students obviously had problems with the long span of text back
to the referent, Išbi-Erra. The scribe of X1 used gúr, “to bow down in obeisance,”
possibly trying to make sense of all this.
40. The metaphor used here, and its echo in line 47, recalls Inninšagura 11–12:
za-pa-ág̃ dugud-da-ni-šè dig̃ ir kalam-ma-ke 4 ní àm-ma-ur 4-ru-ne, ur 5-ša 4-
a-ni d a-nun-na gi dili-gin 7 sag̃ mu-da-sìg-sìg-ge-ne, “Her loud clamor makes
the gods of the country tremble, her scream makes the Anuna quiver like a single
reed.” This is the only other occurrence of zapag̃ + dugud in Sumerian; in Akka-
dian, compare Enlil’s words in Atraḫasis II 7 (Lambert and Millard, Atra-ḫasīs, 72):
iktabta rigim awīlūti, “the ‘noise’ of humanity had become oppressive to me.”
41. There are no variants to gin-gin. F. Ali, SL 44, read gub and translated “Išbierra
stood at the head of his army,” as did S. N. Kramer, The Sumerians, 334. The redupli-
cation of the intransitive root with a singular subject implies habitual action.
44–46. There is more confusion and deviation in these lines than in any other pas-
sage in this letter, suggesting interpretive confusion in antiquity.
44. The personal name at the beginning of the line is problematical, compounded
by the fact that the city of Malgium is not attested prior to OB times. All previous
renditions interpret it as Iddin-Malgium or the like, a name that would be highly
improbable in an Ur III context. The matter is further complicated by the wide
variety of writings of the name of the city attested in the Old Babylonian period.
One scribe, who wrote N4, put Iddi and Malgium on separate lines; it may be that
others interpreted it as the personal name Iddin-Malgium, although this was clearly
not well understood by some of scribes (X1 solved it with a hypocoristic Iddiluma).
The verbal form ba-ni-in-ku 4 must be transitive here (see the discussion of Ur III
ba-ni-ku 4 by C. Wilcke, ZA 78 [1988] 27) and includes the locative prefix ni-; if
the name is Iddin-Malgium, then the verb has no direct object and the locative has
no referent. Malgium, of course, is unattested in Ur III documents; see p. 199 above.
46. The verb gú . . . bar is otherwise encountered only in martial contexts in the
inscriptions of Hammurabi and Samsuiluna and in one Inana hymn (M. Jaques, Le
vocabulaire des sentiments, 147) and is usually translated “to hate” (Akkadian zêrum)
but here, as in the inscriptions, it is used in the sense “to resist, rebel”; see, e.g., Sam-
suiluna 8:36 [E4.3.7.8] and Samsuiluna YD 14. The non-Nippur texts X1 and X2 as
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 447

well as N4 have the quasi-synonym gú . . . ak (see note to line 1 above), with the
meaning “opposed him.”
There is some question as to the subject of the three verbs in the sentence. I take
Girbubu to be the agent of gú . . . bar but Išbi-Erra as the agent of dab 5, with the
switch of reference indicated by the independent pronoun ene. More problematical
is the matter of the agents in these lines, an issue that obviously also caused problems
for ancient students, as exemplified by the erroneous first‑ or second-person ending
in N1 (“I/you resisted”); indeed, all nine witnesses to this line have completely dif-
ferent forms of the initial predicate.
It is usually assumed that Išbi-Erra was the one who instigated the action symbol-
ized by the “cutting” of Girbubu’s shield. The grammar, such as it is, suggests that
Girbubu did the cutting to symbolize his resistence to the man imposed by Išbi-Erra
and that the independent pronoun marks the switch of reference to the latter, who
imposed his vengence. However, in the reply, Ibbi-Sin demands action of both Puzur-
Numušda and Girbubu.
For the reading as well as the meaning of gur(u) 21, “shield,” see M. Civil, JCS 55
(2003) 52. Note the variant guru 7 in N4; most likely, it is a clever phonetic vari-
ant, similar to those discussed by M. Civil, JAOS 92 (1972) 271. The scribe then
substituted sù for ku 4 and reinterpreted the phrase as “he emptied his grain stores.”
48–49. F. Ali, SL 52, translated these lines: “He has fixed his eyes upon me, I have
no ally (and) no one to go with.” The translation of the last verb was based on a
reading di rather than sá; the verb is undoubtedly sá, with the prefix -da-, “to be
equal to, to compare with, to vie with.”
This use of igi . . . g̃ ar with the meaning “turn attention to” is also encountered in
Curse of Agade, 222–24: mìn-kam-ma-šè d suʾen d en-ki d inana d nin-urta d iškur
d
utu d nuska d nidaba dig̃ ir hé-em-me-eš, uru ki -šè igi-ne-ne i-im-g̃ á-g̃ á-ne,
a-ga-dè ki áš hul-a im-ma-ab-bal-e-ne, “Then again Sin, Enki, Inana, Ninurta,
Iškur, Utu, Nuska, Nidaba, the gods who were (there), turned their attention to the
city, and cursed Agade.” Note that lines 48–49 are quoted in the answer from Ibbi-
Sin to Puzur-Numušda (IbP1: 8–9, Letter 24).
50. As G. Gragg ( JNES 32 [1973] 126) has observed, this is one of only two at-
testations of a negative verbal form in subordinate clauses of the type S-a+ta. He
notes the incongruence of negation and a temporal clause and suggests the causative
meaning “since.”
448 23. Puzur-Numušda to Ibbi-Sin 1

Sources
N1 = 3 N-T 311 (IM 58418) (SL xxii–xxiii; Sumer 26 171–72) iii–iv 1–51
N2 = 3 N-T 919, 45912 (SL xliii; Sumer 26 178; SLFN 22) 23–31; 45–51
N3 = CBS 6895 + 6896 + 6906 + 7663 (first three SL xxxv; Sumer 26 173) 29–51
N4 = CBS 6987 + N 3603 + N 4154 + Ni. 9463 (ISET 1 228[170])13 4–16;24–28;
30–34; 41–49
N5 = CBS 7787 + N1200 + N1203 + N1204 + N1208 + N1210-27a +
N1210-27b + N1210-27d + N1210-27e + N1212 + N1214 +
N1218 (+?) Ni. 4061 + Ni. 4188 (ISET 2 118) ii 6′–13′ 1–6, 11–21; 28–51
N6 = Ni. 4165 (ISET 1 136[78]14) 4–9; 31–34
N7 = Ni. 13180 (ISET 2 11715) 33–36; 40–43
N8 = N 1447 (SL xxxiv; Sumer 26 176) + N 3102 1–7; 20–22
N9 = HS 2394 1–23
Ur1 = U. 16853 (UET 6/2 174) + UET 6/3 557 (*532) obv. iii′ 2′–19′;
rev. i′ 1′–17′ 1–9; 17–29
Ur2 = UET 6/3 558 (*264)16 1–36
Si1 = Si. 524 (Copy F. Geers) 6–16; 35–46
Su1 = MDP 27 212 8–10
X1 = A 7475 ii 27-52, iii 1–22 1–51
X2 = BM 54327 iv 1′–16′ 21–29; 43–46; 31–34
X3 = IM 13347 (TIM 9 38) 1–33; 44; 35; 34; 36; 38–48; 50–51
X4 = Cornell 63 19–44
X5 = NYPLC 33417 17

N1 collated from a photograph. Su1 could not be located. X3 collated by P. Steinkeller.

X1 possibly from Sippar; X3 possibly from Ur. X4 was identified by Alhena Gadotti,
who kindly transliterated it and arranged for photographs (by Lisa Kinney-Bajwa),
just as this book was being finished. I was not able to study the tablet in person. The
tablet is extremely worn. N9 was also identified at the last minute by Manfred Kre-
bernik, who kindly provided a transliteration and digital photo.

12. In SL labeled as 3N-T 919, 959 (in list of sources as 3N-T 919), in RCU as 3N-T919,
486.
13. CBS 6987 also STVC 98, N 3603 also SL xliii; Sumer 26 175.
14. Obverse and reverse to be reversed.
15. Obverse and reverse to be reversed.
16. The surface of this tablet is very worn in parts and extremely difficult to read. The inter-
pretations offered here are the result of multiple collations.
17. Small rectangular tablet with two lines on obverse; reverse uninscribed. This unpro-
venienced piece from the collections of the New York Public Library was published in photo
on CDLI as P342755 when this book was already in press and kindly brought to my attention
by Nike Veldhuis. I have not had the opportunity to collate it (http://cdli.ucla.edu/cdlisearch/
search/index.php?SearchMode=Text&txtID_Txt=P342755).
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 449

Tablet typology: compilation tablets (Type I): N1, N5, Ur1, X1, X2. All the rest are
Type III, except Su1, which is a Type IV round practice tablet.
Bibliography: Editions: F. Ali, SL 42–52; F. Ali, Sumer 26 (1970) 160–69; Yuhong, A
Political History, 8–10. Translation: S. N. Kramer, The Sumerians, 333–34; P. Micha-
lowski, Royal Letters, 80.

Concordance of sigla used here (CKU) and by F. Ali in SL and in Sumer 26, with
additions in RCU:
N1 A A N1
N2 G B X3
N3 H C Ur1
N4 E D N8
N5 I+F E N4
N6 M F N5
N7 J G N2
N8 D H N3
Ur1 C I N5
Ur2 O J N7
Si1 K K Si1
X1 L L X1
X2 N M N6
X3 B N X2

Textual Matrix
1. d
i-bí-den.zu lugal-g̃u10-ra ù-na-a-dug4
N1 oo o .. . . + o o o o o
N5 ⸢I⸣
. . o. + . . + ++ - +
N8 .. + ++ + + . o /o . + .
N9 .+ + ++ + . + . /+ + + +
Ur1 .+ + ++ + + + + /. a na +
Ur2 oo . .. . o o o o o o o
X1 .. . +. . + + . ++ . +
X3 I
. o oo o o o o o o o o
2. I
puzur4-dnu-muš-da énsi ka-zal-luki árad-zu na-ab-bé-a
N1 .. . o o o o o o o o + . . . o o
N5 +. ++ + + + + + + -/ + . + . + +
N8 oo o . . + . o o o o o o . . o o
N9 -. ++ + + + + + + +/ + + + + + +
Ur1 +. . ⸢šul⸣-gi + + + + +/ + + . + + +
Ur2 o. + šul-⸢gi⸣ o o o o o/ o . . . . o
X1 +. . ⸢šul-gi⸣ . + + +. . . + + + +
X3 +. o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
450 23. Puzur-Numušda to Ibbi-Sin 1

3. lú-kíg̃-gi4-a d
iš-bi-èr-ra ugu-g̃u10-šè ì-gin
N1 + + + + ++ + . o o o o o o
N5 + . . . .. . . . o o o o o
N8 o o o o oo o o o . . o o o
N9 + + + + ++ + . . + + + ++
Ur1 + + . + ++ + + + / . . ⸢im?-mi?-in?-gin-en⸣
Ur2 . . . + -+ . o o ⸢ke4⸣ . o o o o
X1 + . . . .o o + + + . - +im +
X3 . . o o oo o o o o o o o o
4. d
iš-bi-èr-ra lugal-g̃u10 ugu-zu-šè kíg̃-gi4-a im-mi-in-gi4
N1 I
++ . . + . + . o o . . + . + . o
N4 oo . o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
N5 .. o . + - - + + - + . o o o o o
N6 oo o . . . o o o o o o o o o o o
N8 ++ + . . o o . + + . o o o o o o
N9 ++ + + + . + + . + + . . + + - .
Ur1 ++ + + + + + . . uš + . - . o o .
Ur2 .. . . . . . . . +/ . . . . . + . 18
X1 .+ + + . . + + . - . . + + . - .
X3 # (or on same line with 3)
5. igi-ni ma-an-g̃ar-ma
N1 + + + . o o
N4 . + . o o o
N5 . o + + + .
N6 o . . o o o
N8 . + + o o o
N9 + + + + + +
Ur1 . . + + . . (after 3)
Ur2 . + . . . + (after 3)
X1 + + + + + - (after 3)
X3 . . o o o o (after 3)
6. d
en-líl lugal-g̃u10 nam-sipa kalam-ma ka-ka-ni ma-an-šúm
N1 ++ + + + . + . o + + + ba . o
N4 .+ . o o/ . + . o/ . + + . o o
N5 oo . + + + + . . . . . . o o
N6 .. . + . . o o o o o o o o o
N8 .+ + + . o o o o + + o o o o
N9 ++ + + + + + + + + + . + + +
Ur1 ++ + + + + . + ./ + . . ⸢ba⸣ . .
Ur2 .. . . . . . . . . o o ba + +
Si1 o. + + + . o o o . . o o o o
X1 .+ + . . . . . . + + + + + .
X3 .. . . . . o o o o o o o o o

18. Followed by a unique line: ⸢ I iš-bi-èr-ra lugal-g̃ u 10 na-ab⸣-bé-[a].

 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 451

7. gú íd
idigna gú íd
buranun-na gú ídabgal ù gú íd
me-den-líl-lá
N1 + ++ - +. o + +. . o oo oo o o
N4 . .. /. .o o/ + +o /+ + +. oo o o
N6 o .. o oo o o oo o . oo oo o o
N8 o .+ . oo o/ o .. o o oo oo o o
N9 + +. + ++ + + -+ + - ++ ++ + +
Si1 . +. . .o o + .⸢áb⸣-gal . o oo oo o o
Ur1 . .+ . .. o/ . +áb⸢abgal-bi⸣ /+ +. ++ + . .
Ur2 o .. . .. . o .o o /. . .o .. . o
X1 . .. . .. . .áb-gal . - .. .. . +
X3 . ++ . +. -19 - +. o o oo oo o o
8. uruki-bi-ne dig̃ir-bi-ne ù ugnim-bi-ne
N1 + ++ + + + . - . o o
N4 + ++ + . o o /+ + . o
N6 o o o o o . o o o o o
N9 + - + e+ + +e + + + + e+
Ur1 . + .⸢ne⸣. . . o /. + x o
Ur2 + . .⸢e⸣ . o . o /. . . o
Si1 . - + + + . o + . o o
Su1 + + + e +/ + +e + - .20 .e +
X1 . - + . . . . . . + .
X3 . - +e+ + +⸢e⸣. o o o o
9. ma-da ha-ma-ziki-ta en-na a-ab-ba má-ganki-na-šè
N1 + . + + . ++ + - ++ o o o o o o
N4 + + + + . o o/ + + ++ + + . o o .
N6 o o o o . o o o o o o o o o o o o
N9 + +ki + + ++ + + + ++ + + + + + +
Ur1 . . + + ⸢zí⸣oo/ . . . ⸢a?⸣ o/ ù + . o o o21
Ur2 . . . . ⸢zí⸣. . . . o o o o o o o o
Si1 + + + + . . + + . o o o o o o o o :
Su1 . +ki + + zí- ./ - - . a - + +an naki ta
X1 + + + + . . . . + +. + . . naki +
X3 . + I
+ + ++ + o o o o o o o o o o

19. Although this source utilizes the writing with final na in line 43, there does not seem to
be enough space here for this sign (UD.⸢KIB.NUN⸣).
20. Written: SU.LU.ÚB.⸢G ̃ AR⸣.
21. Ur1 must have had more after ⸢a-a ? ⸣-[ab-ba], perhaps Dilmun.
452 23. Puzur-Numušda to Ibbi-Sin 1

10. igi nin-in-si-na-ka-šè

d
ku4-ku4-dè
N1 + ++ ì + .ki + + + . o o
N4 . ++ + + + . . + + .
N9 . ++ + + INki + + + + +
Ur2 . ++ ì + + + x (-) o . .
Si1 . ++ . o . + + . o o
Su1 . ++ ì + +ki - - + + ta
X1 + +. + + . - - . + +
X3 . ++ + + + - - + + o
11. ì-si-inki nam-g̃á-nun d
en-líl-lá-šè g̃á-g̃á-da mu tuk-tuk-da
N1 ++ + + + + + ++ + o o + + + + + + .
N4 ++ + + + . o/ ++ + + + + + o/ o o o o
N5 oo o o o o + ++ o o o o o o + šè + + x22
N9 . +++ + + + ++ . . + + + + + + + .
Ur2 ++ + . + . . .. + - - + .⸢dè⸣/ + šu . + dè
Si1 . +++ + + . ++ + . o o o o + . + o
X1 ++ . . + + . .+ + . . + + . + + + dè
X3 . +++ + + . .. o o o o o o . + + o
12. nam-ra-ak-ne-ne uru-uru-bi durun-ù-dè
N1 + + + + +a ak-dè +ki .⸢ki⸣o + +.
N4 . + + + +/ +ki +ki + + ++
N5 o o o o o o o + + +.
N9 + + + + + ak-dè + + + . - +
Ur2 + + ka + . . + ba + - +
Si1 + + . . + + . + +23 . o:
X1 . . . . . .? . ⸢ba⸣ . ++
X3 . . ka . o + + + + o o
13. d
en-líl-le g̃á-a-ra ma-an-dug4
N1 ++ + . . . + ⸢ba⸣ . .
N4 ++ + + + ++ + + +
N5 o+ + -g̃á?-e?-da? + ++
N9 ++ + + + e+ + + +
Ur2 .+ + . o oo o . .
Si1 .. . + . o. . . o
X1 .. . . . - . . . .
X3 .+ + + o o. + + o

22. The surface of N5 is extremely worn at this point (lines 11–21). To simplify matters,
whenever a sign can be even vaguely identified, it is marked as +; only non-broken signs at the
ends of lines are notated as . or x.
23. Written as dib.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 453

14. a-na-aš-àm gú mu-da-ak

N1 o . + + + + + +
N4 ++ + + + + + +
N5 ++ + + + + + +e
N9
Ur2 o . . . . . .ab+
Si1 o o o + . o . .
X1 o o o o . + + .e
X3 ++ + + + + + o
15. mu d
da-gan dig̃ir-g̃á ì-pàd
N1 . . +. . + + +
N4 . . . + + + + +
N5 + ++ . o o o o
N9 + ++ + + g̃u10 in-ši-pàd
Ur2 o [d]⸢en-líl lugal-g̃u10⸣ . ++ +!24 + in .
Si1 o o. . . + + .:
X1 o oo o + + + .
X3 . den-líl ⸢lugal-g̃u10⸣ ù ++ . o o o o
16. ka-zal-luki šu-g̃u10 sá hé-eb-bé
N1 . o ++ + + + + + +
N4 traces
N5 + + ++ . o o o o o
N9 + + ++ + + + + + +
Ur2 o + ++ + ⸢g̃á⸣ +25 + bí di
Si1 + . oo o . . . . o
X1 o o oo + g̃á + . + ⸢dug4⸣
X3 + + ++ + g̃á + o o o
17. uru ma-da den-líl-le ma-an-du11-ga-àm
N1 . . + ++ + + . . . + o
N5 + + + +. o o o o o o o
N9 + + +ki++ + + + + + + +
Ur1 x x o oo o o o o o o o26
Ur2 . + + .. . + . . + + +
X1 o o o o. . + g̃á-ra . + . . .
X3 . . + ++ . ⸢lá⸣ + + . o o
X5 +ki + +/ . . . + + + + + -

24. Written as MU!

25. Possibly, the student began to write hé and then continued with sá.
26. The remnants of two signs at the beginning of the line cannot be deciphered; it is im-
possible to determine if the line was split over two lines or not.
454 23. Puzur-Numušda to Ibbi-Sin 1

18. šà ì-si-inki-na-ka zag-gu-la-ne-ne ga-bí-ib-dù-dù

N1 + + + + ++ + . . . . o + + + . .
N5 + + + + ++ + . o o o o o o o o o
N9 + + + + +- - + + +27 . + a + + + durun-uš
Ur1 . . . . - . o/ . + lá + ./
g̃iš
+ + + + .
Ur2 . . + + - + + ⸢g̃iš⸣. . + + + + . ⸢íb⸣ . +
X1 o o o o o . + o + . . .⸢a⸣ . . . + +
X3 . . + + +. . . -? lá + o + . + g̃ar o
19. èš-èš-a-ne-ne-a ga-àm-ak
N1 . + ++ + + . . .
N5 + + ++ + - . o o
N9 + + ++ + + + + +
Ur1 x la + + + - + ⸢an⸣ .
Ur2 . . . + + . . . nígin28
X1 o o o o . + + .ma +
X3 + + ++ + . + +ma x
X4 o o . . . o o o o
20. alam-g̃u10 šu-nir-g̃u10 en lú-mah ereš-dig̃ir-g̃u10-ne
N1 . + g̃iš . + + . . . + + + o
N5 + + + + + . o o o o o o
N8 o o o o . o o o . + . o
N9 + + + + + + + + + + + +29
Ur1 + +ne g̃iš + . . / + g̃u10-ne - - + + . o
Ur2 . + + + + . o . / . . . +:
X1 o o o o . . . + . . . .
X3 . + + + . . . . o o o o
X4 . . ⸢g̃iš⸣
. . + + . . . . . +
21. g̃i6-par-ra-ne-ne-a ga-bí-ib-durunx(KU.KU)
N1 . + . . . + . + + dúr ru dúr
N5 o + + . . o o o o o
N8 o o . + + + + . . o
N9 + + + + + . + + + .
Ur1 + . + + + + . o o o
Ur2 + . . . + - + . o .
X1 o o o . . + + + + +
X2 o o o o o o o o o .
X3 + + + + + + + + . .
X4 . . . . . + + ⸢ba⸣- .

27. Misshapen; looks more like um.

28. Possibly tuš.
29. Preceded by an erased ne.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 455

22. igi en-líl-lá

d
šà é-kur-ra-šè
N1 . .. . - . . . . +
N8 o oo . + + ++ + +
N9 + ++ + + - ++ + .
Ur1 + ++ + + šè + ++ . o
Ur2 o oo o o o . o . -
X1 o oo o o ⸢šè⸣ . +. + -
X2 o oo o o o o . . -
X3 + ++ . + ⸢šè⸣ - ++ + -
X4 . .. . . ⸢šè⸣ - +o . -
23. igi d
nanna šà é-kiš-nu-g̃ál-šè
N1 . .⸢en.zu⸣ . o . . +x30+
N2 o oo o o o o . .
N9 + ++ na + + + . + ???
Ur1 + .. šè + + . o o o
Ur2 o oo o . o o . ta
X1 o oo . . . . . ⸢ta⸣
X2 o oo o . . + + ta
X3 + ++ o + + . . o
X4 + . . - . . . . ta
24. tur-tur-g̃u10 sízkur-bi hé-eb-bé
N1 . .ma g̃á . . + + +
N2 o o o o . . + +
N4 o o o o o . . .
Ur1 . + + . + + ⸢íb?⸣o
Ur2 o o o o . . b[í-ib]-⸢dug ⸣
X1 . . . . o . . ⸢dug ⸣
X2 o o o o o . + +
X3 + + ni .31 + + . x
X4 + +x x + + . + +
25. ù za-e lú g̃iškim-ti-zu-um
N1 . + + + + . + +
N2 o o o o . ++ +
N4 o . . + + ++ o
Ur1 + + + + . . o o
Ur2 . o o o o oo o
X1 o o o o . . o o
X2 o o o o o oo o :
X3 + + + . o + me-en :
X4 . . . . . + -? -? :

30. Probably an erased sign; it appears that the student began to write la.
31. It is possible that there was a sign between ni and sízkur.
456 23. Puzur-Numušda to Ibbi-Sin 1

26. ma-da-ni-ta ga-àm-ta-an-gub-bu

N1 . + + + + . . - . +
N2 o o o o o o + + + +
N4 + +ki + + / + + + + - +
Ur1 šà + + . . . o o o o o
Ur2 + . . . . + o o o o
X1 o o o o o o o + - .
X2 . . + + o [a]b+ + - +
X3 + + . o o x + - - +
X4 o o . x + . .? o o o
27. ì-si-inki-na bàd-bi ga-àm-dù
N1 ++ +++ + + + + +
N2 oo ooo . + + + +
N4 ++ +++/ . + + + +
Ur1 ++ +- + . . o o o
Ur2 . . .na ki + . . o o
X1 oo ooo o x + + +
X2 oo ooo . + + + +
X3 ++ +o o + +a + . o
X4 . . . . . . + + . .`
28. i-di-il-pa- šu-nu mu-šè ga-an-sa4
N1 I
. + + ⸢KA⸣ + + + sa4-àm ga-sa4
N2 oo o o . + o o . . .
N4 o. + + + + o o o o .?
N5 oo o o . . . o o o o
Ur1 o . . ⸢KA⸣ . o x x + ⸢bí⸣o
Ur2 ì+ ++ + + + + + bí .
X1 oo o o o o o . . ⸢àm⸣.
X2 oo o o o o + + + + +
X3 ++ + + o o + + + ⸢àm⸣.
X4 .. . . . . . . . x o
29. bí-in-du11-ga-gin7-nam
N1 + + + + + +
N2 o o o o o o
N3 . + + o o o
N5 . o o . + o
Ur1 o . . . . o
Ur2 . + + + + +
X1 . . . . + .
X2 o o o o + +
X3 + + + o + o
X4 + + + . . .
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 457

30. ì-si-inki-na bàd-bi ba-an-dù

N1 ++ + + . . . . + +
N2 oo o o o o . o o .
N3 ++ + + + + . o o x
N4 traces / o . + + .
N5 . . . . + + . x o o
Ur2 . . . ⸢naki⸣ o o .⸢àm⸣ +
X1 ++ + + + + + + + +
X2 #
X3 . ++++ . + ⸢im⸣ ma .
X4 ++ + + + . . . . o
31. i-di-il-pa-šu-nu mu-šè ba-an-sa4
N1 I
++ + KA+ + + sa4-a ba-sa4-a
N2 oo o o o o o o o o .
N3 + + el KA+ + + . . + .
N4 o . + + . +/ o o . + .
N5 I
e-de32-⸢el⸣-KA-šu-nu mu-šè ì-i[m? . . .]
N6 o o . ⸢KA⸣o o o o o o o
Ur2 ì + +. o o . + + àm .
X1 ++ + + + + + + + + +
X2 oo o o o o o . . + +
X3 o. + + . . . . ⸢ga àm⸣o
X4 ++ . . . . . + + . o
32. nibruki ba-an-dab5 en-nu-ùg̃-g̃á-ni ba-an-g̃ar
N1 + + + . . . . + + +33 + + +
N3 + + + + + + . + + - + + .
N4 o . + . +/ o o . . + + + +
N5 + + + . . + + + + . o o o
N6 . + + + . . o o o o o o o
Ur2 . . . . . + + - + + . . .
X1 + + + + + + + + + + + + +
X2 o o o o o o o o x + + + +
X3 . . . . + + + . + + o o o
X4 . . + + + + + + . o o o o

32. It may be that the student began to write te and then decided to use di.
33. The sign looks more like lú.
458 23. Puzur-Numušda to Ibbi-Sin 1

33. ù I
níg̃-du11-ga-ni sag̃a nibruki ba-an-dab5
N1 + ++ + + + + + + + + +
N3 + -+ + + + + . + + + +
N4 o oo o . + +/ o o . + +
N5 + -+ + . + + + + . o o
N6 o o. + + + + . o o o o
N7 o oo o o o . . o o o o
Ur2 o oo . + + . . + . o o
X1 - ++ + + + + + + + + +
X2 o oo o o o o o o + + +
X3 + -+ + + + + + +⸢a⸣+ . o
X4 . -. . . . . . . o o o
34. I
zi-in-nu-um énsi su-bir4ki-a šag̃aa i-ni-in-dab5
N1 o. . + + + + + + - . ⸢ba⸣- - .
N3 -+ + + + + + + + + + + +- +
N4 oo o o o ./ o o o o o o oo o
N5 ++ + + + + + . o o + + +. o
N6 oo o . . . . . o o o o oo o
N7 oo o . + + . . -34 - . + ++ +
Ur2 omits, or had after line 35
X1 ++ - + +e + + + + + + + + + ak
X2 oo o o o o . . . . . . . . ⸢ak⸣
X3 ++ + + + + kišiki o o o o o o(after 35)
X4 o. - . . . . . o o o o oo o
35. ha-ma-ziki nam-ra-aš im-mi-in-ak
N1 #
N3 I
+ + +- + ⸢ma⸣+ + + + +
N5 I
+ + +- + + + . o o o
N7 o o . - + + + + + + +
Si1 + + . . . o o o o o o
Ur2 o o o+ + +⸢a⸣ . + ma⸢an?⸣ o (after 33)
X1 + + ++ + + + + + an-lah5
X3 I
. + ⸢zí⸣. . + . . ma-⸢an-ak?⸣ (after 33,44)
X4 . . . . . . . x x o o

34. There does not seem to be room for ki; note that the scribe omits the ki in the next line
as well but writes it in line 36.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 459

36. I
nu-úr-a-hi énsi èš-nun-naki
N1 oo . + + + + . + +
N3 ++ + + + + + + - +
N5 ++ + + + + + . o o
N7 oo o o o . + . ki
na
Si1 ++ + é-a . o o o o (after 37)
Ur2 traces
X1 ++ + é-a + + + . - (after 37)
X3 ++ + + .i . o o o o
X4 o. . . . . . o o o
37. I
šu-den-líl énsi kišiki-a
N1 . . ++ + + + + -
N3 ++ ++ + . + + +
N5 ++ ++ + + . . o
Si1 ++ ++ + . o o o (after 35)
X1 ++ ++ + + + + + (after 35)
X3 # (see l. 35)
X4 #
38. ù I
puzur4-dtu-tu énsi bàd-zi-ab-baki
N1 . -+ .+ + + . . . + +
N3 + -+ ++ . + + . + + +
N5 + -+ .. . + + ++ + +
Si1 - ++ -+ + . . + + . o:
X1 - ++ -+ + + + ++ + .
X3 - +. .+ + o o o o o o
X4 - o. .+ . o o o x o o:
39. ki-ni-šè ba-an-gur-ru-uš
N1 . ++ + + + + +
N3 o . . . . + + .
N5 + . + + + + + +
Si1 + ++ + ⸢e⸣ + + +
X1 + ++ + e gúr - +
X3 . +. bí-i[n] o o o
X4 . . . + . . . .
40. za-pa-ág̃-g̃á-ni ma-da gi-sig-gin7 ì-bur10-e
N1 #
N3 o . + + + . . . . o +. .
N5 + . + + + + +ki . . ge en . . o
N7 o o o o o o o o o . + +. ⸢re⸣
Si1 + + + + + ta + + + + + ++ +
X1 + + + + + ta + + + + + íb + re
X3 . + . + + ta + + . o o ì . o
X4 o o . + + ta + + . . + . + +
460 23. Puzur-Numušda to Ibbi-Sin 1

41. d
iš-bi-èr-ra igi érin-na-šè ì-gin-gin
N1 #
N3 . + + + . + + + + ++ .
N4 ooo o o / o . o o oo o
N5 - + + d+ + + + - + ++ .
N7 o o o o o o o . + ++ +
Si1 + + + + + + . + + ++ .
X1 + + + + + + + + + ++ +
X3 . . . . . + + + + +. o
X4 o o o ⸢d⸣. . + + . + ++ .
42. bí-in-du11-ga-gin7-nam
N1 + ++ + + +
N3 . ++ . + +
N4 . +. . . o
N5 + ++ + + .
N7 o o . o . +
Si1 + ++ + . .
X1 + ++ + + +
X3 # or on previous line
X4 o o o o o o:
43. gú idigna
íd
gú íd
buranun-na gú íd
abgal ù gú íd
me-den-líl-lá ba-an-dab5
N1 + ++ - .+ + - ++ + - ++ ++ + + + + +
N3 o ++ + .+ +/ o ++ + - ++ ++ + + + . .
N4 . ++ /. +. +/ . ++ / . + ++ ++ + + + + +
N5 + ++ + ++35 + . . o + - ++ ++ + + + . o
N7 o oo . .. +/ o o o . - ++ ++ + + + + +
Si1 + +. + +. ki + .⸢áb⸣-gal + - . . ++ + . o o o
X1 + ++ + .+ + + +áb-gal + - ++ ++ + + + . o
X2 o oo o o. ki + +áb-gal . + ++ ++ + + + + +
X3 + .+ + ++ ki - - - - - -- -- - - + + .
X4 . .+ . .. ki / o o o o o o oo o + - + + +
44. I
i-di mà-al-gi4ki-a ba-ni-in-ku4
N1 +++ . . + . + + + + .
N3 oo . + + + - + + + . .
N4 o.o/ o .gu7 a⸢ki⸣/ . + + .
N5 ++dì + + + aki + . o o
Si1 o.+ + + + aki o o o o
X1 I
id-di-lum-a + . . +
X2 oo o o o o o o + + + +
X3 ++ + . +⸢gu7 a⸣ki + + + . (after 33)
X4 oo o o o o o o o . . .

35. Written UD.NUN.

 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 461

45. I
gir-bu-bu énsi g̃ír-kalki-ke4
N1 ++ + . + + + +-
N2 oo o o . . o o o
N3 oo ⸢d⸣+ + . + . o o
N4 ++ + + . + + +o
N5 .. + + + . . o o
Si1 oo . . . o . o o
X1 ++ + + + + + + +:
X2 oo o o o o o o . :
X3 +. . . + + + +- :
46. gú im-da-bar-re-ma guru21-ni
kuš
ba-an-ku5 ù e-ne ba-an-dab5
N1 + in . + en o ++ + + + + + ++ + + +
N2 o o o o o o o. . . . . - - - - - -36
N3 . . . . . . ++ . ib - . / + ++ . + +
N4 + in + ak à[m] / -guru7 + + + sù / + ++ + + .
N5 + + + + ⸢ra⸣ o .o o o o o + +. o o o
Si1 traces
X1 + in-da-⸢an-ak⸣-e ++ + + + + + ++ + + +
X2 . in-da-ak-e / oo o o o o o . + + + +
X3 . i[n]o o o /-x x . . . . ++ + + .
47. za-pa-ág̃-g̃á-ni im-ma-dugud
N1 + + + + + + + +
N2 o o o o o . + +
N3 + + + + + . + an +
N4 + + + + . + + .
N5 + + + . o o o o
X1 + + + + + + + an +
X3 + x x x x . + .
48. ugu-g̃u10-uš igi-ni ma-an-g̃ar
N1 + + + + + + + .
N2 o o o o o + + +
N3 + + šè + . [i]m-ma-ni-in-g̃ar
N4 + + + + + [m-ma]-ni-in-[g̃ar]
N5 . . . . o o o o
X1 + + šè + + + + .
X3 . x x . x x x x

36. Perhaps the end of the line continued around the edge.
462 23. Puzur-Numušda to Ibbi-Sin 1

49. lú tab-ba nu-tuku lú nu-mu-un-da-sá-e

N1 . + + + + + + + + + + .
N2 o o o o o o . + + + + +
N3 + + + + + . . e - + + .
N4 . + . o o/ - + . o o o o
N5 . + + + o o o o o o o o
X1 + + + + + + + + + + + +
X3 #
50. šu-ni sá nu-mu-un-da-ab-du11-ga-ta
N1 . + + + + + + + . + +
N2 o o o o o o ⸢na?⸣-ab-ta-ta
N3 + + + + + - .37 o . +⸢a⸣ +
N5 . + + . o o o u]b? + . o
X1 + + + nu-ub-du11-ga :
X3 ⸢šu-[ ] sá mu-un-ib-ib⸣-du11-ga-a-⸢ta⸣38
51. ù-mu-un-šub ga-àm-ma-gin lugal-g̃u10 hé-en-zu
N1 + + - +ub + . . . . + . . o
N2 o o o o o o . + o o . + +
N3 ++ + + . . + ./ + + . . .
N5 . . . o o o + + + + . . .
X1 ++ . . . + - + . . . o o [a]-ma-ru-kam
X3 . . . . . . . ./ . . + + +

Catchline N3: [ (I) puz]ur 4- d nu-mu[š-da…] (IbPu1 [24])

In N5 and X1 followed by IbPu1 (24)

Colophon O (X1)

37. Sign looks more like the beginning of da rather than of un. There is no room for both.
38. Reading of line uncertain.
 24. Ibbi-Sin to Puzur-Numušda 1
(IbPu1, 3.1.20, RCU 22)

Composite Text
Version A (Short Version)
1. I
puzur4-dnu-muš-da énsi ka-zal-luki
2. ù-na-a-dug4
3. d
i-bí-den.zu lugal-zu na-ab-bé-a
4. u4 érin-ta mu-ra-suh-a-gin7 nam-énsi ka-zal-luki-šè mu-ra-g̃ál
5. g̃á-e-gin7-nam érin-zu dugud-da-zu in-nu-ù
6. a-na-aš-àm ur5-gin7 lú mu-e-ši-gi4
7. I
iš-bi-èr-ra ugu-g̃u10-šè igi-ni im-ma-ši-in-g̃ar
8. ù g̃á-e ù-mu-un-šub ga-àm-gin
9. en-na iš-bi-èr-ra kur šu-ni bí-in-gi4-a a-gin7 nu-e-zu1
10. za-e gir-bu-bu énsi g̃ír-kalki-a-ke4
12. a-na-aš-àm érin šu-zu-šè ì-g̃ál-la igi-ni-šè la-ba-an-su8-ge-za-na
13. kur ki-bi gi4-gi4-da a-gin7 mi-ni-ib-šúm-mu-za-na
13. u4 na-me den-líl-le ki-en-gi hul mu-un-gi4
14. úgu
ugu4-bi kur-bi-ta è-dè nam-sipa kalam-ma-šè mu-un-íl
15. ì-ne-éš den-líl-le lú im-sa10-sa10 nu-luh-hasar
16. I
iš-bi-èr-ra numun ki-en-gi-ra nu-me-a nam-lugal-la mu-na-an-šúm
17. ga-nam pu-úh-rumki dingir-re-e-ne ki-en-gi ság ba-ab-dug4
18. a-a den-líl du11-ga-du11-ga-ni dab5-bé-da
19. en-na uri5ki-ma lú érim-ša mu-un-ri-a
20. iš-bi-èr-ra lú má-ríki-ke4 suhuš-bi ba-bu-re
21. ki-en-gi hé-ág̃-e ur5-gin7-nam bí-in-dug4
22. ù tukum-bi énsi uru-didli ì-g̃ar-g̃ar-re-en-zé-en
23. inim den-líl-lá-ta iš-bi-èr-ra ì-bal-e-eš-àm
24. lú tab-ba-gin7 uru érim-ra ba-šúm-mu-na-ta
25. ù za-e árad gi-na-g̃u10-gin7 iš-bi-èr-ra nu-mu-un-zu-a
26. ì-ne-éš inim du10-ga gi4-gi4-dè
27. lul du8-du8-ù-da hé-ni-ib-túm-túm-mu
28. un-zu buru14-ba hé-ak-e-ne

1. Var.: en-na iš-bi- d èr-ra kur-šè bí-in-gi 4 -a a-gin 7 nu-e-zu.

463
464 24. Ibbi-Sin to Puzur-Numušda 1

29. za-e na-an-gur10-un ugu-g̃u10-šè nam-ma-ši-du-un

30. šu-ni uruki-a nam-bí-ib-sá-di
31. lú má-rí  ki-ke4 g̃alga ur-re nam-en na-an-ak-e
32. ì-ne-éš amurrum kur-bi-ta den-líl á-dah-g̃u10 im-ma-zi
33. elamki zag mu-un-tag-ge ù diš-bi-èr-ra mu-un-dab5-bé
34. kalam ki-bi gi4-gi4-dè nam-kala-ga kur-kur-ra hé-zu-zu
35. a-ma-ru-kam za-e nam-ba-e-še-ba-e-dè-en-zé-en

Translation (A)
Speak to Puzur-Numušda, governor of Kazallu, 3 saying (the words of) Ibbi-
1–2

Sin, your king:

4
Ever since I selected you out of the ranks and made you the governor of Kazallu,
5
have you not been honored among the troops as my representative? 6 How could
you send someone to me (with a letter beginning) thus: 7 “Išbi-Erra has presented
his matter before me,” 8 (and ending with) “and as far as I am concerned, when he
finally strikes, I will have to flee!” 9 How is it that you do not know when Išbi-Erra will
take back control over his enemy country?2 10–11 Why did you and Girbubu, governor of
Girkal, not confront him with the troops that are under your authority (while you
still had the chance)? 12 To restore the lands to their previous condition—that was
the assignment you were both given!
13
At some time in the past, Enlil had already come to hate Sumer, 14 and had
elevated a monkey descending from his mountain (home) to the stewardship of the
homeland. 15–16 But now Enlil has given the kingship to a (mere) peddler of exotic
spices, to Išbi-Erra, who is not even of Sumerian seed. 17 Moreover, the assembly of
the gods has scattered Sumer. 18 Father Enlil conveyed his decisions: 19 “As long as
an enemy is installed in Ur, 20 Išbi-Erra, the man of Mari, will continue to rip out its
foundations, 21 and so Sumer will be measured out (like grain)”—thus he spoke! 22
But if you both gather together the governors of all the individual cities, 23 it is by
the (very) command of Enlil that they will overthrow Išbi-Erra! 24–25 But even if you
should hand over the city to the enemy as an ally, do you think that Išbi-Erra would
not recognize that you are my trusty servant?
26
Now, to return to reconciliation 27 and bring an end to all treason, . . . 28 and have
your men work on their harvest. 29 But neither of you should do the reaping yourself
nor run away to me; 30 I assure you that he will not conquer (your) city; 31 the man
from Mari, with the mind of a beast,3 will not exercise legitimate power! 32 For even
now Enlil has roused up the Amorites from the highlands to aid me. 33 They will
repulse the Elamite (forces) and capture Išbi-Erra 34 to restore the homeland, so that
all the lands will know the power! 35 Please, you both must not neglect (my orders)!

2. Var.: How is it that you do not know when Išbi-Erra will return (back) to (his) enemy
country?
3. Alt. tr.: with hostile intentions.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 465

Sources
Version A (short version)
N1 = CBS 7772 (MBI 9) = 18–35
N2 = CBS 14224 (PBS 13 3) = 1–18
N3 = CBS 14230 (PBS 13 6) + N 2964 + N 3003 = 3–35
N4 = CBS 7787 + N1200 + N1203+N1204 + N1208 +
N1210-27a + N1210-27b + N1210-27d + N1210-27e +
N1212 + N1214 + N1218 (+?) Ni. 4061 +
Ni. 4188 (ISET 2 118-19) iii–iv = 1–2; 5–13, 14–33, 34–35
Ki1 = AO 10630 (PRAK II C10) = 10–11; 14–16
Si1 = Si. 557 (Copy F. Geers)4 = 4–12; 30–35
Version B (long version)
X1 = A 7475 iii 24–iv 34 = 1–61 (A 1–35)
X2 = MM 1039 (M. Molina and B. Böck, AuOr 15 [1997] 36) = 13–36; 39–45
(A 8–17, 19–25)
X2 collated on photographs provided by Miguel Civil and Manuel Molina.
X1 possibly from Sippar, X2 reportedly from Babylon. N1 and N2 were
written by the same scribe.

Tablet typology: Compilation tablets (Type 1): N4, X1; all others type III.

Textual Matrixes
Version A (short version)

1. puzur4-dnu-muš-da
I
énsi ka-zal-luki
N2 ++ ++ + + . + + ++
N4 oo oo o x + . + . .
X1 ++ +šul-⸢gi-ra⸣ - - - -- :
2. ù-na-a-dug4
N2 ++ ++
N4 o . - .
X1 . . . .
3. d
i-bí-den.zu lugal-zu na-ab-bé-a
N2 +. + ++ + + +/ . + + +
N3 oo o oo o o o o o . o
X1 ++ + ++ + . o . + . o

4. This text has a double line after line 35 and therefore definitely had the short version.
466 24. Ibbi-Sin to Puzur-Numušda 1

4. u4 érin-ta mu-ra-suh-a-gin7 nam-énsi ka-zal-luki-šè mu-ra-g̃ál

N2 . + + + + + ++ + + + + ++ + + + +
N3 o o o o o o oo o o . . . . ⸢ka⸣ o o +
Si1 o . . . o . oo o + . o oo o o o o
X1 + + + + + + +. . . . + +. o o-⸢e⸣-g̃ar-ra
5. g̃á-e-gin7-nam érin-zu dugud-da-zu in-nu-ù
N2 + . + + + + + + + + + +
N3 o oo o o o . . + + + +
N4 . oo o o o o o o o o o
Si1 o o. . kalam-ma . o o o o o
X1 + ++ + kalam-ma . o o . + .
6. a-na-aš-àm ur5-gin7 lú mu-e-ši-in-gi4
N2 ++ + + . . + + ++ + .
N3 oo o o o o o . +. . +
N4 . o o o o o o o o o o o
Si1 . . + + + . o o o o o o
X1 za-e g̃á-⸢ra ur5⸣-gin7 lú mu-e-ši-in-[gi4 (...)]
7. I
iš-bi-dèr-ra ugu-g̃u10-šè igi-ni im-ma-ši-in-g̃ar
N2 ++ + ++ + + + + + + + + + + +
N3 oo o oo o o . + . . . + + + +
N4 +. o oo + . . . . . . . . . o
Si1 d
+ + -+ + g̃u10 + . o o o o o o o o
X1 d
+ + -. . e + + + + + ma-⸢an-g̃ar⸣
8. ù g̃á-e ù-mu-un-šub ga-àm-gin
N2 + + + ++ + + + + +
N3 o o o o o o o . . .
N4 + . o o . - + + . DU.DU
Si1 - + + - + - + àm-m[a ]
X1 + + . . + . + ⸢ga⸣-àm-ma-ši-⸢gin⸣
X2 o o o o o o o o x +
9. en-na iš-bi-dèr-ra kur-šè bí-in-gi4-a a-gin7 nu-e-zu
N2 . . + + ++ + + . + + + + ++ + + +
N3 o o o o oo o . – šu-⸢ni⸣. + + . - - - - -5
N4 + . o o o. + + - ⸢šu-ni⸣+ + . + . . ++ +
Si1 + + d
. + -+ . o o o o o o o o o o o
X1 + + d
+ + -+ + kur ki-bi-šè g̃á-g̃á-a a-gin7 nu-e-zu
X2 o o o o oo . kur ki-bi-⸢šè gi4⸣-a a-gin7 nu-e-zu

5. It is possible that the last two words were either wrapped around and broken, or may have
been at the beginning of line 10.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 467

10. za-e gir-bu-bu énsi g̃ír-kalki-a-ke4

N2 + + . . + + + + +- +
N3 o o o o o . + . . ++
N4 + . . . . . . + ++ o
Ki1 o o o o o o . . . - .
Si1 + + + + . o o o oo o
X1 + + + + + . + + +- +
X2 o o o o o . + + ++ +
11. a-na-aš-àm éren šu-zu-šè ì-g̃ál-la igi-ni-šè la-ba-an-su8-ge-za-na
N2 ++ . . . . + + . + . . + + + + + + + + .
N3 o o o o o o o o o. . . . o . . . o o o o
N4 o o o . + + + - + . +àmo . + + + ši . +en+ +
Ki1 o o o o o o o o oo o o o x . . + + . . +
Si ++ + + + + . o oo o o o o + . o o o o o
X1 ++ + + + + + + -+ + + + + + + - + + + o
X2 o o o o o o o in-g̃ál-le-eš + + + + + + su8-su8-ge-eš
12. kur ki-bi gi4-gi4-da a-gin7 mi-ni-ib-šúm-mu-za-na
N2 x . . + + + . . . . ++ - + +
N3 o o o o o o o . . .⸢íb?⸣ o o o o
N4 . . o + + + . o x x . . . . .
Si1 . . . o o o o o o o o o o o o
X1 + . + šè + + dè ++ + + + + . ⸢un⸣
X2 o o o gur]-⸢ru⸣-uš ++ + + íb + + + +
13. u4 na-me d
en-líl-le ki-en-gi hul mu-un-gi4
N2 . . + .. . + + + + + + . +
N3 o o o oo o o o + + + . . o
N o o o oo o x . o o o o o o
X1 + na-an-ga-ma ++ + + + + + + ba-an-⸢gig⸣
X2 o o o oo o o o o x + ba-an-gig
14. ugu4-bi
úgu
kur-bi-ta è-dè nam-sipa kalam-ma-šè mu-un-íl
N2 ++ + + . . . ./ + + + + + . . .
N3 o o o o o . ++ + + . o o o o o
N4 +6 + + . + + o o + + + + o o o o
Ki1 o o o o o o o o + + . + + + . o
X1 ++ + + + + ++ + + + + . ⸢ba-e⸣-gub-bu-dè
X2 o o o o o o .? .? . + + + ke4 x x x

6. Written A.UGU.
468 24. Ibbi-Sin to Puzur-Numušda 1

15. ì-ne-éš den-líl-le lú im-sa10-sa10 nu-luh-hasar

N2 + . + ++ + + + + + + + + + +
N3 o o o oo o + + + + + o o o o
N4 + + + ++ + - . o o o + + . o
Ki1 o o o oo o o o o . . + ha la +
X1 a-da-lam den-líl-le nu-luh-ha⸢sar⸣ sa10-sa10-⸢dè lú?⸣ tumu nígin
X2 o o o oo o o o o o o nu ha ra
16. d
iš-bi-dèr-ra numun ki-en-gi-ra nu-me-a nam-lugal-la mu-na-an-šúm
N2 I
+ + ++ + + + + ++ + + + + + + . . + +
N3 -. o o o o . + + ++ + + + . o o o . + .
N4 ++ + + + . o o o o o o o o . + . o o o o ⸢ma?⸣
Ki1 oo o o o o o o o o o . . . . . o o o o o
X1 ++ + - + + + + + ++ + + + + + - [im?-m]a?–an-šúm
X2 oo o o o o o o o o o o + + + + + + .? - .
17. ga-nam pu-úh-rumki dig̃ir-re-e-ne ki-en-gi ság ba-ab-dug4
N2 + + + + + + . . ++ + + + + + + +
N3 + . . . + + + + ++ + . o . + . +
N4 + + . . o o o o o . . . o o o . +
X1 + + + + + - + + ++ + + + bir-bir-re ba-[… du]g 4
X2 o o o o o o o o o o o o x . ù-bí-in-⸢dug 4⸣
18. a-a en-líl
d
du11-ga-du11-ga-ni dab5-bé-da
N1 ++ ++ + . + + + + dib + +
N2 ++ ++ + + + + + + + + +
N3 ++ ++ + . . . . . . + . ⸢aš⸣
N4 ++ ++ + . . o o o dib + + aš
X1 ++ ++ + + + + + + + + + aš ka[lam] ⸢ì?⸣-[b]al-e
19. en-na uri5ki-ma lú érim-ša mu-un-ri-a
N1 + + + +. + + + +7 + + +
N3 + + . o o o . . + + ++
N4 + + + ++ . + + + . ++
X1 + + + + + šè + + ra + + . o aš
X2 traces
20. iš-bi-èr-ra lú má-ríki-ke4 suhuš-bi ba-bu-re
N1 + ++ + + + ++ + + + + . +
N3 + ++ . o o oo o o o . + +
N4 d
+ + d. . . + ++ + + . . + + en
X1 d
++ + + + + ++ . + + ba-ab-⸢bu-re⸣
X2 o o o o o o oo .? .? o o o .

7. Proceeded by an erased árad.

 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 469

21. ki-en-gi hé-ág̃-e ur5-gin7-nam bí-in-dug4

N1 + + + + + + + + + + + +
N3 + + + . o o o o o o . +
N4 + + + . o o . + + + . +
X1 . . . . + + + + + + ⸢íb⸣ +
X2 o o o o o o o o o . . .
22. ù tukum-bi énsi uru-didli ì-g̃ar-g̃ar-re-en-zé-en
N1 + + + + + + ++ + + + + +
N3 + . o o o o oo o o + + +
N4 + . o o . + ++ + + + . +
X1 o . + . .⸢uru⸣+ -. x o o o o
X2 o o o o .⸢uru⸣.? - . . . ⸢ne⸣
23. inim d
en-líl-lá-ta iš-bi-èr-ra ì-bal-e-eš-àm
N1 + .+ + + + + +++ ++ + + a
N3 + .. . + . o o o o ++ + + e
N4 + .. o o o + + d+ + o. + + +
X1 o oo o o o . . . . oo o o o
X2 o oo o o o o . . . ⸢hé?⸣-ni-bal-e
24. lú tab-ba-gin7 uru érim-ra ba-šúm-mu-na-ta
N1 + + +8 + + + + + + + + +
N3 + + + + + . o o . + + +
N4 + . o . + + +a . o .un-ne-ta
X1 o o o . . + šè ba-ra-mu-un-⸢šúm-ma-ta⸣
X2 o o o o o . ma ba-ra-an-šúm-ma-a
25. ù za-e árad gi-na-g̃u10-gin7 iš-bi-èr-ra nu-mu-un-zu-a
N1 + + + + + + + + + + ++ + + + + +
N3 + + + + + + . o . . ++ + + + + +
N4 + + o o . + + + o o . + + + + + .
X1 ù d
iš-bi-èr-ra za-e árad gi-na-g̃u10-gin7 ní-ba mi-ni-ib-zu-a-ta
X2 o o o o o o o o o o . + ní-bi mu-un-zu-a
26. ì-ne-éš inim du10-ga gi4-gi4-dè
N1 ++ + + + + + + +
N3 . + + + + + + + +
N4 +o o + + + + + +
X1 en-na u4-bi-da-ke4 inim du10 gi4-bí-ib / gin-na ì-ne-éš inim du10 gi4-ib :
27. lul du8-du8-ù-da hé-ni-ib-túm-túm-mu
N1 + + + + + + + + + + +
N3 o . + + + + + + + + +
N4 . o o o o o . + + + +
X1 lul du10-ud-ak-da mi-ni-in-túm-túm-mu

8. Written as su.
470 24. Ibbi-Sin to Puzur-Numušda 1

28. ùg̃-zu buru14-ba hé-ak-e-ne

N1 + ba + + + + ++
N3 o o . + + + +.
N4 o o o o o + +-
X1 + + + + + + - +
29. za-e na-an-gur10-un ugu-g̃u10-šè nam-ma-ši-du-un
N1 . + + + + + + + + + + ++ +
N3 o o . + gur4 ru + + + + + ++ .
N4 o o o o o o o . + + + ++ .
X1 + + nam-ba-da-g̃ír-e + + + + + - + -
30. šu-ni uruki-a nam-bí-ib-sá-di
N1 + + + ++ + + + + +
N3 . . + ++ + + + + +
N4 o o o o o o o + + +x
Si1 o . . o o o o o o o
X1 + + + - ni sá nu-ub-du11-ga
31. lú má-ríki-ke4 g̃alga ur-re nam-en na-an-na-ak-e
N1 + + ++ + + + + + + + + + + +
N3 + + ++ + + + + + + + + + + .
N4 o o oo o o . + - + na . . . . .
Si1 o + ++ x o o o o o o o o o o
X1 + + ++ + + + + + + bi + + - + +
32. ì-ne-éš amurrum kur-bi-ta den-líl á-dah-g̃u10 im-ma-zi
N1 ++ + + + + + ++ + . + + + + +
N3 ++ + + + + + ++ + + + + + + +
N4 o. . + + + . oo . . + . . . o
Si1 ⸢ì-ne⸣-éš ti-da-nu-um [. . .] / den-líl kur-bi-ta á-d[ah-g̃u10-šè im-ma-(an)-zi]
X1 ì-ne-éš ti-da-ma-rum amurrumki-a/den-líl-le kur-bi-ta á-dah-g̃u10-šè im-ma-an-zi
33. elamki zag mu-un-tag-ge ù d
iš-bi-èr-ra mu-un-dab5-bé
N1 + +ki+ + + + + + ++ - + + + + + +
N3 + + + + + + + + ++ + + + + + + +
N4 o o o o x + . o oo o o o o o o o
Si1 + + + . + + o o oo o o o + o o o
X1 + + + + + + ga/ + ++ + + + ba ab + +
34. kalam ki-bi gi4-gi4-dè nam-kala-ga kur-kur-ra hé-zu-zu
N1 + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
N3 + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
N4 o o o o o o . . . o o o . . .
Si1 + + + + + da o o o o o o o o o:
X1 kalam ki-bi-šè bí-íb-gi4-gi4 / kala-ga-g̃u10 kur-re bí-ib-zu-zu
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 471

35. a-ma-ru-kam za-e nam-ba-e-še-ba-e-dè-en-zé-en

N1 ++ + + + + + + -+ - - + - - +
N3 ++ + + + + + + ++ + + + + + +
N4 . + + + + + . . +. . + + . . +
Si1 - - - - - -9 nam-ba-še-bé-d[è ]
X1 . . + + + + nam-ba-še-bé-dè-ne

Version B (long version)

X1 with variants from X2 (equivalent lines in A in right-hand column)10
1. I
puzur -dšul-⸢gi-ra ù-na-a-dug ⸣ 1–2
2. d
i-bi- en.zu luga[l-zu n]a-ab-⸢bé⸣-[a]
d
3
3. u4 érin-ta mu-ra-suh-a-g[in7 na]m-⸢énsi⸣ ⸢ka⸣-zal-lu⸢ki⸣-[šè mu]-⸢e⸣-g̃ar-⸢ra⸣ 4
4. g̃á-e-gin7-nam kalam-ma d[ugud-da-zu i]n-nu-⸢ù⸣ 5
5. ka-zal-luki lú-ùlu [. . .]⸢ki?-šè?⸣ b[í-. . .]
6. lú al-m e-a-gin7 ⸢ù?⸣ x [. . .] a [. . .]
7. ma-da-zu-ta den-líl-⸢le nu-mu⸣-ra-ab-tuk[u . . .]
8. diri lú za-e-gin7-nam nam ⸢uru? tur?⸣-ra-⸢ta?⸣ x[. . .]
9. a-na-aš-àm ní šà-zu-šè ì-bu-⸢bu⸣
10. ní ul4-⸢la⸣ mu-e-te igi tur-⸢zu⸣ mu-⸢e-gíd⸣-[i . . .]
11. za-e g̃á-⸢ra ur5⸣-gin7 lú mu-e-ši-in-[gi4 (. . .)] 6
12. d
iš-bi-⸢èr-ra⸣-e ugu-g̃u10-šè igi-ni ma-⸢an-g̃ar⸣ 7
13. ù g̃á-⸢e ù⸣-mu-⸢un⸣-šub ⸢ga⸣-àm-ma-ši-⸢gin⸣ 8
X2 [ ]-x-gin ?11

13a. *
X2 [ ]x-e-NE [ ] ⸢en⸣ e su8-⸢dè?⸣-eš
14. en-na diš-bi-èr-ra kur ki-bi-šè g̃á-g̃á-a a-gin7 nu-e-zu 9
X2 [ r]a kur ki-bi-⸢šè gi4⸣-a a-gin7 nu-e-zu
15. za-e gir-bu-bu ⸢énsi⸣ g̃ír-kalki-ke4 10
X2 [ éns]i g̃ír-kalki-a-ke4
16. a-na-aš-àm érin šu-zu-šè g̃ál-la igi-ni-šè la-ba-su8-ge-za-[na] 11
X2 [ ] in-g̃ál-le-eš igi-ni-šè la-ba-an-su8-su8-ge-eš
17. kur ⸢ki⸣-bi-šè gi4-gi4-dè a-gin7 mi-ni-ib-šúm-⸢mu-un⸣ 12
X2 [ gur]-⸢ru⸣-uš a-gin7 mi-ni-í b-šúm-mu-za-na
18. u4 na-an-ga-ma den-líl-le ki-en-gi hul ba-an-⸢gig⸣ 13
X2 [ ]x hul ba-an-gig

9. The equivalents of the beginning parts of the line may have been on line 34.
10. X1 has deteriorated somewhat since I first began to study it.
11. There seem to be remnants of the last sign of at least three lines before this, as well as
the additional line that does not appear to match X1. Unfortunately, I have not been able to
inspect this tablet in person.
472 24. Ibbi-Sin to Puzur-Numušda 1

19. úguugu4-bi kur-bi-ta è-dè nam-sipa kalam-ma-⸢šè ba-e⸣-gub-bu-dè 14

X2 [ ] ⸢è?-dè?⸣ ⸢nam⸣-sipa kalam-ma-ke4 x x x
20. a-da-lam en-líl-le nu-luh-ha⸢sar⸣ sa10-sa10-⸢dè lú?⸣ tumu nígin
d
15
X2 [ ] nu-ha-ra
21. iš-bi-èr-ra numun ki-en-gi-ra nu-me-a nam-lugal [im?-m]a?-an-šúm
d
16
X2 [ nu]-me-a nam-lugal-la mu-⸢na?-šúm⸣
22. ga-nam pu-úh-rum dingir-re-e-ne ki-en-gi bir-bir-re ba-[… d]ug4 17
X2 [ ]x ⸢ság⸣ ù-bí-in-⸢dug4⸣
23. a-a en-líl du11-ga-du11-ga-ni dab5-bé-da-aš ka[lam] ⸢ì?⸣-[b]al-e
d
18
24. en-na uri5ki-ma-šè lú érim-ra mu-un-⸢ri⸣-[. . .]-aš 19
X2 traces
25. diš-bi-èr-ra lú má-ríki-⸢ke4⸣ suhuš-bi ba-ab-⸢bu-re⸣ 20
X2 [ ] -ke4? suhuš? [ -r]e
26. ⸢ki-en-gi hé⸣-ág̃-e ur5-gin7-nam ⸢bí-íb-dug4⸣ 21
X2 [ ] ⸢bí-in-dug4⸣
27. [ù tu]kum-bi ⸢énsi uru-uru⸣-didli ⸢g̃ar⸣ x [ ] 22
X2 [ ] ⸢uru-uru-didli g̃ar-g̃ar-e-ne⸣
?

28. [inim den-líl-lá-ta d]⸢iš-bi-èr-ra⸣ [ ] 23

X2 [ iš]-⸢bi-èr-ra⸣ ⸢hé?⸣-ni-bal-e
29. [lú tab-ba]-⸢gin7 uru⸣ érim-šè ba-ra-mu-un-⸢šúm-ma-ta⸣ 24
X2 [ ér]im-ma ba-ra-an-šúm-ma-a
30. ù diš-bi-èr-ra za-e árad gi-na-g̃u10-gin7 ní-ba mi-ni-ib-zu-a-ta 25
X2 [ ù (d)iš-bi]-⸢èr⸣-ra ní-bi mu-un-zu-a
30a. X2 [ ] hé-me-en
(X1: *)
31. mu-e-du11-ga-zu níg̃-na-me nam-ba-e-hul
X2 [ ]-e-ši-hul
32. mu-e-zu-zu dig̃ir-ra g̃á-a-kam
X2 [ ] ⸢g̃á⸣-a-kam
33. a-a den-líl du11-ga-du11-ga-ni dib-bé-da-aš kalam ì-bal-e-eš
X2 [ ] x.NE.A kalam-ma ì-bal-e
34. gin ì-ne-éš ma-ra ma-ab-gi4-gi4
X2 [ ]-⸢ab⸣-gi4-gi4
35. i-dutu kiri3 šu-ta ba-g̃ál
X2 [ ] kiri3 šu g̃ál-la-g̃á
36. en gal den-líl-le g̃éštu-bi mu-un-g̃ar
X2 [ d
]⸢en-líl-lá⸣ g̃éštu-bi mu-ri
37. igi níg-sa6-⸢ga⸣-ni g̃á-ra mu-un-ši-in-bar
X2 *
38. šà-ne-ša4-g̃u10 šà kù-bi-šè mu-un-g̃ar
X2 *
39. kíg̃-gi4-a-g̃u10 uzu silim-ma-ke4 ma-an-g̃ar
X2 [kíg̃-gi4-a]-⸢g̃á⸣ uzu silim-ma im-ma-an-g̃ar
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 473

40. uzu zi-da-na uzu gùb-⸢ba?-g̃á?⸣ á-diri ù-ni-ak

X2 [ z]i-da á-gùb-bu-ba á-diri ù-mu-ni-ak
41. g̃ištukul á zi-da-g̃á gú-bi zi-da ul gùr-ru mi-ni-šúm
X2 *
42. g̃ištukul gùb-bu-na gu-da lá-lá gú-ri-bi g̃ar-ra
X2 *
43. lú hul-g̃ál-g̃u10 šu-g̃á ì-g̃á-g̃á sag̃ g̃iš bí-ra
X2 [ ]-⸢g̃ál⸣-e šu-g̃á ba-ni-in-g̃ál sag̃ g̃iš bi-ra-ra
44. un kúkku-ga-ke4 zalag-šè è-dè dúr silim-⸢ma⸣ nú-dè
X2 [ ]-⸢ga⸣-ke4 zalag-šè è-⸢dè dúr silim⸣-ma nú-dè
45. dutu en ka-aš-bar an-ki-ke4 á-ág̃-g̃á im-ma-an-g̃ar
X2 traces
46. en-na u4-bi-da-ke4 inim du10 gi4-bí-ib
47. gin-na ì-ne-éš inim du10 gi4-ib lul du10-ud ak-da mi-ni-in-túm-túm-mu
26–27
48. ùg̃-zu ebur-ba hé-ak-ne 28
49. za-e nam-ba-da-g̃ír-e ugu-g̃u10-šè nam-ma-du 29
50. šu-ni uru-ni sá nu-ub-du11-ga 30
51. lú má-ríki-ke4 g̃alga ur-re nam-en-bi na-an-ak-e 31
52. ì-ne-éš ti-da-ma-rum amurrumki-a }32
53. den-líl-le kur-bi-ta á-dah-g̃u10-šè im-ma-an-zi
54. u4-ne-a an den-líl den-ki-bi-ke4
55. ⸢uri5⸣ki-ma sá mu-ub-du11-ga an-ta-bi aka-dè
56. elamki zag mu-un-tag-ga }33
57. ù iš-bi-èr-ra ba-ab-dab5-bé
d

58. kalam ki-bi-šè bí-íb-gi4-gi4 }34

59. kala-ga-g̃u10 kur-re bí-ib-zu-zu
60. ⸢u4⸣-na-me inim za-e mu-sa6-ga-zu
61. ⸢a-ma⸣-ru-kam za-e nam-ba-še-bé-dè-ne 35

Colophon O (X1)

Translation (B)
1–2
Speak to Puzur-Šulgi, governor of Kazallu, 4 saying (the words of) 3Ibbi-Sin,
your king:
3
Ever since I selected you out of the ranks and made you the governor of Ka-
zallu, 4have you not been honored throughout the homeland as my representative?
5
Kazallu . . . 6 A man who is . . .7 Enlil has not . . . from your frontier area. 8 Someone
excellent, a man who is like you . . . the responsibilities over the smaller cities . . .
9
Why is it that all valor has been torn from your heart, 10 why are you so panicked
and full of contempt? 11 You even sent someone to me (saying) thus:12 12 “Išbi-Erra

12. Var.: But you sent me someone with the following message.
474 24. Ibbi-Sin to Puzur-Numušda 1

has presented his matter before me, 13 and as far as I am concerned, when he finally
strikes, I will have to flee!” 14 How is it that you do not know when Išbi-Erra will restore
his own enemy country? 15–16 Why did you and Girbubu, governor of Girkal, not stand
up against him with the troops that are under your authority (while you still had the
chance)? 17 To restore the lands to their previous condition—that was the assignment
you were both given!
18
Enlil had earlier already come to hate Sumer,19 appointing a monkey descend-
ing from its mountain (home) to the stewardship of the homeland. 20–21 But now Enlil
has handed kingship to a (mere) peddler of exotic spices, one who chases the wind, to
Išbi-Erra, who is not even of Sumerian descent. 22 Moreover, once the assembly of
the gods (decided) to scatter the (inhabitants of the) Sumer, 23 Father Enlil, having
conveyed his commands, proceeded to overthrow the homeland. 24 “As long as Ur is
imbued with evildoers, 25 Išbi-Erra, the man of Mari, will tear out its foundations, 26 and
Sumer will be measured out,” thus he spoke! 27 And if the governors of the individual
cities should gather together, 28 by Enlil’s command Išbi-Erra will fall.
29
But even supposing that he is not (betrayed) as if being handed over to an en-
emy city by a comrade, 30 and you, although acting as if you were my trusted servant,
recognize Išbi-Erra by yourself/out of fear, 31 your statements would do nothing to
upset me, 32 for you know very well that I am (a favorite) of the gods.
33
Father Enlil, by means of his angry commands, has overthrown the homeland.
34
Come now, he has returned to my side! 35 My complaints were submitted by humble
prayer, 36 and Great Lord Enlil heard me out; 37 he cast his favorable glance upon me,
38
set his holy heart on mercy, 39 and established for me my favorable omen. 40 And
after I had the follow-up reading made concerning his pars familiaris and my pars
hostilis,13 41 the weapon-mark on my right side, its trunk is straight, and that (good
news) gave me joy; 42 on the weapon-mark on his (i.e., Išbi-Erra’s) left side a filament
is suspended,14 it is placed (against) the other side. 43(The message was:) “My enemy
shall fall into my hands, he shall be killed, 44 the people, having come out of darkness
into the light, will lie in peaceful habitations.” 45 Utu, lord who makes the decisions
of the heavens and the earth, has provided (this) omen.
46
Return to reconciliation as before, 47 come now, (you too) must return to rec-
onciliation, so that all treachery is undone, 48 so that your can people can work on
their harvest. 49 You must not hurry to come to me; 50 (I assure you that) he will not
conquer the city that he (wants), 51 the man of Mari, with the mind of a beast, will
not exercise sovereignty there! 52–53 Now Enlil has mustered the Tidnumite(s) in (the
land of) Amurrum as my helper(s). 54–55 . . . 56 The Elamite (forces) will be repulsed, 52
Išbi-Erra will be captured, and 58 the homeland will be restored (to me). 59 The foreign
land(s) will learn of my strength! 60 From now on you. . . . 61 It is urgent, you must
make sure that everyone must not neglect (my orders)!

13. So X1; X2 omits 41 and 42: After I had the follow-up reading made concerning the left
and right sides, (the message was): . . .
14. Alt. tr.: is attached.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 475

Commentary
This letter is known in two versions, a shorter one (A) from Nippur, Kish, and
Sippar, and a longer one (B) attested in two manuscripts of unknown provenience.
As noted above, there are clues that suggest that X1 may come from Sippar and
X2 from Babylon, but the evidence is hardly conclusive. Version B adds six lines
between lines 5 and 6, fourteen or fifteen lines between 25 and 26, and two lines
between 32 and 33. The short version appears to be fairly stable, with few substantive
variants, but the two sources of B clearly represent different redactional traditions.
X1 is dated to the 27th year of Samsu-iluna, providing a historical context for one
manuscript the long version. Moreover, the text was known to the compiler of the
Uruk Letter Catalog, as documented by the entry in line 8: puzur 4 ‑ d šul‑g[i P]A.TE.
⟨SI⟩ k[a-zal-lu ki ].
The differences between the two versions are not only in length. A has many
difficult passages, and some of them seem to have been as puzzling to some ancients
as they are to many of us. Redactors of what became “B”—itself not uniform—at-
tempted to make sense of some version of “A” that was at their disposal, reinterpret-
ing some of the grammar and vocabulary to fit a specific understanding of the text.

B10. This difficult line, which is not in the short version, contains words that are
otherwise rare in Sumerian. The noun ní-ul 4, “fear, terror,” occurs, to my knowledge
only once in another text, in Ininšagura 161 (see Å. Sjöberg, ZA 65 [1975] 161): ní-
àm ur 4-re ní ⸢ul 4⸣ ní-⸢ri⸣-ti-la ní gal me-lám-ma, which consists of a series
of synonyms and quasi-synonyms for “fear,” “terror.” Here ul 4 seems to qualify the
noun in the compound verb ní . . . te, “to fear”; it could either be construed as ul 4 =
piqittu, “terror,” or as the adverb “greatly” (magal); see now M. Jaques, Le vocabulaire
des sentiments, 189.
The verb must be igi-tur . . . gíd-i, “to hold in contempt, despise,” which is oth-
erwise only attested in SP Coll. 2 16 and in bilingual and lexical texts (= šēṭūtam
leqûm).
A6 = B11. Note that ur 5-gin 7 is used, like its Akkadian equivalent kīam, to intro-
duce direct speech. In line 22, it follows the quotation and the form is ur 5-gin 7-nam,
which corresponds to kīamma, which is likewise used to introduce quoted statements.
The verbal form in A is, technically speaking, in the third person—“he sent a man
to you”—but this is clearly incorrect. A redactor of B attempted to clarify this with
the superfluous za-e g̃á-ra, “you to me.”
A7–8 = B12–13. These are the incipit and last lines of the previous letter; this is a
unique example of the way in which one could refer to previous correspondence in
Sumerian.
A9 = B14. The syntax of this line is difficult. The first part, governed by a temporal
adverb (en-na = adi ), must be dependent on the main clause, which is introduced by
476 24. Ibbi-Sin to Puzur-Numušda 1

an interrogative preposition (a-gin 7 = kî ). Redactors of the long version recognized

the problem and attempted to resolve it by changing the predicate of the dependent
clause but only managed to introduce more confusion. The tentative interpretation
of šu . . . gi4 as “to take charge of ” is inspired by the comments of W. Sallaberger,
Klein AV 250.
A13–15 = B18–20. The proper understanding of this passage relies on the first
word, which is u 4 na-me in one manuscript of A but clarified as u 4 na-an-ga-ma
in B.15 The scribe of X1 has taken pains to interpret a difficult passage, since in all
other cases u 4 na-me occurs with negative verbal forms (matima, “never”; see com-
mentary to IbIš1A 13′ [22]); here it must be a temporal adverb. These lines have
to be compared to Lugalbanda II 74–77 (C. Wilcke, JNES 27 [1968] 241, and idem,
Das Lugalbandaepos 98–100 with commentary on p. 159; H. Vanstiphout, Epics of
Sumerian Kings, 140–41):
u 4 na-an-ga-ma mušen-e gùd-bi-šè šid 17 un-gi 4
amar-bi gùd-bi-ta gù ba-ni-ib-gi 4-gi 4
ì-ne-éš mušen-e gùd-bi-šè
amar-bi gùd-bi-ta gù nu-um-ma-ni-ib-gi 4-gi 4
Earlier, whenever the bird screeched at its nest,
Its young answered it from its nest,
But now, when the bird screeched at its nest,
Its young did not answer it from its nest.

Thus, the phrases governed by the adverbs u 4-na-me . . . ì-ne-éš (A) and u 4 na-
an-ga-ma . . . a-da-lam (B) are structurally identical, contrasting earlier and later
events. This is extremely important; we now realize that the word “monkey” does
not refer to Išbi-Erra, as has always been thought, but must be a characterization of
someone else, undoubtedly “Elamites.” Is it possible that this refers to events that
provided the enigmatic name of Ibbi-Sin’s 23rd and penultimate, year: mu d i-bí-
d
en.zu lugal uri 5ki -ma-ra úgu ugu 4-bi dugud kur-bi mu-na-e-ra, “The year:
The dumb/formidable monkey struck out from its mountain against Ibbi-Sin, king of
Ur.” Note that the Gutians are described as having the form of monkeys (uludin 2
ugu 4-bi) in the Curse of Agade, 156, and the same expression is used to character-
ize Amorites in the Marriage of Amurru (line 127). This may be a reference to some
other highlanders here, Elamites, or perhaps the Amorites, according to IbIš1A: 14′
(22), although the latter is definitely untrustworthy. More importantly, if this holds
true, it would date the Puzur-Numušda correspondence to the very end of Ibbi-Sin’s
reign. See p. 201 above.
A13 = B18. The verb hul . . . gig(gi 4) is usually translated as “to hate.” The sense
here is more precise: Enlil has broken his bond with Sumer, and thus the verb is used

15. Note that u 4 na-an-ga-ma, “earlier,” is derived from na-an-ga-ma, “moreover,

furthermore.”
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 477

here in the “judicial” sense of scorn or repudiation discussed in M. Jaques, Le vocabu-

laire des sentiments, 156–58.
A15 = B20. The expression lú im-sa 10-sa 10 nu-luh-ha sar, which is attested in at
least five manuscripts of the short version, is grammatically and lexically difficult.
The term nu-luh-ha sar, Akkadian nuḫurtu or tījatu, has been rendered “asafoedita,”
ever since it was thus defined in R. C. Thompson, DAB, 354–58; see B. Landsberger,
FS Baumgartner, 179 n. 1, with earlier references to our passage. As far as I can
gather, there is not a single other example of this word in any Sumerian text out-
side of the lexical tradition (documented in the dictionaries). It is listed in an OB
school co­efficient list of unknown origin, followed by še-lú sar, presumably “cori-
ander,” (E. Robson, Mesopotamian Mathematics, 193:15–16). The presumption has
been that asafoedita is a foul-smelling spice, and thus peddlers of such a substance
would have been tainted by its odor. But there is no evidence to support this iden-
tification, etymology aside (“unclean”), because the extant documentation provides
no evidence on the nature of this plant.16 Moreover, asafoedita, as anyone who has
cooked northern Indian food knows, “is virtually odorless until it is powdered, when
it releases its strong characteristic smell” (J. Sahni, Classic Indian Cooking, 9). It was
a foreign plant, at least in Assyria, since it was listed as such by Assurnaṣirpal in his
“Banquet Stela” (Iraq 14 33 [1952]: 48 = RIMA 2 A.0.101.30).17 Perhaps this is the
clue to the metaphor: Išbi-Erra is a mere peddler of exotic foreign substances, once
again stressing his foreign origins.
The two versions have different forms of the line:
A ì-ne-éš d en-lí l-le lú im-sa 10-sa 10 nu-luh-ha sar
B a-da-lam d en-lí l-le nu-luh-ha⸢sar ⸣ sa 10-sa 10-⸢dè lú?⸣ tumu nígin
    (At present the end of the line in X1 reads: sa 10-sa 10-d[è lú] tumu-x)

The text was in better condition when it was cited by B. Landsberger, FS Baumgart-
ner, 179 n. 1. X2 has the idiosyncratic syllabic writing nu-ha-ra. The end of the line
may have to be read lú ? im-nígin.
A16 = B21. The phrase numun ki-en-gi-ra nu-me-a is unique. Compare, per-
haps, the invective raised against Šamši-Addu by Puzur-Sin of Assur: la šīr aššur, “not
of the flesh of the city of Assur” (A. K. Grayson, ARRIM 3 [1985] 12 lines 12–13 and
25; see already J. Cooper, Curse of Agade, 35 n. 42).
A17 = B22. ga-nam seems to be used in two different ways, either as an adverb
meaning “moreover” (Akk. appūna) or as a particle introducing irrealis (piqa, tušama,

16. See now CAD T 400: “The identification with asafoedita in Thompson, DAB 358 is not
supported by the botanical evidence.”
17. D. T. Potts, Mesopotamian Civilization, 66, claims that asafoedita was grown in the
gardens of Merodach-Baladan (CT 14 50:65) but the plant in question is ṣurbu, a different, al-
beit unidentified plant. The identification of the plant as asafoedita was already questioned by
A. Kilmer, OrNS 29 (1960) 297 n. 1.
478 24. Ibbi-Sin to Puzur-Numušda 1

etc.; see C. Wilcke, JNES 27 [1968] 240–42). Note that the irrealis occurrences, as
well as all Akkadian translations, are post-OB and have no relevance for this passage.
The writer of X1 reinterpreted ság . . . dug 4 = sapāḫum, “to scatter,” with a synonym
bir-bir but in a sense combined the two, apparently creating a neologism, a com-
pound verb bir-bir . . . dug 4.
A18 = B23. In A, the idiom du 11-ga-du 11-ga dab 5 is a calque from Akkadian
awatam ṣabātum, “to convey a message” (CAD Ṣ 25). It may not have been properly
understood by the author of B.
A19 = B24. The final sign in lú-NE.RU-ša (only in A; B: -ra) presents a problem.
This passage was discussed by Å. Sjöberg, ZA 83 (1993) 18–19. Most of the evidence
points to a reading érim of NE.RU, but this clearly demonstrates that some scribes
read the signs NE.RU.DU as ne-ru-ša 4.
A24–25 = B29–30. The interpretation of A offered here is hardly secure, because
the line has no known parallels and the syntax is difficult to analyze. These prob-
lems may have already vexed the ancients; somewhere along the line of transmis-
sion, someone either did not understand the passage correctly or wanted to amend
it to reflect better a particular understanding of the lines. This may have been a
multi-step process. In A25, the verbal form ba-šúm-mu-na-ta is positive, but in
B29 the two sources differ. X1 has the negative ba-ra-mu-un-šúm-ma-ta, but X2
has ba-ra-an-šúm-ma-a, which may be either negative or positive second-person.
This change is echoed in the verb in the next line, where the negative prefix nu-
has been reinterpreted as ní, “fear,” or as the reflexive particle, and the verbal form
changed to positive. The new interpretation may have then led to the insertion of
the two new lines that follow in B but were not in A.
From a syntactic point of view, these lines are difficult to analyze; at first glance,
we have two subordinate clauses with no main sentence. With some reservations, I
take nu-mu-un-zu-a not as a subordinated verbal form but as a question, although
one would expect *nu-mu-un-zu-ù. The basic meaning of the passage is: even if
you were to surrender to him, do you think he would really believe that you were no
longer loyal to me?
A29=B49. The first verb is different in all manuscripts. The composite text follows
N1 (gur 10); N2 has a phonetic variant gur 4. The tradition of X1 (B) once again fol-
lows a track of reinterpretation. The root /gur/ was found wanting and was under-
stood as ul 4 (i.e., gír-gunû) = ḫamāṭum, “to hurry”; under Akkadian influence, the
two verbs in the line were taken as hendiadys.
A30 = B50. The predicate is šu + sá . . . dug, a calque of qātam kašādum, “to con-
quer,” discussed in the commentary to PuIb1: 16 (23). Indeed, this line undoubtedly
alludes to that particular line in the letter that this one answers. The use of the un-
separated sá-di, used in all three Nippur sources, is characteristic of Larsa Sumerian
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 479

but is unique in this letter, in which compound verbs are otherwise are properly used
correctly. Note that the author of X1 insisted on a correct form (sá nu-ub-du 11-ga).
A33 = B56. The complex ideological games that are being played here are echoed
in the OB omen tradition, which preserves a very different version of these events,
using very similar language, albeit in Akkadian (YOS 10 46 v 4–6): šumma(diš)
kakkum(g̃iš.tukul) ra-bu-um i-na i-mi-tim ša-ki-im-ma, e-li mar-tim ra-ki-ib kakkum
(g̃iš.tukul) Iiš-bi-èr-ra, ša e-la-am-tam is-ki-pu, “If there is a large Weapon-mark pres-
ent in the pars familiaris and it straddles the gall-bladder, it is the Weapon-mark of
Išbi-Erra, who repulsed the Elamite (forces).” Note that Akkadian sakāpum is the
lexical equivalent of Sumerian zag . . . tag, “to push away, to repulse.” In both ver-
sions of the letter, the promise is that it will be Ibbi-Sin who will repulse Elam and
capture Išbi-Erra.
B36. Note the use of the uncommon géštu . . . ri in X2, while X1 has g̃éštu . . . g̃ar.
For examples of the former, which is often misinterpreted, see F. Karahashi, Sumerian
Compund Verbs, 86. Both mean, “to listen, pay attention.”
B37. The normal Sumerian version of this expression does not have níg̃; e.g., Nip-
pur Lament, 229: an-né d en-lí l-le igi sa 6-ga-ne-ne im-ši-in-bar-re-eš-àm,
“An and Enlil looked favorably at them (i.e., Girsu and Lagaš).” The only other
example known to me that is similar to the one found here is found in an OB in-
cantation VAS 17 14:17–18 d utu agrun-na-ta [è-a-ni ? ], igi níg̃-sa 6-ga-ni h[é-
em-kù-ge], “May Utu [purify it] upon coming out of his lower region abode.” The
difference between ADJ and níg̃-ADJ in Sumerian is not clear to me.
B39–43. This is the only actual omen in Sumerian and therefore requires a full
discussion. The technical vocabulary is unique; it must be compared to the Akkadian
language of extispicy, since there are no second-millennium omens in Sumerian. The
passage in question is attested only in non-Nippurean manuscripts and was clearly
invented by some northern scribe, who cleverly invented a Sumerian technical vo-
cabulary for extispicy. The observations in Michalowski, FS Leichty, 247–58 must
now be adjusted accordingly. Nevertheless, the new rendition of these lines remains
hypothetical, at best.
B39. This line contains two technical terms: kíg̃-gi 4-a and uzu silim-ma. The for-
mer is undoubtedly tērtum or amutum; see D. Foxvog, FS Sjöberg, 172–73. Sumerian
uzu is sometimes used as synonym for tērtum, but here it probably has a more limited
meaning; the phrase is a back-translation from Akkadian šīrum šalmum, “favorable
ominous part.” As such, uzu probably reflects the more generalized technical use of
šīrum to designate various sorts of ominous phenomena, as discussed by J.-P. Durand,
ARM 26, 15–19.
B40. In X1, the two sides of the liver are here described as uzu zi-da and uzu gùb-
bu; the pars familiaris and pars hostilis, for which see I. Starr, Rituals of the Diviner,
15–29. In X2, there are only the two sides, without uzu; this scribe also omits lines 41
480 24. Ibbi-Sin to Puzur-Numušda 1

and 42—that is, the laborious Sumerian description of the exta. Without additional
duplicates, it is impossible to decide if X2 actually omits these lines or if they were
added by the scribe of X1.
The reading á-diri, or perhaps better, á-SI.A, if correct, presents multiple difficul-
ties. PSD A/II 51 renders á-diri as “superior strength,” and this is clearly not at issue
here. There remains the administrative term á diri, “additional work (assignment),”
listed in the dictionary on the following page, and one might consider the usage in
the letter to be related to the latter. I see three possibilities. Either the author used
it here in an adverbial sense, and the hence the translation should be “additionally,
furthermore,” or this is another attempt to create a Sumerian extispicy term in Sume-
rian. The two texts differ substantially here, but note that the technically incorrect
ascription of the right side to Išbi-Erra and the left to Ibbi-Sin in X1 in line 40 seems
to be reversed in 41 and 42. Therefore, with all due caution, I suggest that á-diri
is an attempt to render Akkadian aḫītum, “follow-up.” As I understand it, Ibbi-Sin
implies, according to the Old Babylonian author, that he had omens performed, and
the follow-up was favorable to him, as he relates here.
B41–42. The expressions g̃ištukul á zi-da and g̃ ištukul gùb-bu are renditions of
Akkadian kak imittim and kak šumēlim, “Weapon of the right/left (side of a perma-
nent feature); for the Akkadian, see U. Jeyes, OBE 82. The kakkum has no parts in
Akkadian extispicy; Ulla Koch suggests to me that gú may therefore refer to some-
thing else, perhaps a part of the gall bladder.
In Akkadian divination texts, gu = qûm, “filament,” is another negative mark; see U.
Jeyes, OBE, 91–92, and U. Koch-Westenholz, BLO 63, with previous literature. As
Jeyes observed, this feature connotes restraint or obstruction, which in this case must
pertain to Išbi-Erra. The verb lá renders Akkadian šuqallulum, “to be suspended,
dangle,” or perhaps even kamûm, “to attach” (suggested to me by R. D. Biggs), both
of which are commonly used in conjunction with the “filament.”
B43. Note that the apodosis of this omen contains a Sumerian calque of an Ak-
kadian expression that is found in omen and dream reports from Mari; šu . . . g̃ar
here used in the sense of ana qāti mullū, “to deliver to someone.” Note ARMT X 8 =
AEM I/1 214 12–14: na-ak-ri-ka a-na qa-ti-ka ú-ma-al-la, “I will deliver your enemies
to you,” (quotation from the speech of a woman who fell into a trance in the temple
of Annunitum). Similar phrases are found in the highly formalized letters of Dam-
ḫuraṣim to Zimri-Lim, ARMT X 62 and 63.
B44. The motif of turning darkness into light, or the reverse, a metaphor for the
reversal of fortune, is well attested in Sumerian literature; see, e.g., Eridu Lament
1:22–24 uru-a u 4 zalag-ga è-a u 4 ba-da-ku 10-ku 10, eridu ki -ga u 4 zalag-ga è-a
u 4 ba-da-ku 10-ku 10, d utu an-úr-ra šú-a-gin 7 an-usan-šè ba-dù, “In the city
where bright sunlight used to shine forth, the day darkened. In Eridu, where bright
sunlight used to shine forth, the day darkened. As if the sun had set below the
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 481

horizon, it turned into twilight”; see also Letter of Sin-iddinam to Utu 7, or Letter of
Sin-šamuḫ to Enki 48. Sumerian zalag was “read” as nūrum already in Ur III; note the
playful writing hu-ùh-ZALAG ki for the place name Huhnuri in B. Lafont, Docu-
ments 79:13. More to the point is the similarity with expressions found in OB “his-
torical” omens pertaining to Sargon and the otherwise unknown TE-Enlila: amūt
Šarrukên ša eklētam illikuma/iḫbutma nūram/nūrum īmuru/ūṣiaššum, “Omen of Sargon
who went through/made an incursion into the darkness and then saw/had appear
light to him;” amūt TE-Enlil ša nūrum ūṣiaššum, “omen of TE-Enlil for whom the
light appeared;” for references, see A. Goetze, JCS 1 (1947) 256–57, 263, and also J.
S. Cooper, Death in Mesopotamia, 102.
The end of the line is grammatically difficult. One could read èd/nú-ne rather than
è/nú-dè.
A27 = B46. The two versions have very different interpretations of this line; inim
du10 is here equivalent to salīmum, “peace, reconciliation,” known only from bilin-
gual texts and as a logogram in Akkadian, rather than the more common “favorable
pronouncement.”
The temporal adverb u 4-bi-da-(k) in B is very rare; it is found only in inscriptions
of Warad-Sin and Rim-Sin in the expression diri u 4-bi-da-šè/ka, which seems to
mean “more than previously/before.”
A28 = B47. The expression lul du 8-du 8-ù-da hé-ni-ib-túm-túm-mu is unique;
it must be compared with the line in Father and Son 63: du 10-ak-a 5-dè lul-da mi-
ni-in-túm-túm-mu nu-mu-e-ši-in-še, translated by Å. Sjöberg as “Bitte ich
kann nicht zulassen, dass du immer wieder unzuverlässig und falsch bist” ( JCS 25
[1973] 116, with commentary on p. 124). My interpretation is based on du 8-du 8 as
puḫḫuru, “to undo.” The author of B had trouble with this line and may have inter-
preted du 8-du 8-ù-da as du 10-ud-ak = tespītum, “prayer,” possibly influenced by the
Father and Son line cited above.
A31 = B51. The translation of this line has been taken for granted but it is not
without problems. Were it not for similar sentiments found in other texts, one would
interpret g̃alga ur-re, the form found in all the Nippur manuscripts, as “of hostile
intentions,” rather than as “the mind of a dog/beast.” For ur in the sense of Akkadian
nakru, see, e.g., Uruk Lament 4.11 gu-ti-um ur-re ba-e-⸢bal⸣ [. . .], “Gutium,
the enemy, overturned. . . .” “Mind of a beast” would be g̃alga ur-ra or g̃alga ur-
ra-ke 4, and, indeed, the former is what X1 writes. The most instructive parallel is
in Curse of Agade 156, where Gutium is described as: dím-ma lú-ùlu g̃alga /arhuš
ur-ra /a /e uludin 2 úgu ugu 4-bi, “With human instinct but the mind of a dog/beast,
and monkey’s looks” (see J. Cooper, Curse of Agade, 31, 353 n. 46, with parallels).
It is probable that the Nippur scribes understood this passage as referring to “hostile
intentions” but that the ever-vigilant author of X1 hypercorrected it to conform to
the usage he knew from other texts.
482 24. Ibbi-Sin to Puzur-Numušda 1

A32–33 = B52–53. From the purely formal grammatical point of view, the Amori-
tes are referred to in singular third person of the animate class. The tradition rep-
resented by X1 (B) indicates that someone recognized this and attempted to take it
literally, hence the otherwise inexplicable writing ti-da-ma-rum, which I take to
be a clumsy attempt at a Sumerian nisbe, hence the reading -rum rather than -aš.
Note that only manuscript Si1 among the A version texts has ti-da-nu-um.
A35 = B61. Following the singular second-person pronoun za-e, most manuscripts
have a different form of the final verb: two have second-person plural (N2, N3),
one has first/second-singular (N1 but this might be simply abbreviation of the plural
form), one has third-plural (X1, probably also Si1). Most probably, the confusion
derives from the contrast between the singular independent pronoun, addressed to
Puzur-Numušda, and the plural verb form that references both him and Girbubu,
governor of nearby Girkal. Compare Letter of Nanna-kiʾag̃a to Lipit-Eštar (SEpM 4)
18: lugal-g̃u 10 nam-ba-e-še-ba-e-ne, “my king, (the troops) will not neglect
(your orders).”
 Bibliography

Abdi, Kamyar
2003 The Early Development of Pastoralism in the Central Zagros Mountains. JWP 17: 395–
448.
Abusch, I. Tzvi
1987 Alaktu and Halakhah: Oracular Decision, Divine Revelation. HTR 80: 15–42.
Adams, Robert McC.
1981 Heartland of Cities: Surveys of Ancient Settlement and Land Use on the Central Floodplain of
the Euphrates. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
1988 Contexts of Civilizational Collapse: A Mesopotamian View. Pp. 20–43 in The Collapse of
Ancient States and Civilizations, ed. Norman Yoffee and George L. Cowgill. Tucson: Uni-
versity of Arizona Press.
1974 The Mesopotamian Social Landscape: A View from the Frontier. Pp. 1–20 in Reconstruct-
ing Complex Societies, ed. Charlotte B. Moore. Bulletin of American Schools of Oriental
Research Supplement 20. Cambridge, MA: ASOR.
2006 Shepherds at Umma in the Third Dynasty of Ur: Interlocutors with a World beyond the
Scribal Field of Ordered Vision. JESHO 49: 133–69.
2009 Old Babylonian Networks of Urban Notables. CDLJ 2009, 7: 1–14.
Al-Fouadi, Abdul-Hadi A.
1969 Enki’s Journey to Nippur: The Journeys of the Gods. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Penn-
sylvania.
Al-Rawi, F. N. H.
1990 Tablets from the Sippar Library, I. The “Weidner Chronicle”: A Supposititious Royal Let-
ter Concerning a Vision. Iraq 52: 1–13.
1994 Texts from Tell Haddad and Elsewhere. Iraq 56: 35–43.
Al-Rawi, F. N. H., and George, A. R.
1994 Tablets from the Sippar Library. III. Two Royal Counterfeits. Iraq 56: 135–48.
Ali, Fadhil Abdulwahid
1964 Sumerian Letters: Two Collections from the Old Babylonian Schools. Ph.D. Dissertation, Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania.
Allred, Lance
2006 Cooks and Kitchens: Centralized Food Production in Late Third Millennium Mesopotamia.
Ph.D. Dissertation, The Johns Hopkins University.
Altman, Janet Gurkin
1982 Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press.
Alster, Bendt
1991–93 The Sumerian Folktale of the Three Ox-Drivers from Adab. JCS 43/45: 27–38.
1997 Proverbs of Ancient Sumer: The World’s Earliest Proverb Collections. Bethesda, MD: CDL.
2005 Wisdom of Ancient Sumer. Bethesda, MD: CDL.

483
484 Bibliography

Alster, Bendt, and Vanstiphout, Herman L. J.

1987 Lahar and Ashnan: Presentation and Analysis of a Sumerian Disputation. ASJ 9: 1–43.
Andersson, Jakob
2008 Some Cuneiform Texts from the Haldar Collection: Two Old Babylonian Contracts. Ori-
entalia Suecana 57: 5–22.
André, Béatrice, and Salvini, Mirjo
1989 Réflexions sur Puzur-Inšušinak. Iranica Antiqua 24: 53–72.
Aqrawi, A. A. M.
2001 Stratigraphic Signatures of Climatic Change during the Holocene Evolution of the Tigris-
Euphrates Delta, Lower Mesopotamia. Global and Planetary Change 28: 267–83.
Archi, Alfonso
1985 Mardu in the Ebla Texts. OrNS 54: 7–13.
Arkhipov, I. S.
2002 Toponim “Subir/Subartu” v mesopotamii III—pervoi poloviny II tyc. do n.e. (The Top-
onym Subir/Subartu during the III Mill. and the 1st Half of the II Mill b.c.) VDI 243:
76–97.
Astour, Michael
1987 Semites and Hurrians in Northern Transtigris. Pp. 3–68 in Studies on the Civilization and
Culture of Nuzi and the Hurrians 2: General Studies and Excavations at Nuzi 9/1, ed. Martha
A. Morrison and David I. Owen. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.
Attinger, Pascal
1984 Enki et Ninḫursag̃a. ZA 74: 1–52.
1993 Eléments de linguistique sumérienne: La construction de du11/e/di “dire.” Göttingen: Vanden-
hoeck & Ruprecht.
1995 Review of Å.W. Sjöberg et al., eds., The Sumerian Dictionary of the University Museum of the
University of Pennsylvania, Vol. 1: A Part I. ZA 85: 127–41.
1998 Inanna et Ebiḫ. ZA 88: 164–95.
2007 Tableau grammatical du sumérien (problèmes choisis): Text of lectures presented at the
École pratique des hautes études, Paris, February–May, 2007. Online: htp://www.arch.
unibe.ch/content/e8254/e8254/e8548/e8549/index_ger.html.
2008 À propos de quelques lectures. NABU 2008/4: 103–4.
2010 La légende de Sargon. Manuscript posted on the Internet.
Balke, Thomas E.
2010 The Sumerian Ternery Numeral System. JCS 62: 45–52.
Baqir, Taha
1948 Date-List of Ishbi-Irra. Sumer 4: 103–14.
Barnett, R. D.
1963 Xenophon and the Wall of Media. JHS 83: 1–26.
Barker, Rodney
2001 Legitimating Identities: The Self-Representation of Rulers and Subjects. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Barthes, Roland
1968 L’effet de réel. Communications 11: 84–89.
Bauer, Theo
1926 Die Ostkanaanäner: Eine philologisch-historische untersuchung über die wanderschicht der
sogennanten “Amoriter” in Babylonien. Leipzig: Asia Major.
1929 Eine Überprüfung der “Amoriter”-Frage. ZA 38: 145–70.
Bauer, Josef
1993 Review of Jacob Marzahn, Altsumerische Verwaltungstexte aus Girsu/Lagaš, Textedition.
Vorderasiatische Schriftdenkmäler, Neue Folge 10. BiOr 50: 173–79.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 485

1995 Review of Å. W. Sjöberg, et al., ed., The Sumerian Dictionary of the University Museum of
the University of Pennsylvania, Vol. 1: A Part I. JAOS 115: 293–97.
Beale, Thomas W.
1973 Early Trade in Highland Iran: A View from a Source Area. World Archaeology 5: 133–48.
Becker, Andrea
1985 Neusumerische Renaissance? Wissenschaftsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zur Philologie
und Archäologie. BaM 16: 229–316.
Begemann, F. and Schmitt-Strecker, S.
2009 Uber das frühe Kupfer Mesopotamiens. Iranica Antiqua 44: 1–45.
Behrens, Hermann
1988 Eine Axt für Nergal. Pp. 27–32 in A Scientific Humanist: Studies in Memory of Abraham
Sachs, ed. Erle Leichty et al. Occasional Publications of the Samuel Noah Kramer Fund,
9. Philadelphia: The Samuel Noah Kramer Fund/University Museum.
Bellwood, Peter
2001 Early Agriculturalist Population Diasporas? Farming, Languages, and Genes. ARA 30:
181–207.
Benstock, Shari
1985 From Letters to Literature: La Carte Postale in the Epistolary Genre. Genre 18: 257–95.
Berlin, Adele
1979 Enmerkar and Ensuḫkešdanna: A Sumerian Narrative Poem. Occasional Publications of the
Babylonian Fund 2. Philadelphia: The University Museum.
Biggs, Robert D.
1967 More Babylonian “Prophecies.” Iraq 29: 117–32.
1985 The Babylonian Prophecies and the Astrological Traditions of Mesopotamia. JCS 37:
86–90.
1997 Šulgi in Simurrum. Pp. 169–78 in Crossing Boundaries and Linking Horizons: Studies in
Honor of Michael C. Astour on His 80th Birthday, ed. G. Young, M. Chavalas and R. Aver-
beck. Bethesda, MD: CDL.
Biggs, Robert D., and Stolper, Matthew W.
1983 A Babylonian Omen Text from Susiana. RA 77: 155–62.
Boeder, Winfried
1991 A Note on Synonymic Parallelism and Bilingualism. Studia Linguistica 45: 97–126.
Bonechi, Marco
1991 Onomastica dei testi di Ebla: nome propri come fossili-guida? SEL 8: 59–79.
Bonechi, Marco, and Durand, Jean-Marie
1992 Oniromancie et magie à Mari à l’époque d’Ébla. Pp. 152–61 in Literature and Literary Lan-
guage at Ebla, ed. Pelio Fronzaroli. Florence: Università di Firenze.
Borger, Rykle
1971 Gott Marduk und Gott-König Šulgi als Propheten. Zwei prophetische Texte. BiOr 28:
3–24.
1991 Ein Brief Sîn-idinnams von Larsa an den Sonnengott sowie Bemerkungen über “Joins” und das
“Joinen.” Nachrichten der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen I. Philologisch-
historische Klasse, Jahrgang 1991, Nr. 2. Göttingen: Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht.
Borges, Jorge Luis
1964 Other Inquisitions. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bottéro, Jean
1973 Le pouvoir royal et ses limitations d’après les texts divinatoires Pp. 119–65 in La voix
d’opposition en Mésopotamie ancienne, ed. A. Finet. Brussels: Institut des Hautes Études de
Belgique.
Bowersock, G. W.
1991 Review of The Collapse of Complex Societies, by Joseph A. Tainter (1988). JFA 18: 119–21.
486 Bibliography

Brant, C.
2000 The Epistolary Novel. Pp. 377–80 in History of European Literature, ed. A. Benoit-Dusausoy
and G. Fontaine. London: Routledge.
Brinker, Christopher
2010 The Meaning and Significance of the Old Assyrian sikkātum. AoF 37: 49–62.
Brisch, Nicole Maria
2007 Tradition and the Poetics of Innovation: Sumerian Court Literature of the Larsa Dynasty
(c. 2003–1763 bce). AOAT 339. Münster: Ugarit-Verlag.
Brusasco, P.
1999–2000 Family Archives and the Social Use of Space in Old Babylonian Houses at Ur. Mesopota-
mia 34/35: 3–174.
Buccellati, Giorgio
1966 The Amorites of the Ur III Period. Naples: Istituto Orientale di Napoli.
1972 On the Use of the Akkadian Infinitive after “ša” or Construct State. JSS 17: 1–29.
1990 “River Bank,” “High Country,” and “Pasture Land”: The Growth of Nomadism on the
Middle Euphrates and the Khabur. Pp. 87–117 in Tell al-Hamidiyah 2, ed. S. Eichler,
M. Wäfler, and D. Warburton. Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht.
2004 Il secondo millennio a.C. nella memoria epica di Giuda e Israele. La Rivista Teologica di
Lugano 9: 521–43.
2008 The Origin of the Tribe and of “Industrial” Agropastoralism in Syro-Mesopotamia.
Pp. 141–59 in The Archaeology of Mobility: Old World and New World Nomadism, ed.
H. Barnard and Willemina Wendrich. Cotsen Advanced Seminars Series 4. Los Angeles:
Cotsen Institute of Archaeology.
Campbell, Lyle
2006 Languages and Genes in Collaboration: Some Practical Matters. Paper presented at the
Languages and Genes conference, University of California, Santa Barbara, Sept. 8–10,
2006.
Canby, Jeanny Vorys
2001 The Ur-Nammu Stela. University Museum Monograph 110. Philadelphia: The University
Museum
Carroué, François
1991 Etudes de géographie et de topographie sumériennes II. A la recherche de l’Euphrate au
IIIe Millénaire. ASJ 13: 111–56.
Carter, Elisabeth
1979 Elamite Pottery, ca. 2000–1000 b.c. JNES 38: 111–28.
1985 Notes on Archaeology and the Social and Economic History of Susiana. Paléorient 11:
43–48.
Carter, Elisabeth, and Stolper, Matthew W.
1984 Elam: Surveys of Political History and Archaeology. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Cavigneaux, Antoine
1987 Notes sumérologiques. ASJ 9: 45–66.
1996 Uruk: Albabylonische Texte aus dem Planquadrat Pe XVI–4/5 nach Kopien von Adam Falken-
stein. Mainz: von Zabern.
Cavigneaux, Antoine, and Al-Rawi, Farouk N. H.
2000a La fin de Gilgameš, Enkidu et les Enfers d’après des manuscripts d’Ur et de Meturan
(Textes de Tell Haddad VIII). Iraq 62: 1–19.
2000b Gilgames et la mort. Textes de Tell Haddad VI. CM 19. Groningen: STYX.
Cavigneaux, Antoine, and d’Istria, Laurent Colonna
2009 Les découverts épigraphiques des fouilles récentes de Mari. État des recherches en janvier
2009. Studia Orontica 6: 51–68.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 487

Charpin, Dominique
1980 Archives familiales et propriété privée en Babylonie ancienne: étude des documents de “Tell Sifr.”
Geneva: Librairie Droz.
1986 Le clergé d’Ur au siècle d’Hammurabi (XIXe–XVIIIe siècles av. J.-C.). Geneva: Librairie Droz.
1992 Les malheurs d’un scribe ou de l’inutilité du sumérien loin de Nippur. Pp. 7–27 in Nippur
at the Centennial, ed. M. deJ. Ellis. Philadelphia: The University Museum.
1999 Hagalum, šakkanakkum de Râpiqum et ses serviteurs. Pp. 95–108 in Munuscula Meso-
potamica: Festschrift für Johannes Renger, ed. Barbara Böck, Eva Kancik-Kirschbaum, and
Thomas Richter. AOAT 267. Münster: Ugarit-Verlag.
2003a La ‘toponymie en miroir’ dans le Proche-Orient amorrite. RA 97: 3–34.
2003b Hammu-rabi de Babylone. Paris: Presses universitaires de France.
2004a Histoire politique du Proche-Orient amoritte (2002–1595). Pp. 25–480 in Mesopotamien:
Die altbabylonische Zeit, by Dominique Charpin, D. O. Edzard, and Marten Stol. OBO
160/4. Friburg: Academic Press / Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
2004b La circulation des commerçants, des nomades et des messagers dans le Proche-Orient
amorrite (XVIIIe siècle av. J.-C.). Pp. 51–69 in La mobilité des personnes en Méditerranée de
l’Antiquité à l’époque moderne: Procédures de contrôle et documents d’identification, ed. Clau-
dia Moatti. Collection de l’Ecole française de Rome 341. Rome: Ecole français de Rome.
2007 Chroniques bibliographiques, 10: Économie, société et institutions paléo-babylonienne:
nouvelles sources, nouvelles approaches. RA 101: 147–82.
2008 Lire et écrire à Babylone. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Charpin, Dominique, and Ziegler, Nele
2003 Mari et le Proche-Orient à l’époque amorrite: Essai d’histoire politique. Florilegium marianum
V: Mémoires de N.A.B.U. 6. Paris: SEPOA.
2007 Amurritisch lernen. WZKM 97: 55–77.
Cherewatuk, Karen
1993 Ragemund and Epistolary Tradition. Pp. 20–45 in Dear Sister: Medieval Women and the
Epistolary Genre, ed. Karen Cherewatuk and Ulrike Wiethaus. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Cherewatuk, Karen, and Wiethaus, Ulrike, eds.
1993 Dear Sister: Medieval Women and the Epistolary Genre. Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl-
vania Press.
Cherniack, Susan
1994 Book Culture and Textual Transmission in Sung China. HJAS 54: 5–125.
Chew, Sing C.
2001 World Ecological Degradation: Accumulation, Urbanization, and Deforestation, 3000 b.c.–
a.d. 2000. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira.
Çığ Muazzez, and Kramer, Samuel Noah
1976 The Ideal Mother: A Sumerian Portrait. Belleten 40: 413–21.
Civil, Miguel
1962 Un nouveau synchronisme Mari–IIIe dynastie d’Ur. RA 56: 213–14.
1964a The “Message of Lú-dingir-ra to His Mother” and a Group of Akkado-Hittite “Proverbs.”
JNES 23: 1–11.
1964b A Hymn to the Beer Goddess and a Drinking Song. Pp. 67–89 in Studies Presented to A.
Leo Oppenheim, June 7, 1964. Chicago: The Oriental Institute.
1969 The Sumerian Flood Story. Pp. 138–45 in Atra-ḫasīs: The Babylonian Story of the Flood,
by W. G. Lambert and A. R. Millard. Oxford: Clarendon; repr., Winona Lake, IN: Eisen-
brauns, 1999.
1972 The Anzu Bird and Scribal Whimsies. JAOS 92: 271.
1973 The Sumerian Writing System: Some Problems. OrNS 42: 21–34.
1974–77 Enlil and Namzitarra. AfO 25: 65–71.
488 Bibliography

1976 Lexicography. Pp. 123–57 in Sumerological Studies in Honor of Thorkild Jacobsen on His
Seventieth Birthday June 7, 1974, ed. Stephen J. Lieberman. AS 20. Chicago: The Oriental
Institute.
1979a Ea A = naqû, Aa A = naqû, with Their Forerunners and Related Texts. MSL 14. Rome: Pon-
tifical Biblical Institute.
1979b Sur l’inscription de Lugalannemundu. RA 73: 93.
1985 Sur les “livres d’ecolier” à l’époque paléo-babylonienne. Pp. 67–78 in Miscellanea Baby-
lonica: Melanges offerts a Maurice Birot, ed. J.-M. Durand and J.-R. Kupper. Paris: Éditions
Recherche sur les civilizations.
1990 The Verb šu-tak4 “to send.” AuOr 8: 109–11.
1993 On Mesopotamian Jails and their Lady Wardens. Pp. in 72–78 in The Tablet and the Scroll:
Near Eastern Studies in Honor of William W. Hallo, ed. Mark E. Cohen, Daniel C. Snell,
and David B. Weisberg. Bethesda, MD: CDL.
1994 The Farmer’s Instructions: A Sumerian Agricultural Manual. Sabadell: AUSA.
2000 From the Epistolary of the Edubba. Pp. 105–18 in Wisdom, Gods and Literature: Studies in
Assyriology in Honour of W. G. Lambert, ed. A. R. George and I. L. Finkel. Winona Lake,
IN: Eisenbrauns.
2002 The Forerunners of Marû and Ḫamṭu in Old Babylonian. Pp. 63–71 in Riches Hidden in
Secret Places: Ancient Near Eastern Studies in Memory of Thorkild Jacobsen, ed. T. Abusch.
Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.
2003 Of Bows and Arrows. JCS 55: 49–54.
2005 The Unveiling of the parakku. Paper presented at the 51st RAI, July 21, 2005, Chicago,
IL.
2007 Early Semitic Loanwords in Sumerian. Pp. 11–34 in Studies Presented to Robert D. Biggs,
June 4, 2000, ed. Martha T. Roth, Walter Farber, Matthew W. Stolper, and Paula von
Bechtolsheim. Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.
2008a A Sumerian Connective Particle and Its Possible Semitic Counterparts. AuOr 26: 7–15.
2008b The Early Dynastic Practical Vocabulary A (Archaic HAR-ra A). ARES 4. With copies by
Alfonso Archi. Rome: Missione Archeologica in Siria.
2010 Sumerian Compound Verbs: Class II. Pp. 523–33 in Language in the Ancient Near East: Pro-
ceedings of the 53e Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Vo1 1, Part 2, ed. Leonid Kogan
et al. Bible und Bibel 4/2. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.
forthcoming The Code of Ur-Namma.
Civil, Miguel, and Sjöberg, Åke W.
1979 Introduction. P. vii in Jane W. Heimerdinger, Sumerian Literary Fragments from Nippur. Oc-
casional Publications of the Babylonian Fund 4. Philadelphia: The University Museum.
Clay, Albert Tobias
1919 The Empire of the Amorites. YOSR 6. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Cohen, Mark
1976 Literary Texts from the Andrews University Archaeological Museum. RA 70: 129–44.
Cohen, Phillip
1996 Is There a Text in This Discipline? Textual Scholarship and American Literary Studies.
American Literary History 8: 728–44.
Cole, Donald P.
2003 Where Have the Bedouin Gone? Anthropological Quarterly 76: 235–67.
Cole, Stephen W.
1994 Marsh Formation in the Borsippa Region and the Course of the Lower Euphrates. JNES
53: 81–109.
Cole, Steven W., and Gasche, Hermann
1998 Second- and First-Millennium bc Rivers in Northern Babylonia. Pp. 1–64 in Changing
Watercourses in Babylonia: Towards a Reconstruction of the Ancient Environment in Lower
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 489

Mesopotamia. Mesopotamian History and Environment, Memoirs-5/1, ed. Hermann

Gasche and Michel Tanret. Ghent: University of Ghent / Chicago: The Oriental Institute
of the University of Chicago.
Collingwood, R. G.
1921 Hadrian’s Wall: A History of the Problem. The Journal of Roman Studies 11: 37–66.
Cooper, Jerrold S.
1980 Apodotic Death and the Historicity of “Historical” Omens. Pp. 99–105 in Death in Mes-
opotamia, ed. Bendt Alster. Mesopotamia 8. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag.
1983 The Curse of Agade. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
1999 Sumerian and Semitic Writing in Most Ancient Syro-Mesopotamia. Pp. 61–77 in Lan-
guages and Cultures in Contact: At the Crossroads of Civilizations in the Syro-Mesopotamian
Realm. Proceedings of the 42th RAI, ed. K. Van Lerberghe and G. Voet. Orientalia Lovani-
ensia Analecta 96. Leuven: Peeters & Departement Oosterse Studies.
2006 Genre, Gender, and the Sumerian Lamentation. JCS 58: 39–47.
Cooper, Jerrold. S., and Heimpel, Wolfgang
1983 The Sumerian Sargon Legend. JAOS 103: 67–82.
Cullen, H. M., et al.
2000 Climate Change and the Collapse of the Akkadian Empire: Evidence from the Deep Sea.
Geology 28: 379–82.
Dahl, Jacob L.
2007 The Ruling Family of Umma: A Prosopographical Analysis of an Elite Family in Southern Iraq
4000 Years Ago. Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Ooosten.
Dalley, Stephanie
2009 Babylonian Tablets from the First Sealand Dynasty in the Schøyen Collection. CUSAS 9.
Bethesda, MD: CDL.
Dällenbach, Lucien
1977 Le récit spéctaculaire: Essai sur la mise en abyme. Paris: Seuil.
1980 Reflexivity and Reading. New Literary History 11: 435–49.
Daneshmand, Parsa
2004 An Extispicy Text from Haft-Tappe. JCS 56: 13–17.
Dankbaar, Ben
1984 Alternative Defense Policies and the Peace Movement. Journal of Peace Research 21: 141–
55.
De Graef, Karen
2005 Les archives d’Igibuni. Les documents Ur III du Chantier B à Suse. MDAI 54. Ghent: Univer-
sity of Ghent.
2006 De la dynastie Simaški au Sukkalmaḫat: Les documents fin PE IIb—début PE III du Chantier B
à Suse. MDAI 55. Ghent: University of Ghent.
2008 Annus Simaškensis. L’usage des nomes d’année pendant la période simaškéenne (ca.
1930–1880 av. notre ère) à Suse. Iranica Antiqua 43: 67–87.
Delnero, Paul
2006 Variation in Sumerian Literary Compositions: A Case Study Based on the Decad. Ph.D. Dis-
sertation, University of Pennsylvania.
Derrida, Jacques
1980 La Carte Postale: de Socrate à Freud at au-delà. Paris: Flammarion.
Diakonoff, Igor Mikhailovich
1939 Amorei. VDI 9: 60–69.
1969 The Rise of the Despotic State in Ancient Mesopotamia. Pp. 173–203 in Ancient Mes-
opotamia, ed. I. M. Diakonoff. Moscow: Nauka.
1990 Lyudi Goroda Ura [The People of the City of Ur]. Moscow: Nauka.
490 Bibliography

Diamond, Jarred
2005 Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Viking.
Dijk, J. J. A. van
1959 Textes divers du Musée de Baghdad, III. Sumer 15: 5–13.
1960 Sumerische Götterlieder II. Heidelberg: Winter.
1978 Išbiʾerra, Kindattu, l’homme d’Elam, et la chute de la ville d’Ur. Fragments d’une hymne
d’Išbi’erra. JCS 30: 189–208.
1983 Lugal ud me-lám-bi nir-gál: La récit épique et didactique des Travaux de Ninurta du Déluge et de
la nouvelle Création. Texte, traduction et introduction. 2 vols. Leiden: Brill.
1989 Ein spätbabylonischer Katalog einer Sammlung sumerischer Briefe. OrNS 58: 441–52.
Driel, Gus van
1989 The British Museum “Sippar” Collection: Babylonia 1882–1893. ZA 79: 102–17.
1995 Nippur and the Inanna Temple during the Ur III Period. JESHO 38: 393–406.
Donbaz, Veysel, and Foster, Benjamin R.
1982 Sargonic Texts from Telloh in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum. OPBF 5. Philadelphia: The
University Museum.
Dossin, Georges
1927 Autres textes sumériens et accadiens. MDP 18. Paris: Ernest Leroux.
Driel, Gus van
1989 The British Museum “Sippar” Collection: Babylonia 1882–1983. ZA 79: 102–17.
1995 Nippur and the Inanna Temple during the Ur III Period. JESHO 38: 393–406.
Durand, Jean-Marie
1988 Archives épistolaires de Mari. ARM 26 I/1. Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les Civilisations.
1997 Les documents épistolaires du palais de Mari, tome I. LAPO 16. Paris: Cerf.
1998 Les documents éépistolaires du palais de Mari, tome II. LAPO 17. Paris: Cerf.
2004 Peuplement et sociétes à l’époque amorrite (1): Les clans bensim’alites. Pp. 111–98 in
Nomades et sédentaires dans le Proche-Orient ancien. Compe rendu de la XLVI e Rencontre
Assyriologique Internationale (Paris, 10–13 juillet 2000), ed. Christophe Nicole. Amurru 3.
Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les Civilisations.
Dyckhoff, Christian
1998 Balamunamḫe von Larsa: Eine altbabylonische Existenz zwischen Ökonomie, Kultus und
Wissenschaft. Pp. 117–24 in Intellectual Life of the Ancient Near East: Papers Presented at the
43rd Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Prague, July 1–5, 1996, ed. J. Prosecký. Prague:
Oriental Institute.
1999 Das Haushaltsbuch des Balamunamḫe, Bd. 1: Darstellung, Bd. 2: Belegmaterial. Inaugural-
Dissertation, Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität, Munich.
Edzard, Dietz Otto
1957 Die zweite Zwischenzeit Babyloniens. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
1972 Hamazi. RLA 4: 70–71.
1990 Gilgamesh und Huwawa A. I. Teil. ZA 80: 165–203
1997 Gudea and His Dynasty. Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia, Early Periods 3/1. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press.
2003 Sumerian Grammar. HdO 1/71. Leiden: Brill.
2004 Altbabylonische Literatur und Religion. Pp. 483–640 in Mesopotamien: Die altbabylonische
Zeit, by Dominique Charpin, D. O. Edzard, and Marten Stol. OBO 160/4. Friburg: Aca-
demic Press / Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Edzard, Dietz Otto, and Farber, Gertrud
1974 Die Ors- und Gewässername der Zeit der 3. Dynastie von Ur. RGTC 2. Wiesbaden: Reichert.
Edzard, Dietz Otto, Farber, Gertrud, and Sollberger, Edmond
1977 Die Ors- und Gewässername präsargonischen und sargonischen Zeit. RGTC 2. Wiesbaden:
Reichert.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 491

Edzard, Dietz Otto, and Röllig, Wolfram

1980 Kimaš. RLA 5: 593.
Ellis, Maria deJong
1975 An Old Babylonian Adoption Contract from Tell Harmal. JCS 27: 130–51.
1987 The Goddess Kititum Speaks to King Ibalpiel: Oracle Texts from Ishchali. M.A.R.I. 5:
235–66.
1989 Observations on Mesopotamian Oracles and Prophetic Texts: Literary and Historiographi-
cal Considerations. JCS 41: 127–86.
Emberling, Geoff
1997 Ethnicity in Complex Societies: Archaeological Perspectives. JAR 5: 295–344.
Emberling, Geoff, and Yoffee, Norman
1999 Thinking About Ethnicity in Mesopotamian Archaeology and History. Pp. 272–81 in
Fluchtpunk Uruk. Archäologische Einheit aus methodischer Vielhaft: Schriften für Hans Jörg
Nissen, ed. H. Kühne, R. Bernbeck, and K. Bartl. Rahden: Leidorf.
Englund, Robert K.
1988 Administrative Timekeeping in Ancient Mesopotamia. JESHO 31: 121–85.
1990 Organisation und Verwaltung der Ur III-Fischerei. BBVO 10. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer.
Fagan, Brian
2004 The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization. New York: Basic Books.
Falkenstein, Adam
1949 Ibbisîn—Ishbiʾerra. ZA 49: 59–79.
1953 Die babylonische Schule. Saeculum 4: 125–37.
1956 Die Neusumerische Gerichtsurkunden II. Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Mü­
nich) Kommission zur Erschliessung von Keilschrifttexten, Bayerische Akademie der Wis-
senschaften (München) Philosophisch-Historische Klasse. Munich: Bayerische Akademie
der Wissenschaften.
1959 Sumerische Götterlieder, I. Abhandlungen der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften,
Phil.-hist. Kl., Jahrgang 1959, 1. Abh. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag.
1963 Zu den Inschriftenfunden der Grabung in Uruk-Warka 1960–1961. BaM 2: 1–82.
Faivre, Xavier
1995 Le recyclage des tablettes cunéiformes. RA 89: 57–66.
Finkel, Irving L.
1980 Bilingual Chronicle Fragments. JCS 32: 65–80.
Finkelstein, Jacob J.
1966 The Genealogy of the Hammurapi Dynasty. JCS 20: 95–118.
1972 Late Old Babylonian Documents and Letters. Yale Oriental Series 13. New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press.
Fish, Thomas
1932 Catalogue of Sumerian Tablets in the John Rylands Library. Manchester: The Manchester
University Press, and the Librarian, the John Rylands Library.
Fitzgerald, Madelaine André
2002 The Rulers of Larsa. Ph.D. Dissertation. Yale University.
Flückiger-Hawker, Esther
1999 Ur-Namma of Ur in Sumerian Literary Tradition. OBO 166. Fribourg: University Press.
Foster, Benjamin R.
1982a A Postscript to the “Letter of Gilgamesh.” AnSt 32: 43–44.
1982b Education of a Sargonic Bureaucrat in Sargonic Sumer. ArOr 50: 238–41.
2005 Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature. Bethesda, MD: CDL.
Foxvog, Daniel A.
1976 Texts and Fragments 101–106. JCS 28: 101–6.
492 Bibliography

1989 A Manual of Sacrificial Procedure. Pp. 167–76 in DUMU E2-DUB-BA-A: Studies in

Honor of Åke W. Sjöberg, ed. Hermann Behrens, Darlene Loding, and Martha T. Roth.
Occasional Publications of the Samuel Noah Kramer Fund, 11. Philadelphia: The Samuel
Noah Kramer Fund, University Museum.
Frahm, Eckhardt
2005 On Some Recently Published Late Babylonian Copies of Royal Letters. N.A.B.U. 2005:
43–46.
2006 Šulgi Sieger über Assur und die Skythen? N.A.B.U. 2006: 21–24.
2009 Assurbanipal in Der. Pp. 51–64 in Of God(s), Trees, Kings, and Scholars: Neo-Assyrian and
Related Studies in Honour of Simo Parpola, ed. Mikko Luukko, Saana Svärd, and Raija Mat-
tila. Studia Orientalia 106. Helsinki: The Finnish Oriental Society.
Frangipane, Marcella
2009 Rise and Collapse of the Late Uruk Centres in Upper Mesopotamia and Eastern Anatolia.
Science dell’Antichità 15: 15–31.
Frayne, Douglas R.
1982 New Light on the Reign of Išbi-Erra. Pp. 25–32 in Vorträge gehalten auf der 28. Rencontre
Assyriologique Internationale in Wien 6.–10. Juli 1981, ed. H. Hirsch and H. Hunger. AfO
Beiheft 19. Horn, Austria: Ferdinand Berger.
1990 The Old Babylonian Period (2003–1595 bc). The Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia, Early
Periods 4. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
1992 The Early Dynastic List of Geographical Names. AOS 74. New Haven: American Oriental
Society
1997 Ur III Period (2112–2004 bc). Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia, Early Periods 3/2. To-
ronto: University of Toronto Press.
Friberg, Jöran
2007 A Remarkable Collection of Babylonian Mathematical Texts: Manuscripts in the Schøyen Col-
lection Cuneiform Texts. New York: Springer.
Fronzaroli, Pelio
2003 Testi di cancelleria: I rapporti con le città: (archivio L. 2769). Archivi reali di Ebla, Testi 13.
Roma: Missione Archeologica Italiana in Siria.
Gadotti, Alhena
2005 Gilgameš, Enkidu and the Netherworld and the Sumerian Gilgameš Cycle. Ph.D. Dissertation,
The Johns Hopkins University.
Garfinkle, Steven J.
2008 Was the Ur III State Bureaucratic? Patrimonialism and Bureaucracy in the Ur III Period.
Pp. 55–61 in The Growth of an Early State in Mesopotamia: Studies in Ur III Administration,
ed. Steven J. Garfinkel and J. Cale Johnson. BPOA 5. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Inves-
tigaciones Cientifícas.
Gasche, Hermann
1973 La poterie élamite du douxième millénaire a.C. Leiden: Brill.
Gasche, Hermann, et al.
2002 Fleuves du temps et de la vie. Permanences et instabilité du réseau fluviatile babylonien
entre 2500 et 1500 avant notre ère. Annales 57: 531–44.
Gelb, I. J.
1938 Studies in the Topography of Western Asia. AJSL 55: 66–85.
1961 The Early History of the West Semitic Peoples. JCS 15: 27–47.
1965 The Ancient Mesopotamian Ration System. JNES 24: 230–43.
1982 Terms for Slaves in Ancient Mesopotamia. Pp. 81–98 in Societies and Languages of the
Ancient Near East: Studies in Honour of I. M. Diakonoff, ed. M. A. Dandamayev et al.
Warminster: Aris & Phillips.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 493

Genouillac, Henri de
1924 Premières recherches archéologiques à Kich (Fouilles françaises d’El-ʾAkhymer, mission d’Henri
de Genouillac, 1911–1912). Paris: Champion.
Gentili, Paulo
2006 Where is Diniktum? Remarks on the Situation and a Supposition. RSO 79: 231–38.
George, Andrew R.
1992 Review of Frayne 1990. BSOAS 55: 358–40.
2005 In Search of the é.dub.ba.a: The Ancient Mesopotamian School in Literature and Reality.
Pp. 127–37 in An Experienced Scribe Who Neglects Nothing: Ancient Near Eastern Studies in
Honor of Jacob Klein, ed. Y. Sefati. Bethesda, MD: CDL.
2009 Babylonian Literary Texts in the Schøyen Collection. CUSAS 10. Bethesda, MD: CDL.
Geyer, Bertrand
2009 Die syrische Mauer: Eine 4000 Jahre Alte “Grenze” in der syrischen Steppe,” Pp. 36–45
in A. Nunn, Mauern als Grenzen. Mainz am Rhein: Philipp von Zabern.
Geyer, Bertrand, et al.
2007 The Arid Margins of Northern Syria: Occupation of the Land and Modes of Exploita-
tion in the Bronze Age. Pp. 269–81 in Urban and Natural Landscapes of an Ancient Syrian
Capital: Settlement and Environment at Tell Mishrifeh/Qatna and in Central-Western Syria, ed.
Danielle Morandi Bonacossi. Studi Archeologici su Qatna, 1. Udine: Forum.
Gibson, McGuire
1998–99 Nippur and Umm Al-Hafriyat. Oriental Institute Annual Report 1998–99. Online: http://
oi.uchicago.edu/research/pubs/ar/98–99/nippur.html.
Glassner, Jean-Jacques
1997 L’historien mésopotamien et l’événement. Mètis 12: 97–117.
2004 Mesopotamian Chronicles. SBLWAW19. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature.
2005 L’aruspicine paléo-babylonienne et le témoignage des sources de Mari. ZA 95: 276–300.
2009 Écrire des livres à l’époque paléo-babylonienne: le traité d’extispicine. ZA 99: 1–81.
Goddeeris, Anne
2002 Economy and Society in Northern Babylonia in the Early Old Babylonian Period (ca. 2000–
1800 bc). Leuven: Peeters.
Goetze, Albrecht
1947 Historical Allusions in Old Babylonian Omen Texts. JCS 1: 253–65.
1950 Sin-iddinam of Larsa: New Tablets from his Reign. JCS 4: 83–118.
1963 The Šakkanakku’s of the Ur III Empire. JCS 17: 1–31.
1964 Remarks on the Old Babylonian Itinerary. JCS 18: 114–19.
Goldstein, Ronnie
2010 Late Babylonian Letters on Collecting Tablets and Their Hellenistic Background: A Sug-
gestion. JNES 69: 199–207.
Gomi, Tohru
1980 On Dairy Productivity in the Late Ur III Period. JESHO 23: 1–42.
1984 On the Critical Situation at Ur Early in the Reign of Ibbisin. JCS 36: 211–42.
Gragg, Gene B.
1972 Observations on Grammatical Variations in Sumerian Literary Texts. JAOS 92: 204–13.
1973 A Class of “When” Clauses in Sumerian. JNES 32: 124–34.
Grayson, A. K.
1966 Divination and the Babylonian Chronicles: A Study of the Rôle which Divination Plays
in Ancient Mesopotamian Chronography. Pp. 69–76 in La divination en Mésopotamie an-
cienne et dans les régions voisines. XIV Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale. Paris: Presses
universitaires de France.
1975 Assyrian and Babylonian Chronicles. TCS 5. Locust Valley, N.Y.: Augustin; repr., Winona
Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2000.
494 Bibliography

1985 Rivalry over Rulership at Aššur: The Puzur-Sîn Inscription. ARRIM 3: 9–14.
Grayson, A. K., and Lambert, W. G.
1964 Akkadian Prophecies. JCS 18: 7–30.
Green, Margaret W.
1978 The Eridu Lament. JCS 30: 127–67.
1984 The Uruk Lament. JAOS 104: 253–79.
Grégoire, J-P.
1996 Archives administratives et inscriptions cunéiformes: Ashmolean Museum, Bodleian Collection,
Oxford. Paris: Paul Geuthner.
Guichard, M.
1997 Copie de la supplique bilingue suméro-akkadienne “Les malheurs d’un scribe” (texte no
6). Pp. 79–82 in Florilegium marianum III: Recueil d’études à la mémoire de Marie-Thérèse
Barrelet, ed. D. Charpin and J.-M. Durand. Memoires de NABU 4. Paris: SEPOA.
Guillén, Claudio
1986 Notes Toward the Study of the Renaissance Letter. Pp. 70–104 in Renaissance Genres:
Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation, ed. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski. Harvard English
Studies 14. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Gurney, Oliver R.
1957 The Sultantepe Tablets (Continued). VI. A Letter of Gilgamesh. AnSt 7: 127–36.
Gurney, Oliver R., and Kramer, Samuel Noah
1976 Sumerian Literary Texts in the Ashmolean Museum. OECT 5. Oxford: Clarendon.
Güterbock, Hans
1934 Die historische Tradition und ihre literarische Gestaltung bei Babyloniern und Hethitern
bis 1200. ZA 42: 1–91.
Hallo, W. W.
1953 The Ensis of the Ur III Dynasty. MA thesis, University of Chicago.
1960 A Sumerian Amphictyony. JCS 14: 88–114.
1963a On the Antiquity of Sumerian Literature. JAOS 83: 167–76.
1963b Royal Hymns and Mesopotamian Unity. JCS 17: 112–18.
1968 Individual Prayer in Sumerian: The Continuity of a Tradition. JAOS 88: 71–89.
1969 The Neo-Sumerian Letter-Orders. BiOr 26: 171–76.
1972 The House of Ur-Meme. JNES 31: 87–95.
1977 Seals Lost and Found. BibMes 6: 55–60.
1981 Letters, Prayers, and Letter-Prayers. Pp. 17–27 in Proceedings of the Seventh World Congress
of Jewish Studies: Studies in the Bible and the Ancient Near East. Jerusalem: Magnes.
1982 The Royal Correspondence of Larsa, II: The Appeal to Utu. Pp. 95–109 in zikir šumim:
Assyriological Studies Presented to F. R. Kraus on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, ed.
G. van Driel et al. Leiden: Brill.
1985 Back to the Big House: Colloquial Sumerian, Continued. OrNS 54: 56–64.
1998 Two Letter-Prayers to Amurru. Pp. 397–410 in Boundaries of the Ancient Near Eastern
World: A Tribute to Cyrus H. Gordon, ed. Meir Lubetski, Claire Gottlieb, and Sharon
Keller. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press.
2006 A Sumerian Apocryphon? The Royal Correspondence of Ur Revisited. Pp. 85–104 in
Approaches to Sumerian Literature: Studies in Honor of Stip (H. L. J. Vanstiphout), ed. Piotr
Michalowski and Niek Veldhuis. CM 35. Leiden: Brill.
2008 Day Dates in Texts from Drehem. Pp. 99–118 in The Growth of an Early State in Mesopo-
tamia: Studies in Ur III Administration, ed. Steven J. Garfinkel and J. Cale Johnson. BPOA
5. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientifícas.
Halstead, Paul
1990 Quantifying Sumerian Agriculture: Some Seeds of Doubt and Hope. BSA 5: 187–95.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 495

Hattori, Atsuko
2006 The Return of the Governor. Pp. 197–208 in If a Man Builds a Joyful House: Assyriological
Studies in Honor of Erle Verdun Leichty, ed. Ann K. Guinan et al. CM 31. Leiden: Brill.
Heimpel, Wolfgang
1974–77 Sumerische und akkadische Personennamen in Sumer und Akkad. AfO 25: 171–74.
1990 Ein Zweiter Schritt zur Rehabilitierung der Rolle des Tigris in Sumer. ZA 80: 204–13.
1994 ne-sag̃. NABU 1994/4: 72–73.
1995 Plow Animal Inspection Records from Ur III Girsu and Umma. BSA 8: 71–171.
1998 The Industrial Park of Girsu in the Year 2042 b.c.: Interpretation of an Archive As-
sembled by P. Mander. JAOS 118: 387–99.
2003 Letters to the King of Mari: A New Translation, with Historical Introduction, Notes, and Com-
mentary. MC 12. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.
2009a Blind Workers in Ur III Texts. KASKAL 6: 43–48.
2009b The Location of Madga. JCS 61: 25–61.
2009c Workers and Construction Work at Garšana. CUSAS 5. Bethesda, MD: CDL.
Helman, Sarit
1989 The Javanese Concept of Order and its Relationship to Millenarian Motif and Imagery.
Pp. 126–38 in Order and Transcendence: The Role of Utopias and the Dynamics of Civiliza-
tion, ed. A. B. Seligman. International Studies in Sociology and Social Anthropology 50.
Leiden: Brill.
Hilgert, Markus
2002 Akkadisch in der Ur III-Zeit. Münster: Rhema.
Hinüber, Oskar von
2010 Did Hellenistic Kings Send Letters to Aśoka? JAOS 130: 261–66.
Hirsch, E. D.
1967 Validity in Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press.
House, J. W.
1980 The Frontier Zone: A Conceptual Problem. International Political Science Review 1: 456–77.
Huber, Fabienne
2001 La Correspondance Royale d’Ur: un corpus apocryphe. ZA 91: 169–206.
Huffmon, H. B.
1965 Amorite Personal Names in the Mari Texts. A Structural and Lexical Study. Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press.
Hunger, Hermann, and Pingree, David
1989 MUL.APIN: An Astronomical Compendium in Cuneiform. Archiv für Orientforschung,
Beiheft 24. Horn, Austria: F. Berger & Söhne.
Hussein, Ayad Mohamed, et al.
2010 Tell Abu Sheeja /Ancient Pashime: Report on the First Season of Excavations, 2007. Ak-
kadica 131: 47–104.
Jacobsen, Thorkild
1939 The Sumerian King List. AS11. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
1940 Historical Data. Pp. 116–200 in Henri Frankfort, Seton Lloyd, and Thorkild Jacobsen, The
Gimilsin Temple and the Palace of the Rulers at Tell Asmar. OIP 43. Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press.
1941 Review of Lamentation over the Destruction of Ur by Samuel N. Kramer. AJSL 58: 219–24.
1953 The Reign of Ibbī-Suen. JCS 7: 36–47.
1960 The Waters of Ur. Iraq 22: 174–85.
1963 Ancient Mesopotamian Religion: The Central Concerns. PAPS 107: 473–84.
1997 The Harps that Once...: Sumerian Poetry in Translation. New Haven: Yale University Press.
496 Bibliography

Jahn, Brit
2007 The Migration and Sedentarization of the Amorites from the Point of View of the Settled
Babylonian Population. Pp. 193–209 in Representations of Political Power: Case Histories
from Times of Change and Dissolving Order in the Ancient Near East, ed. Marlies Heinz and
Marian H. Feldman. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.
Janssen, Caroline
1991 Samsu-iluna and the Hungry Naditus. Pp. 3–39 in Northern Akkad Project Reports 5, ed.
L. de Meyer and H. Gasche. Ghent: University of Ghent.
Jaques, Margaret
2006 Le vocabulaire des sentiments dans les texts sumériens: Recherche sur le lexique sumérien et ak-
kadien. AOAT 332. Münster: Ugarit-Verlag.
Javitch, Daniel
1998 The Emergence of Poetic Genre Theory in the Sixteenth Century. Modern Language Quar-
terly 59: 139–69.
Jean, Joan de
1989 Fictions of Sappho, 1546–1937. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Jeyes, Ulla
1989 Old Babylonian Extispicy: Omen Texts in the British Museum. Leiden: Nederlands Instituut
voor het Nabije Oosten.
Joannès, Francois
1996 Routes et voies de communication dans les archives de Mari. Pp. 323–61 in Mari, Ebla et
les Hourittes dix ans de travaux: Première partie, ed. Jean-Marie Durand. Amurru 1. Paris:
Editions Recherche sur les Civilisations.
Kagan, Kimberly
2006 Redefining Roman Grand Strategy. The Journal of Military History 70: 333–62.
Kamp, Kathryn A., and Yoffee, Norman
1980 Ethnicity in Ancient Western Asia during the Early Second Millennium b.c.: Archaeo-
logical Assessments and Ethnoarchaeological Prospectives. BASOR 237: 85–104.
Keetman, Jan
2010 Zwei Stellen aus Enmerkara und der Herr von Aratta. NABU 2010/3: 72–73.
Kapp, A.
1955 Ein Lied auf Enlilbani von Isin. ZA 51: 76–87.
Karahashi, Fumi.
2000 Sumerian Compound Verbs with Body-Part Terms. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago.
Katz, Dina
1993 Gilgamesh and Akka. Groningen: STYX.
2007 Sumerian Death Rituals in Context. Pp. 167–88 in Performing Death: Social Analyses of
Funerary Traditions in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean, ed. Nicola Laneri. OIS 3.
Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.
Khazanov, A. M.
1984 Nomads and the Outside World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kienast, Burkhart, and Volk, Konrad
1995 Die sumerischen und akkadischen Briefe des III. Jahrtausends aus der Zeit vor der III. Dynastie
von Ur. FAOS 19. Stuttgart: Steiner.
Kiernan, V. G.
1957 Foreign Mercenaries and Absolute Monarchy. Past & Present 11: 66–86.
Kilmer, A. D.
1960 Two New Lists of Key Numbers for Mathematical Operations. Or NS 29: 273–308.
Kiser, Edgar, and Cai, Yong
2003 War and Bureaucratization in Qin China: Exploring an Anomalous Case. American Socio-
logical Review 68: 511–39.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 497

Klein, Jacob
1981 Three Šulgi Hymns: Sumerian Royal Hymns Glorifying King Šulgi of Ur. Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan
University Press.
1991 The Coronation and Consecration of Šulgi in the Ekur (Šulgi G). Pp. 292–313 in Ah, As-
syria: Studies in Assyrian History and Ancient Near Eastern Historiography Presented to Hayim
Tadmor, ed. M. Cogan and I. Ephʾal. Scripta Hierosolymitana 33. Jerusalem: Magnes.
1993 A Self-Laudatory Šulgi Hymn Fragment from Nippur. Pp. 124–31 in The Tablet and the
Scroll: Near Eastern Studies in Honor of William W. Hallo, ed. Mark E. Cohen, Daniel C.
Snell, and David B. Weisberg. Bethesda, MD: CDL.
1996 The Marriage of Martu. The Urbanization of “Barbaric” Nomads.” Pp. 83–96 in Mutual
Influences of Peoples and Cultures in the Ancient Near East, ed. Meir Malul. Michmanim 9.
Haifa: Reuben and Edith Hecht Museum / University of Haifa.
1997 The God Martu in Sumerian Literature. Pp. 99–116 in Sumerian Gods and Their Represen-
tations, ed. I. L. Finkel and M. J. Geller. CM 7. Groningen: STYX.
Klein, Jacob, and Abraham, Kathleen
2000 Problems of Geography in the Gilgameš Epics: The Journey to the “Cedar Forest.” Pp. 63–
73 in Landscapes, Territories, Frontiers and Horizons in the Ancient Near East 3, ed. L. Milano
et al. HANES III/3. Padova: Sargon.
Kleinerman, Alexandra
2009 Education in Early 2nd Millennium bc Mesopotamia: The Sumerian Epistolary Miscellany.
Ph.D. Dissertation, The Johns Hopkins University.
2011 Education in Early 2nd Millennium bc Babylonia: The Sumerian Epistolary Miscellany. Cunei-
form Monographs 42. Leiden: Brill.
Koch-Westenholz, Ulla
1995 Mesopotamian Astrology: An Introduction to Babylonian and Assyrian Celestial Divination.
Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press.
2000 Babylonian Liver Omens: The Chapters Manzāzu, Padānu and Pān Tākalti of the Babylo-
nian Extispicy Series Mainly from Assurbanipal’s Library. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum
Press.
Koskenniemi, Heikki
1956 Studien zur Idee und Phraseologie des griechischen Briefes bis 400 n. Chr. Helsinki: Finnischen
Akademie der Wissenschaften.
Kramer, Samuel Noah
1942 The Oldest Literary Catalogue. A Sumerian List of Literary Compositions Compiled
about 2000 b.c. BASOR 88: 10–19.
1949 Schooldays: A Sumerian Composition Relating to the Education of a Scribe. JAOS 69:
199–215.
1963 The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
1976 Sumerian Literary Texts in the Ashmolean Museum, by Oliver R. Gurney and Samuel Noah
Kramer. OECT 5. Oxford: Clarendon.
Kraus, F. R.
1955 Provinzen des neusumerischen der Reiches von Ur. ZA 51: 45–75.
1980 Der Brief des Gilgameš. AnSt 30: 109–21.
1983 Eine neue Probe akkadischer Literatur. Brief eines Bittstellers an eine Gottheit. JAOS 103:
205–9.
Krebernik, Manfred
2006 Philologische Aspekte elamisch-mesopotamischer Beziehungen im Überblick. Pp. 59–99
in Babel und Bibel 3: Annual o f Ancient Near Eastern, Old Testament and Semitic Studies, ed.
L. Kogan et al. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.
498 Bibliography

Krecher, Joachim
1965 Zur sumerischen Grammatik. ZA 57: 12–30.
1966 Sumerische Kultlyrik. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
1969 Schreiberschulung in Ugarit: Die Tradition von Listen und sumerischen Texten. UF 1:
131–58.
1976–80 Kataloge, literarische. RLA 5 478–85.
1987 /ur/ “Mann”, /eme/ “Frau” und die sumerische Herkunft des Wortes urdu(-d). WO 18:
7–19.
Krispijn, T. J. H.
1990 Beiträge zur altorientalischen Musikforschung. Šulgi und die Musik. Akkadica 70: 1–27.
Kupper, J. R.
1961 L’iconographie du dieu Amurru dans la glyptique de la Ire dynastie babylonienne. Brussells: Palais
des Académies.
Kutscher, Raphael
1968–69 Apillaša, Governor of Kazallu. JCS 22: 63–65.
1982 Review of Sumerian Literary Texts in the Ashmolean Museum, by Oliver Gurney and Samuel
Noah Kramer. Oxford: Clarendon, 1976. BiOr 39: 583–90.
1989 The Brockmon Tablets at the University of Haifa: Royal Inscriptions. Haifa: Haifa University
Press.
Kutscher, Raphael, and Wilcke, Claus
1978 Eine Ziegel-Inschrift des Königs Takil-ilissu von Malgium, gefunden in Isin und Yale. ZA
68: 95–128.
Labat, René, and Edzard, D. O.
1974 Textes littéraire de Suse. MDAI 57. Paris: Geuthner.
Lafont, Bertrand
1985 Documents administratifs sumériens provenant du site de Tello et conservés au Musée du Louvre.
Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les civilisations.
1994 L’Avènement de Šu-Sin. RA 88: 97–119.
1995 La chute des rois d’Ur et la fin des archives dans les grands centres administratifs de leur
empire. RA 89: 3–13.
1996 L’extraction du minerai de cuivre en Iran à la fin du IIIe millénaire. Pp. 87–93 in Tablettes et
images au pays de Sumer et d’Akkad: Mélanges offerts à Professeur Henri Limet, ed. Ö. Tunca
and D. Deheselle. Liège: Université de Liège.
2009a The Army of the Kings of Ur: The Textual Evidence. CDLJ 2009 no. 5.
2009b Eau, pouvoir et société dans l’Orient ancien: approches théoriques, travaux de terrain
et documentation écrite. Pp. 11–23 in Stratégies d’acquisition de l’eau et société au Moyen-
Orient depuis l’Antiquité, ed. Mohamed Al-Dbiyat and Michel Mouton. Bibliothèque ar-
chéologique et historique, 186. Beirut: Presses de l’Ifpo.
2010 Sur quelques dossiers des archives de Girsu. Pp. 167–79 in Why Should Someone Who
Knows Something Conceal It? Cuneiform Studies in Honor of David I. Owen on His 70th
Birthday, ed. Alexandra Kleinerman and Jack M. Sasson. Bethesda, MD: CDL.
Lambert, Maurice
1974 Les villes du Sud-mésopotamien et l’Iran au temps de Naramsin. OrAn 13: 1–24.
1979 Le prince des Suse Ilish-mani et l’Elam de Naramsin à Ibisîn. JA 267: 11–40.
Lambert, W. G.
1974 DINGIR.ŠÀ.DIB.BA Incantations. JNES 33: 267–322.
Lambert, W. G., and Millard, A. R.
1969 Atra-ḫasīs: The Babylonian Story of the Flood. Oxford: Clarendon; repr., Winona Lake, IN:
Eisenbrauns, 1999.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 499

Landsberger, Benno
1967 Akkadische–Hebraïsche Wortgleichungen. Pp. 176–204 in Hebraïsche Wortforschung:
Festschrift zum 80. Geburtstag von Walter Baumgartner, ed. B. Hartmann. Leiden: Brill.
Latham, J. D.
1983 The Beginnings of Arabic Prose Literature: The Epistolary Genre. Pp. 154–79 in Arabic
Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period, ed. A. F. L Beeston et al. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Lattimore, Owen
1940 Inner Asian Frontiers of China. New York: American Geographical Society.
Leemans, W. F.
1968 King Hammurabi as Judge. Pp. 110–20 in Symbolae Iuridicae et Historicae Martino David
Dedicatae, ed. J. A. Ankum, R. Feenstra, and W. F. Leemans. Leiden: Brill.
1989 A propos du livre de Dominique Charpin, Le Clergé d’Ur au siècle d’Hammurabi: La fonc-
tion de šandabakku. JESHO 32: 229–36.
Leichty, Erle
1970 The Omen Series Šumma Izbu. TCS 4. Locust Valley, NY: Augustin.
Levine, Louis D.
1973 Geographical Studies in the Neo-Assyrian Zagros I. Iran 11: 1–28.
1974 Geographical Studies in the Neo-Assyrian Zagros II. Iran 12: 99–122.
Lieberman, Stephen J.
1968–69 An Ur III Text from Drēhem Recording “Booty from the Land of Mardu.” JCS 22: 53–62.
Lightfoot, Kent G., and Martinez, Antoinette
1995 Frontiers and Boundaries in Archaeological Perspective. ARA 24: 471–92.
Limet, Henri
1972 L’étranger dans la société sumérienne. Pp. 123–38 in Gesellschaftsklassen im Alten Zwei­
strom­land und in den angrenzenden Gebieten: XVIII Rencontre assyriologique internationale,
München, 29. Juni 1970, ed. D. O. Edzard. Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissen-
schaften.
1978 Étude sémantique de ma-da, kur, kalam. RA 72: 1–12.
Lindner, Rudi Paul
1982 What Was a Nomadic Tribe? Comparative Studies in Society and History 24: 689–711.
Lion, Brigitte
2009 Les femmes scribes de Sippar. Pp. 289–303 in Femmes, cultures et sociétés dans les civilisa-
tions méditerranéennes et proches-orientales de l’Antiquité, ed. F. Briquel-Chatonnet et al.
Topoi Supplément 10. Paris: De Boccard.
Lion, Brigitte, and Robson, Eleanor
2005 Quelques texts scolaires paléo-babyloniens rédigés pare des femmes. JCS 57: 37–54.
Liverani, Mario
1995 The Medes at Esarhaddon’s Court. JCS 47: 57–62.
1997 Lower Mesopotamian Fields: South vs. North. Pp 219–27 in Ana šadî Labnāni lū allik:
Beiträge zur altorientalischen und mittelmeerischen Kulturen: Festschrift für Wolfgang Röllig, ed.
Beate Pongratz-Leisten, Hartmut Kühne, and Paolo Xella. Kevelaer: Butzon und Bercker/
Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag.
2001 The Fall of the Assyrian Empire: Ancient and Modern Interpretations. Pp. 374–91 in
Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History, ed. Susan E. Alcock, et al. Cambridge:
Cambridge University.
Liverani, Mario, ed.
1993 Akkad, the First World Empire: Structure, Ideology, Traditions. HANES 5. Padova: Sargon.
500 Bibliography

Llop, Jaume, and George, A. R.

2003 Die babylonisch-assyrischen Beziehungen und die innere Lage Assyriens in der Zeit der
Auseinandersetzung zwischen Ninurta-tukulti-Aššur und Mutakkil-Nusku nach neuen
keilschriftlichen Quellen. AfO 48–49: 1–23.
Luciani, Marta
1999 Zur Lage Terqas in schriftlichen Quellen. ZA 89: 1–23.
Ludwig, Marie-Christine
1990 Untersuchungen zu den Hymnen des Išme-Dagan von Isin. SANTAG 2. Wiesbaden: Harras-
sowitz.
2009 Literarische Texte aus Ur: Kollationen und Kommentare zu UET 6/1–2. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Luttwak, Edward N.
1976 The Grand Strategy of The Roman Empire from the First Century a.d. to the Third. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press.
Lyonnet, Bertile
1998 Le peuplement de la Djéziré occidentale au début du 3e millénaire, villes circulaires et
pastoralisme: questions et hypothèses. Pp. 179–93 in About Subartu: Studies Devoted to
Upper Mesopotamia, vol. 1, ed. Marc Lebeau. Subartu 4. Turnhout: Brepols.
2001 L’occupation des marges arides de la Djéziré: pastralisme et nomadisme aux débuts de 3e et
du 2e millénaire. Pp. 15–26 in Conquête de la steppe et appropriation des terres sur les marges
arides du croissant fertile, ed. Bernard Geyer. Travaux de la Maison de l’Orient méditer-
ranéen 36. Lyon: Maison de l’Orient Méditerranéen-Jen Pouilloux.
2004 Le nomadisme et l’archéologie: problèmes d’identification. Le cas de la partie Occidentale
de la Djéziré aux 3ème et début du 2ème millénaire avant notre ère. Pp. 25–49 in Nomades
et sédentaires dans le Proche-Orient ancien. Compte rendu de la XLVIe Rencontre Assyriologique
Internationale (Paris, 10–13 juillet 2000). Amurru 3. Paris: Editions Recherche sur les Ci-
vilisations.
2008 Who Lived in the Third-Millennium “Round Cities” of Northern Syria? Pp. 199–223 in
Nomads, Tribes, and the State in the Ancient Near East: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives, ed.
Jeffrey Szuchman. OIS 5. Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.
Lyonnet, Bertille, and Kohl, Philip L.
2008 By Land and by Sea: The Circulation of Materials and Peoples, ca. 3500–1800 b.c. Pp. 29–
52 in Intercultural Relations between South and Southwest Asia: Studies in Commemoration
of E. C. L. During Caspers (1934–1996), ed. Eric Olijdam and Richard H. Spoor. BAR
International Series 1826. Oxford: Archaeopress.
McAnany, Patricia A., and Yoffee, Norman
2010 Why We Question Collapse and Study Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and
the Aftermath of Empire. Pp. 1–17 in Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological
Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire, ed. Patricia A. McAnany and Norman Yoffee.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McCown, Donald E., and Haines, Richard C.
1967 Nippur 1: Temple of Enlil, Scribal Quarter, and Soundings. OIP 78. Chicago: The Oriental
Institute of the University of Chicago.
McEwan, Gilbert
1980 Review of MSL 11. WO 11: 158–64.
McGann, Jerome J.
1983 A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
MacGinnis, John
1995 Letter Orders from Sippar and the Administration of the Ebabbara in the Late-Babylonian Period.
Poznań: Bonami.
Maeda, Tohru
1992 The Defense Zone during the Rule of the Ur III Dynasty. ASJ 14: 135–72.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 501

Maekawa, K.
1989 Rations, Wages and Economic Trends in the Ur III period. AoF 16: 42–50.
1996 Confiscation of Private Properties in the Ur III Period: A Study of the é-dul-la and níg-
GA. ASJ 18: 103–68.
Manak, Joseph M.
2004 The Law of Written Description in Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology Patents. Biotech-
nology Law Report 23: 30–47.
Mann, C. J.
1979 Force and the Frontiers of the Empire. Journal of Roman Studies 69: 175–83.
Marchesi, Gianni
2001 Alleged SIG7 = agar4 and Related Matters. OrNS 70: 313–17.
2006 LUMMA in the Onomasticon and Literature of Ancient Mesopotamia History of the Ancient
Near East Studies. Padua: Sargon.
Maul, Stefan M.
1988 Herzberuhigungsklagen: Die sumerisch-akkadischen Eršaḫunga-Gebete. Wiesbaden: Harras-
sowitz.
1997 Zwischen Sparmassnahme und Revolte. . . : Die Aktivitäten des Iasīm-Sūmû, des šanda­
bakkum von Mari. MARI 8: 755–74.
Maaijer, Remco de
1998 Land Tenure in Ur III Lagash. Pp. 50–73 in Landless and Hungry: Access to Land in Early
and Traditional Societies. Proceedings of a Seminar held in Leiden, 20 and 21 June, 1996, ed.
B. Haring and R. de Maaijer. CNWS Publications 67. Leiden: Research School CNWS,
Leiden University.
Maaijer, Remco de, and Jagersma, Bram
2003/4 Review of PSD A/3. AfO 50: 351–55.
Mayr, Rudolf H., and Owen, David I.
2004 The Royal Gift Seal in the Ur III Period. Pp. 145–74 in Von Sumer nach Ebla und zurück:
Festschrift für Giovanni Pettinato zum 27. September 1999 gewidmet von Freunden, Kollegen
und Schülern, ed. H. Waetzoldt. Heidelberg: Heidelberger Orientverlag.
McAnany, Patricia A. and Norman Yoffee
2010 Why We Question Collapse and Study Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and
the Aftermath of Empire. Pp. 1–17 in Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological
Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire, ed. Patricia A. McAnany and Norman Yoffee.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Meijer, Diederik J. W.
forthcoming Nomadism, Pastoralism and Town and Country: About the Roaming Elements in the
Syrian Middle Bronze Age. In Proceedings of the Third International Congress on the Archae-
ology of the Ancient Near East (Paris, April 14th–19th, 2002), ed. Jean-Claude Margueron,
Pierre de Miroschedji, and Jean-Paul Thalmann. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.
Michalowski, Piotr
1975 The Bride of Simanum. JAOS 95: 716–19.
1976 The Royal Correspondence of Ur. Ph.D. Dissertation, Yale University.
1977 The Neo-Sumerian Silver Ring Texts. Syro-Mesopotamian Studies 2/3: 43–58
1978a Foreign Tribute to Sumer in Ur III Times. ZA 68: 34–49.
1978b Two Sumerian Literary Letters. JCS 30 114–20.
1981 Königsbriefe. RLA V: 51–59.
1983a Review of L. Cagni, Briefe aus der Iraq Museum (Leiden, 1980). JCS 35: 221–28.
1983b History as Charter: Some Observations on the Sumerian King List. JAOS 103: 237–48.
1983c Review of A = nâqu, Aa A = nâqu, with Their Forerunners and Related Texts, by Miguel
Civil. JNES 42: 151–53.
502 Bibliography

1986a Mental Maps and Ideology: Reflections on Subartu. Pp. 129–56 in The Origins of Cities in
Dry-Farming Syria and Mesopotamia in the Third Millennium b.c., ed. Harvey Weiss. Guil-
ford, CT: Four Quarters.
1986b Review of Neo-Sumerian Archival Texts Primarily from Nippur in the University Museum, the
Oriental Institute and the Iraq Museum, by David I. Owen. JNES 45: 326–28.
1987 On the Early History of the Ershahunga Prayer. JCS 39: 37–48.
1989 The Lamentation over the Destruction of Sumer and Ur. MC 1. Winona Lake, IN: Eisen-
brauns.
1991 Incantation Incipits, N.A.B.U. 1991: 48.
1993 Letters from Early Mesopotamia. SBLWAW 3. Atlanta: Scholars Press.
1996 Ancient Poetics. Pp. 141–53 in Mesopotamian Poetic Language: Sumerian and Akkadian, ed.
M. E. Vogelzang and H. L. J. Vanstiphout. CM 6. Groningen: STYX.
1999a Commemoration, Writing, and Genre in Ancient Mesopotamia. Pp. 69–90 in The Limits
of Historiography: Genre and Narrative in Ancient Historical Texts, ed. Christina Shuttle-
worth Kraus. Mnemosyme Supplementum 191. Leiden: Brill.
1999b Sumer Dreams of Subir: Politics and the Geographical Imagination. Pp. 305–16 in Lan-
guages and Cultures in Contact: At the Crossroads of Civilizations in the Syro-Mesopotamian
Realm, ed. K. van Lerberghe and G. Voet. Leuven: Peeters.
2004 The Ideological Foundations of the Ur III State. Pp. 219–35 in 2000 v. Chr. Politische,
wirtschaftliche und kulturelle Entwicklung im Zeichen einer Jahrtausendwende. 3. Internatio-
nales Colloquium der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 4.–7. April 2000 in Frankfurt/Main und
Marburg/Lahn, ed. W. Meyer and W. Sommerfeld. Saarbrücken: Saarbrücken Druckerei.
2005a Iddin-Dagan and his Family. ZA 95: 65–76.
2005b Literary Works from the Court of King Ishbi-Erra of Isin. Pp. 199–212 in An Experienced
Scribe Who Neglects Nothing: Ancient Near Eastern Studies in Honor of Jacob Klein, ed.
Yitschak Sefati, et al. Bethesda, MD: CDL.
2006a How to Read the Liver? In Sumerian. Pp. 247–57 in If a Man Builds a Joyful House: Assyri-
ological Studies in Honor of Erle Verdun Leichty, ed. Ann K. Guinan, et al. CM 31. Leiden:
Brill.
2006b Love or Death? Observations on the Role of the Gala in Ur III Ceremonial Life. JCS 58:
49–61.
2006c The Lives of the Sumerian Language. Pp. 159–84 in Margins of Writing, Origins of Culture,
ed. Seth Sanders. Oriental Institute Seminars 2. Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the
University of Chicago.
2006d The Strange History of Tumal. Pp. 145–65 in Approaches to Sumerian Literature: Studies in
Honour of Stip (H. L. J. Vanstiphout), ed. P. Michalowski and N. Veldhuis. CM 35. Leiden:
Brill.
2006e Royal Letters of the Ur III Kings. Pp. 75–81 in The Ancient Near East, ed. Mark W. Cha­
va­las. Blackwell’s Sourcebooks in Ancient History. Oxford: Blackwell.
2006f The Scribe(s) of MDAI 57 Susa Omens? N.A.B.U. 41: 39–41.
2008 Observations on “Elamites” and “Elam” in Ur III Times. Pp. 109–23 in On the Third Dy-
nasty of Ur: Studies in Honor of Marcel Sigrist, ed. Piotr Michalowski. JCSSup 1. Boston:
American Schools of Oriental Research.
2009a Aššur During the Ur III Period. Pp. 149–56 in Here and There Across the Ancient Near
East: Studies in Honour of Professor Krystyna Łyczkowska, ed. Olga Drewnowska-Rymarz.
Warsaw: Agade.
2009b The Ur III Literary Footprint and the Historian. Paper presented at Antico Oriente: Non-
solostoria: International Conference in Honour of Mario Liverani, Rome, April 21, 2009.
2010 Literacy, Schooling, and the Transmission of Knowledge in Early Mesopotamian Culture,
in Theory and Practice of Knowledge Transfer, ed. W. S. van Egmond and W. H. van Soldt.
PIHANS 117. Leiden/Istanbul: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 503

2011 On Early Mesopotamian Epistolary Pragmatics. In LEGGO! Studies presented to Prof. Fred-
erick Mario Fales on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday, ed. G. B. Lanfranchi, D. Morandi
Bonacossi, C. Pappi, and S. Ponchia. Leipziger Altorientalische Studien 2. Wiesbaden:
Harrassowitz.
Michalowski, Piotr, and Daneshmand, Parsa
2005 An Ur III Tablet from Iran. JCS 57:31–36.
Michalowski, Piotr, and Wright, Henry T.
2010 The Mid-Late Third Millennium on the Deh Luran Plain. Pp. 106–9 in Elamite and
Achaemenid Settlement on the Deh Luran Plain: Towns and Villages of the Early Empires in
Southwestern Iran, ed. Henry T. Wright and James A. Neely. Memoirs of the Museum of
Anthropology, 47. Ann Arbor: Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan.
Millar, Fergus
1982 Emperors, Frontiers and Foreign Relations, 31 b.c. to a.d. 378. Britannia 13: 1–23.
Miller, Naomi F.
1985 Paleoethnobotanical Evidence for Deforestation in Ancient Iran: A Case Study of Urban
Malyan.” Journal of Ethnobiology 5 (1985) 1–19.
Mittermayer, Catherine
2006 Altbabylonische Zeichenliste der sumerisch-literarischen Texte. OBO Sonderband. Fribourg:
Academic Press / Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
2009 Enmerkar und der Herr von Aratta: ein ungleicher Wettstreit. OBO 239. Fribourg: Academic
Press / Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Molina, Manuel
2000 Lexical and Other School Tablets in the Montserrat Museum. Pp. 751–64 in Studi sul
Vicino Oriente Antico dedicati alla memoria di Luigi Cagni II, ed. Simonetta Graziani, Maria
C. Casaburi, and Giancarlo Lacerenza. Naples: Istituto Universitario Orientale, Napoli.
2008 The Corpus of Neo-Sumerian Tablets: An Overview. Pp. 19–53 in The Growth of an Early
State in Mesopotamia: Studies in Ur III Administration, ed. S. J. Garfinkel and J. Cale John-
son. BPOA 5. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientifícas.
Molina, Manuel, and Böck, Barbara
1997 Textos y fragmentos literarios sumerios AuOr 15: 33–41.
Morozova, Galina S.
2005 A Review of Holocene Avulsions of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and Possible Effects
on the Evolution of Civilizations in Lower Mesopotamia. Geoarchaeology 20: 401–23.
de Morgan, Jacques, and Scheil, Vincent
1893 Les deux stèles de Zohâb. RT 14: 100–106.
Muhamed, Ahmad Kamel
1992 Old Babylonian Cuneiform Texts from the Hamrin Basin: Tell Hadad. Edubba 1. London:
NABU.
Müller-Karpe, Michael
2002 Die Toten von Awal. Reiche Gräber des 3. und 2. Jahrttausends v. Chr. vom Tell Suleima,
Iraq. Jahrbuch des Römisch-Germanischen Zentralmuseums Mainz 49: 410–12.
2003 The Shu-Sin Bowl: A New Royal Inscription from the IIIrd Dynasty of Ur. Paper pre-
sented at the Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, London.
Nashef, Khaled
1982a Die Orts- und Gewässernamen der mittelbabylonischen und mittelassyrischen Zeit. RGTC 5.
Wiesbaden: Reichert.
1982b Der Ṭaban Fluss. BaM 13: 117–41.
Nasidze, Ivane, and Stoneking, Mark
2001 Mitochondrial DNA Variation and Language Replacements in the Caucasus. Proceedings of the
Royal Society: Biological Sciences 268 (no. 1472): 1197–206.
504 Bibliography

Nasrabadi, Behzad Mofidi

2005 Eine Steininschrift des Amar-Suena aus Tappeh Bormi (Iran). ZA 95: 161–71.
Neumann, Hans
1992a Ein Brief an König Šulgi in einer späten Abschrift. AoF 19: 29–39.
1992b Nochmals zum Kaufmann in neusumerischer Zeit: die Geschäfte des Ur-DUN und anderer
Kaufleute aus Nippur. Pp. 83–94 in La circulation des biens, des personnes et des idées dans
le Proche-Orient ancien: Actes de la XXXVIIIe Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, 38
(Paris, 8–10 juillet 1991), ed. D. Charpin and F. Joannès. Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les
Civilisations.
2006 Sumerische und akkadische Briefe des 3. Jt. v. Chr. Pp. 1–20 in Briefe, ed. Michael Lich-
tenstein. TUAT, Neue Folge, 3. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus.
Nichols, Johanna
1997 Modeling Ancient Population Structures and Movement in Linguistics. ARA 26: 359–84.
Nokandeh, Jebrael, et al.
2006 Linear Barriers of Northern Iran: The Great Wall of Gorgan and the Wall of Tammishe.
Iran 44: 121–73.
Nougayrol, Jean
1945 Note sur la place des “présages historiques” dans l’extispicine babylonienne. Annuaire
d’École Pratique des Hautes Études, Section des Sciences Religieuses 1944–1945: 5–41.
Ohgama, Naoko, and Robson, Eleanor
2010 Scribal Schooling in Old Babylonian Kish. Pp. 207–36 in Your Praise is Sweet: A Memo-
rial Volume for Jeremy Black from Students, Colleagues and Friends, ed. Heather D. Baker,
Eleanor Robson, and Gábor G. Zólyomi. London: British Institute for the Study of Iraq.
Olmstead, A. T.
1918 The Calculated Frightfulness of Ashur Nasir Apal. JAOS 38: 209–63.
Owen, David I.
1972 A Unique Letter-Order in the University of North Carolina. JCS 24: 133–34.
1973 Miscellanea Neo-Sumerica I–III. Pp. 131–37 in Orient and Occident: Essays Presented to
Cyrus H. Gordon on the Occasion of his Sixty-fifth Birthday, ed. H. A. Hoffner. AOAT 22.
Kevelaer: Butzon & Bercker Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag.
1980 A Sumerian Letter from an Angry Housewife? Pp. 189–202 in The Bible World: Studies in
Honor of Cyrus H. Gordon, ed. G. Rendsburg, et al. New York: Ktav.
1981 Review of Die Ors- und Gewässername der Zeit der 3. Dynastie von Ur, by Dietz Otto Edzard
and Gertrud Farber. Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1974. JCS 33: 244–69.
1988 Random Notes on a Recent Ur III Volume. JAOS 108: 111–22.
1992 Syrians in Sumerian Sources from the Ur III Period. Pp. 107–75 in New Horizons in the
Study of Ancient Syria, ed. Mark W. Chavalas and John L. Hayes. BibMes 25. Malibu:
Undena.
1993 Some New Evidence on Yamḫadiu = Aḫlamû. Pp. 181–84 in The Tablet and the Scroll:
Near Eastern Studies in Honor of William W. Hallo, ed. M. E. Cohen, et al. Bethesda, MD:
CDL.
1997 Ur III Geographical and Prosopographical Notes. Pp. 367–98 in Crossing Boundaries and
Linking Horizons: Studies in Honor of Michael C. Astour on His 80th Birthday, ed. G. Young,
M. Chavalas, and R. Averbeck. Bethesda, MD: CDL.
2001a On the Patronymy of Šu-Suen. NABU 15/1: 19–20.
2001b The Royal Gift Seal of Ṣilluš-Dagan, Governor of Simurrum. Pp. 829–89 in Studi sul Vi-
cino Oriente antico dedicati alla memoria di Luigi Cagni, vol. 2, ed. S. Graziani. Naples: IUO,
Dipartimento di Studi Asiatici.
Owen, David I., and Mayr, Rudolf H.
2007 The Garshana Archives. CUSAS 3. Bethesda, MD: CDL.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 505

Owen, David I., and Veenker, Ron

1987 MeGum, the First Ur III Ensi of Ebla. Pp. 263–91 in Ebla 1975–1985: Diecianni di studi
linguistici e filologici. Atti del convegno internazionale (Napoli, 9–11 ottobre 1985), ed. Luigi
Cagni. Napoli: Istituto Universitario Orientale di Napoli.
Pardee, Dennis, and Whiting, Robert M.
1987 Aspects of Epistolary Verbal Usage in Ugaritic and Akkadian. BSOAS 50: 1–31.
Parpola, Simo
1987 The Forlorn Scholar. Pp. 257–78 in Language, Literature, and History: Philological and His-
torical Studies Presented to Erica Reiner, ed. F. Rochberg-Halton. New Haven: American
Oriental Society.
Peters, John Punnett
1897 Nippur or Explorations and Adventures on the Euphrates: The Narrative of the University of
Pennsylvania Expedition to Babylonia in the Years 1888–1890. New York: Putnam’s Sons.
Pientka-Hinz, Rosel
2006 Der rabi sikkatum in altbabylonischer Zeit. Pp. 53–70 in Recht gestern und heute: Festschrift
zum 85. Geburtstag von Richard Haase, ed. Joachim von Hengstl and Ulrich Sick. Wies-
baden: Harrassowitz.
Pinches, Theophilus G.
1917 Some Texts of the Relph Collection, with Notes on Babylonian Chronology and Genesis
XIV. PSBA 39: 4–15, 55–72, 89–98.
Postgate, J. N., and Mattila, R.
2004 Il-Yada’s and Sargon’s Southeast Frontier. Pp. 235–54 in From the Upper Sea to the Lower
Sea: Studies on the History of Assyria and Babylonia in Honour of A. K. Grayson, ed.
G. Frame. PIHANS 101. Istanbul: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten.
Porter, Anne
2002 The Dynamics of Death. Ancestors, Pastoralism and the Origins of a Third Millennium
City in Syria. BASOR 325: 1–36.
2004 The Urban Nomad: Countering the Old Cliches. Pp. 69–74 in Nomades et sédentaires dans
le Proche-Orient ancien: Compe rendu de la XLVIe Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale
(Paris, 10-13 juillet 2000), ed. Christophe Nicole. Amurru 3. Paris: Éditions Recherche sur
les Civilisations.
2009 Beyond Dimorphism: Ideologies and Materialities of Kinship as Time-space Distanciation.
Pp. 199–223 in Nomads, Tribes, and the State in the Ancient Near East: Cross-Disciplinary
Perspectives, ed. Jeffrey Szuchman. OIS 5. Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the Univer-
sity of Chicago.
Potts, Daniel T.
1997 Mesopotamian Civilization: The Material Foundations. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
1999 The Archaeology of Elam: Formation and Transformation of an Ancient Iranian State. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
2008 Puzur-Inšušinak and the Oxus Civilization (BMAC): Reflections on Šimaški and the Geo-
political Landscape of Iran and Central Asia in the Ur III period. ZA 98: 165–94.
Potts, Timothy F.
1994 Mesopotamia and the East: An Archaeological and Historical Study of Foreign Relations 3400–
2000 b.c. Oxford: Oxford University Committee for Archaeology.
Powell, Marvin
1985 Salt, Silt, and Yields in Sumerian Agriculture: A Critique of the Theory of Progressive
Salinization. ZA 75: 7–38.
Rasheed, Fawzi
1981 The Ancient Inscriptions in Himrin Area. Himrin 4. Baghdad.
Rashid, Fawzi
1984 Akkadian Texts from Tell Sleima. Sumer 40: 55–56.
506 Bibliography

Reade, Julian E.
1972 The Neo-Assyrian Court and Army: Evidence from the Sculptures. Iraq 34: 87–112.
Reichel, Clemens D.
2001a Political Changes and Cultural Continuity at the Palace of the Rulers in Eshnunna (Tell Asmar)
from the Ur III Period to the Isin-Larsa Period (ca. 2070–1850 b.c.). Ph.D. Dissertation:
University of Chicago.
2001b Seals and Sealings at Tell Asmar: A New Look at an Ur III to Isin/Larsa Palace. Pp. 101–
31 in vol. 2 of Seals and Seal Impressions: Proceedings of the XLVe Rencontre Assyriologique
Internationale, ed. W. W. Hallo and I. J. Winter. Bethesda, MD: CDL.
Reiner, Erica
1956 Lipšur Litanies. JNES 15: 129–49.
1974 New Light on Some Historical Omens. Pp. 257–61 in Anatolian Studies Presented to Hans
Gustav Güterbock on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday, ed. K. Bittel, P. H. J. Houwink
Ten Cate and E. Reiner. Leiden: Nederlands Historisch-Archaeologisch Instituut in het
Nabije Oosten.
1995 Astral Magic in Babylonia. TAPS 85/4. Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society.
Rekavandi, H. O., Sauer, E., and Wilkinson, T.
2007 An Imperial Frontier of the Sassanian Empire: Further Fieldwork at the Great Wall of
Gorgan. Iran 45: 95–136.
Rekavandi, H. O., et al.
2008 The Enigma of the “Red Snake:” Revealing One of the World’s Greatest Frontier Walls.
Current World Archaeology 27: 12–22.
Renfrew, Colin
1992 Archaeology, Genetics and Linguistic Diversity. Man 27: 445–78.
Richardson, Seth
2008 Ningirsu Returns to His Plow: Lagash and Girsu Take Leave of Ur. Pp. 153–57 in On the
Third Dynasty of Ur: Studies in Honor of Marcel Sigrist, ed. Piotr Michalowski. JCSSup 1.
Boston: American Schools of Oriental Research.
Riehl, Simone
2008 Climate and Agriculture in the Ancient Near East: A Synthesis of the Archaeobotanical
and Stable Carbon Isotope Evidence. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 17: 43–51.
2009 Archaeobotanical Evidence for the Interrelationship of Agricultural Decision-Making
and Climate Change in the Ancient Near East. Quaternary International 197: 93–114.
Riehl, Simone, Bryson, Reid, and Pustovoytov, Konstantin
2008 Changing Growing Conditions for Crops During the Near Eastern Bronze Age (3000–
1200 bc): The Stable Carbon Isotope Evidence. Journal of Archaeological Science 35: 1011–
22.
Robson, Eleanor
1999 Mesopotamian Mathematics, 2100–1600 bc: Technological Constants in Bureaucracy and Edu-
cation. Oxford: Clarendon.
2001 The Tablet House: A Scribal School in Old Babylonian Nippur. RA 95: 39–67.
2002 More than Metrology: Mathematics Education in an Babylonian Scribal School. Pp. 325–
65 in Under One Sky: Astronomy and Mathematics in the Ancient Near East, ed. John M.
Steele and Annette Imhausen. Münster: Ugarit-Verlag.
2004 Mathematical Cuneiform Tablets in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. SCIAMVS 5: 3–65.
Röllig, W.
1972–75 Heirat, politische. RLA 4: 282–87.
Römer, Willem H. P.
1965 Sumerische ‘Königshymnen’ der Isin-Zeit. Leiden: Brill.
1980 Das sumerische Kurzepos “Gilgamesh and Akka.” AOAT 290. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neu-
kirchener Verlag.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 507

Ron, Moshe
1987 The Restricted Abyss: Nine Problems in the Theory of Mise en Abyme. Poetics Today 8:
417–38.
Rosenmeyer, Patricia A.
2001 Ancient Epistolary Fictions: The Letter in Greek Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Roth, Martha T.
1983 The Slave and the Scoundrel: CBS 10467, a Sumerian Morality Tale? JAOS 103: 275–82.
1995 Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor. SBLWAW 6. Atlanta: Scholars Press.
Rothenberg, Jerome
1981 Total Translation: An Experiment in the Translation of American Indian Poetry. Pp. 76–
92 in Jerome Rothenberg, Pre-Faces and Other Writings. New York: New Directions.
1992 “We Explain Nothing, We Believe Nothing.” American Indian Poetry and the Problemat-
ics of Translation. Pp. 64–79 in On the Translation of Native American Literatures, ed. Broan
Swann. Washington: Smithsonian Institution.
Rouda, Robert R.
1992 Livestock Production in Southern Lebanon. Rangelands 14: 115–18.
Rowton, M. M.
1969 Watercourses and Water Rights in the Growth of Mesopotamian Civilization. JCS 21:
267–74.
1982 Sumer’s Strategic Periphery in Topological Perspective. Pp. 318–25 in Zikir Šumim: Assyri-
ological Studies Presented to F.R. Kraus on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, ed. G van
Driel, Th. J. Kripijn, M. Stol and K. R. Veenhof. Leiden: Brill.
Rubio, Gonzalo
2006 Šulgi and the Death of Sumerian. Pp. 167–79 in Approaches to Sumerian Literature: Studies
in Honor of Stip (H. L. J. Vanstiphout), ed. Piotr Michalowski and Niek Veldhuis. CM 35.
Leiden: Brill.
in press Sumerian Literary Texts from the Ur III Period. MC 17. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.
Rutten, M.
1938 Trente-deux modèles de foies en argile provenant de Tell Hariri (Mari). RA 35: 36–70.
Rutz, Matthew T.
2006 Textual Transmission between Babylonia and Susa: A New Solar Omen Compendium.
JCS 58: 63–96.
Sallaberger, Walther
1993 Der kultische Kalender der Ur III–Zeit. Berlin: de Gruyter.
1999 Ur III-Zeit. Pp. 119–414 in Mesopotamien: Akkade-Zeit u. Ur III-Zeit, ed. Pascal Attinger
and Markus Wäfler. OBO 160/3. Freiburg: Universitätsverlag / Göttingen: Vandenhoeck
& Ruprecht.
2003 Nachrichten an den Palast von Ebla: Eine Deutung von níg-mul-(an). Pp. 600–25 in
Semitic and Assyriological Studies Presented to Pelio Fronzaroli by Pupils and Colleagues, ed.
Paolo Marrassini. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
2003–4 Schlachtvieh aus Puzriš-Dagān: Zur Bedeutung dieses königlichen Archivs. JEOL 38:
45–62.
2007 From Urban Culture to Nomadism: A History of Upper Mesopotamia in the Late Third
Millennium. Pp. 417–56 in Sociétés humaines et changement climatique à la fin du troisième
Millénaire: Une crise a-t-elle eu lieu en Haute Mésopotamie? Actes du Colloque de Lyon, 5–8
décembre 2005, ed. C. Kuzucuoğlu and C. Marro. Paris: de Boccard.
2009 Die Amurriter-mauer. Pp. 27–37 in A. Nunn, Mauern als Grenzen. Mainz am Rhein:
Philipp von Zabern.
508 Bibliography

Salzman, Philip Carl

2002 Pastoral Nomads: Some General Observations Based on Research in Iran. JAR 58: 245–
64.
Samet, Nili
2009 The Lamentation Over the Destruction of Ur: A Revised Edition. Ph.D. Dissertation, Bar-Ilan
University.
Saporetti, Claudio
2002 La rivale di Babilonia: Storia di Ešnunna ai tempi di Ḫammurapi. Rome: Newton & Compton.
Sauer, Eberhard, et al.
2009 Die sasanidischen Mauern. Pp. 127–43 in A. Nunn, Mauern als Grenzen. Mainz am Rhein:
Philipp von Zabern.
Sauvage, Martin
1998 La Construction des ziggurats sous la troisième dynastie d’Ur. Iraq 60: 45–63.
Scharaschenidze, M.
1976 Die sukkal-mah des alten Zweistromlandes in der Zeit der III. Dynastie von Ur. Pp. 103–
12 in Wirtschaft und Geselslschaft im Alten Vorderasien, ed. J. Harmatta and G. Komoróczy.
Budapest: Akadémiai Kiado.
Schwartz, Glenn
1995 Pastoral Nomadism in Ancient Western Asia. Pp. 249–58 in Civilizations of the Ancient
Near East, ed. Jack Sasson. New York: Scribner’s.
Sharlach, Tonia M.
2002 Foreign Influences on the Religion of the Ur III Court. Pp. 91–114 in General Studies and
Excavations at Nuzi, 10/3, ed. David. I. Owen and Gernot Wilhelm. Bethesda, MD: CDL.
2005 Diplomacy and the Rituals of Politics at the Ur III Court. JCS 57: 17–29.
Scheil, Vincent
1902 Une saison de fouilles à Sippar. Cairo: Imprimerie de l’Institut français d’archéologie orien-
tale.
Sefati, Yitschak
1998 Love Songs in Sumerian Literature: Critical Edition of the Dumuzi-Inanna Songs. Bar-Ilan
Studies in Near Eastern Languages and Culture. Publications of the Samuel N. Kramer
Institute of Assyriology. Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press.
Selz, Gebhard J.
1989 Altsumerische Verwaltungstexte aus Lagas, Teil 2: Die altsumerischen Wirtschaftsurkunden der
Eritage zu Leningrad. FAOS 15/1. Stuttgart: Steiner.
1992 Altsumerische Verwaltungstexte aus Lagas, Teil 2: Die altsumerischen Wirtschaftsurkunden aus
amerikanischen Sammlungen. 2. FAOS 15/2. Stuttgart: Steiner.
2005 Sumerer und Akkader. Geschichte—Gesellschaft— Kultur. Munich: Beck.
Seri, Andrea
2005 Local Power in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia. London: Equinox.
Sigrist, Marcel
1979 ERÍN—UN-íl. RA 73: 101–20.
1989 Le deuil pour Šu-Sin. Pp. 499–505 in DUMU-E2-DUB-BA-A: Studies in Honor of Åke W.
Sjöberg, ed. Hermann Behrens, Darlene Loding, and Martha T. Roth. Occasional Publica-
tions of the Samuel Noah Kramer Fund 11. Philadelphia: The Samuel Noah Kramer Fund,
The University Museum.
1992 Drehem. Bethesda, MD: CDL.
1995 The Administration at Drehem. Neo-Sumerian Texts from the Royal Ontario Museum 1.
Bethesda, MD: CDL Press
Sinopoli, Carla
1994 The Archaeology of Empires. ARA 23: 159–80.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 509

Sjöberg, Åke W.
1960 Der Mondgott Nanna-Suen in der sumerischen Überlieferung. Stockholm: Almquist & Wik-
sell.
1967 Zu einigen Verwandtschaftsbezeichnungen im Sumerischen. Pp. 201–32 in Heidelberger
Studien zum Alten Orient: Adam Falkenstein zum (60. Geburtstag) 17. Sept. 1966, ed. Dietz
Otto Edzard. HSAO 1. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
1972 Hymns to Meslamtaea, Lugalgirra and Nanna-Suen in Honour of King Ibbīsuen (Ibbīsîn)
of Ur. Orientalia Suecana 19–20 (1970–1971): 140–78.
1973a Der Vater und sein missratener Sohn. JCS 25: 105–69.
1973b Miscellaneous Sumerian Hymns. ZA 63: 1–55.
1975a The Old Babylonian Eduba. Pp. 159–79 in Sumerological Studies in Honor of Thorkild Ja-
cobsen on His Seventieth Birthday, June 7 1974, ed. Stephen J. Lieberman. AS 20. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
1975b in-nin šà-gur4-ra: A Hymn to the Goddess Inanna by the en-Priestess Enḫeduanna. ZA 65:
161–253.
1977 A Blessing of King Urninurta. Pp. 189–95 in Essays on the Ancient Near East in Memory of
Jacob Joel Finkelstein, ed. Maria deJong Ellis. Memoirs of the Connecticut Academy of Arts
& Sciences 19. Hamden: Archon.
1993a The Ape from the Mountain Who Became the King of Isin. Pp. 211–20 in The Tablet and
the Scroll: Near Eastern Studies in Honor of William W. Hallo, ed. Mark. E. Cohen, Daniel
C. Snell, and David B. Weisberg. Bethesda, MD: CDL.
1993b CBS 11319+. An Old Babylonian Schooltext from Nippur. ZA 83: 1–21.
1996 UET 7 no. 93. A Lexical Text or a Commentary? ZA 86: 220–37.
Sjöberg, Åke W., and Bergmann, E.
1969 The Collection of the Sumerian Temple Hymns. TCS 3. Locust Valley, NY: Augustin.
Small, Ian
1999 Identifying Text and Postmodernist Editorial Projects. The Yearbook of English Studies 29,
The Text as Evidence: Revising Editorial Principles: 43–56.
Sollberger, Edmond
1953 Remarks on Ibbīsīn’s Reign. JCS 7: 48–50.
1954 New Lists of the Kings of Ur and Isin. JCS 8: 135–36.
1954–56 Sur la chronologie des rois d’Ur et quelques problèmes connexes. AfO 17: 10–48.
1965 A Three-Column Silbenvokabular A. Pp. 21–28 in Studies in Honor of Benno Landsberger
on His Seventy-Fifth Birthday, April 25, 1965. AS 16. Chicago: The Oriental Institute.
1966 The Business and Correspondence under the Kings of Ur. TCS 1. Locust Valley, NY: Augus-
tin.
1968 Two Kassite Votive Inscriptions. JAOS 88: 191–97.
1980 Ibbi-Sin. RLA 5: 1–8.
Sommerfeld, Walther
1999 Die Texte der Akkad-Zeit, 1: Das Dijala-Gebiet: Tutub. IMGULA 3/1. Münster: Rhema.
Sørbø, Gunnar M.
2003 Pastoral Ecosystems and the Issue of Scale. Ambio 32: 113–17.
Spooner, Brian
1971 Towards a Generative Model of Nomadism. Anthropological Quarterly 44: 198–210.
1986 Review of Nomads and the Outside World, by A. M. Khazanov. American Ethnologist 13:
183–84.
Starr, Ivan
1983 The Rituals of the Diviner. BibMes 12. Malibu: Undena.
510 Bibliography

Steiner, Peter
1982 The Semiotics of Literary Reception. Pp. 503–20 in The Structure of the Literary Process:
Studies Dedicated to the Memory of Felix Vodička, ed. Peter Steiner, Miroslac Červenka, and
Ronald Vroon. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Steinkeller, Piotr
1980 On the Reading and Location of the Toponyms ÚR×Ú and A.ḪA.KI. JCS 32: 23–33.
1981 Early History of the Hamrin Basin in the Light of Textual Evidence. Pp. 163–68 in Uch
Tepe 1: Tell Razuk, Tell Ahmed al-Mughir, Tell Ajam, ed. McGuire Gibson. Chicago: The
Oriental Institute and the Institute of Assyriology.
1981 The Renting of Fields in Early Mesopotamia and the Development of the Concept of
“Interest” in Sumerian. JESHO 24: 113–45.
1981 The Signs ŠEN and ALAL. OrAn 20: 243–49.
1982a The Mesopotamian God Kakka. JNES 41: 289–94.
1982b On Editing Ur III Economic Texts. JAOS 102: 639–44.
1986 Seal of Išma-ilum, Son of the Governor of Matar. VO 6: 27–40.
1987 The Administrative and Economic Organization of the Ur III State: The Core and the Pe-
riphery. Pp. 19–41 in The Organization of Power: Aspects of Bureaucracy in the Ancient Near
East, ed. McGuire Gibson and Robert D. Biggs. SAOC 46. Chicago: Oriental Institute of
the University of Chicago.
1988 On the Identification of the Toponym LÚ.SU(.A). JAOS 108: 197–202.
1989 Sale Documents of the Ur III Period. FAOS 17. Stuttgart: Steiner.
1991 The Reforms of UruKAgina and an Early Sumerian Term for “Prison.” Pp. 227–33 in Velles
Paraules: Ancient Near Eastern Studies in Honor of Miguel Civil on the Occasion of his Sixty-
fifth Birthday, ed. P. Michalowski, et al. Barcelona: Editorial AUSA.
1993 Early Political Development in Mesopotamia and the Origins of the Sargonic Empire.
Pp. 107–29 in Akkad: The First World Empire: Structure, Ideology, Traditions, ed. Mario
Liverani. HANES 5. Padova: Sargon.
1995 Sheep and Goat Terminology in Ur III Sources from Drehem. BSA 8: 49–70.
1998 The Historical Background of Urkeš and the Hurrian Beginnings in Northern Mesopota-
mia. Pp. 75–98 in Urkesh and The Hurrians: A Volume in Honor of Lloyd Cotsen, ed. Giorgio
Buccellati and Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati. BibMes 26. Malibu: Undena.
2001 New Light on the Hydrology and Topography of Southern Babylonian in the Third Mil-
lennium. ZA 91: 22–84.
2003a An Ur III Manuscript of the Sumerian King List. Pp. 267–92 in Literatur, Politik und Recht
in Mesopotamien: Festschrift für Claus Wilcke, ed. Walther Sallaberger, Konrad Volk, and
Annette Zgoll. OBC 14. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
2003b The Question of Lugalzagesi’s Origins. Pp. p 621–37 in Festschrift für Burkhart Kienast zu
seinem 70. Geburtstage dargebracht von Freunden, Schülern und Kollegen, ed. Gebhard J. Selz.
AOAT 274. Münster : Ugarit-Verlag.
2004 A History of Mashkan-shapir and Its Role in the Kingdom of Larsa. Pp. 26–42 in The
Anatomy of a Mesopotamian City: Survey and Soundings at Mashkan-shapir, ed. Elizabeth C.
Stone and Paul Zimansky. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.
2006 New Light on Marhaši and Its Contacts with Makkan and Babylonia. JMS 1: 1–17.
2007a New Light on Šimaški and Its Rulers. ZA 97: 215–32.
2007b On Sand Dunes, Mountain Ranges, and Mountain Peaks. Pp. 219–32 in Studies Presented
to Robert D. Biggs, June 4, 2004, ed. Martha T. Roth, et al. Chicago: The Oriental Institute
of the University of Chicago.
2007c Tiš-atal’s Visit to Nippur. N.A.B.U. 2007/1: 14–16.
2007d City and Countryside in Third-Millennium Southern Mesopotamia. Pp. 185–211 in Set-
tlement and Society: Essays Dedicated to Robert McCormick Adams, ed. Elizabeth C. Stone.
Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 511

2008 On Birbirrum, the Alleged Earliest-Documented rabiānum Official, and on the End of
Ibbi-Suen’s reign. NABU 2008/1: 3–5.
2010 On the Location of the Towns of Ur-Zababa and Dimat-Enlil and on the Course of the
Arahtum. Pp. 369–82 in Festschrift für Gernot Wilhelm anläßlich seines 64 Geburtstages am
28. Januar 2010, ed. Jeanette C. Finke. Dresden: ISLET.
forthcoming The Gutian Period in Chronological Perspective. In Chronology of the Third Millen-
nium: History and Philology, ed. Walther Sallaberger and Ingo Schrakamp. Turnout: AR-
CANE Publications.
Steve, M.-J, Gasche, H. and de Mayer, L.
1980 La Susiane au deuxiéme millènaire à propos d’une interprétation des fouilles de Suse.
Iranica Antiqua 15: 49–154.
Stol, Marten
1982 A Cadastral Innovation by Hammurabi. Pp. 351–58 in Zikir Šumim: Assyriological Studies
Presented to F. R. Kraus, ed. G. van Driel, et al. Leiden: Brill.
1991 Old Babylonian Personal Names. SEL 8: 191–212.
1995 Old Babylonian Corvée (tupšikkum). Pp. 293–309 in Ancient Near Eastern Studies Presented
to Philo H. J. Houwink ten Cate on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday, ed. Theo P. J. van den
Hout and Johan de Roos. PIHANS 74. Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije
Oosten.
2004 Wirtschaft und Gesselschaft in Altbabylonischer Zeit. Pp. 643–975 in Mesopotamien: Die
altbabylonische Zeit, by Dominique Charpin, D. O. Edzard, and Marten Stol. OBO 160/4.
Friburg: Academic Press / Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Stolper, Matthew W.
1982 On the Dynasty of Šimaški and the Early Sukkalmahs. ZA 72: 42–67.
Stone, Elizabeth C.
1987 Nippur Neighborhoods. SAOC 44. Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of
Chicago.
2002 The Ur III–Old Babylonian Transition: An Archaeological Perspective. Iraq 64: 79–84.
Streck, Michael P.
2000 Das amurritische Onomastikon der altbabylonischen Zeit. Münster: Ugarit-Verlag.
Sullivan, Brian Barry
1979 Sumerian and Akkadian Sentence Structure in Old Babylonian Literary Bilingual Texts. Ph.D.
Dissertation, Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati.
Szuchman, Jeffrey, ed.
2009 Nomads, Tribes, and the State in the Ancient Near East: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives. OIS
3. Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.
Tainter, Joseph A.
1988 The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2006 The Archaeology of Overshoot and Collapse. ARA 35: 59–74.
Thureau-Dangin, François
1910 Lettres et contrats de l’èpoque de la première dynastie babylonienne. TCL 1. Paris: Geuthner.
Tinney, Steve
1995 On the Poetry for King Išme-Dagan. OLZ 90: 5–26.
1996 The Nippur Lament: Royal Rhetoric and Divine Legitimation in the Reign of Išme-Dagan of Isin
(1953–1935 b.c.). Occasional Publications of the Samuel Noah Kramer Fund 16. Phila-
delphia: The Samuel Noah Kramer Fund.
1998 Texts, Tablets, and Teaching: Scribal Education in Nippur and Ur. Expedition 40: 40–50.
1999 On the Curricular Setting of Sumerian Literature. Iraq 61: 159–72.
Toorn, K. van der
1985 ARM XIV 78 (= TCM I 78). RA 79: 189–90.
512 Bibliography

1996 Family Religion in Babylonia, Syria, and Israel: Continuity and Change in the Forms of Religious
Life. Leiden: Brill.
Trigger, Bruce G.
1989 Review of The Collapse of Complex Societies, by Joseph A. Tainter. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988. Man 24: 374–75.
Tynianov, Yuri
1981 The Problem of Verse Language, ed. and trans. Michael Sosa and Brent Harvey. Ann Arbor,
MI: Ardis.
Vallat, François
1993 Les noms géographiques des sources suso-élamites. RGTC 11. Wiesbaden: Reichert.
1994 Succession royale en Elam au IIème millenaire. Pp. 1–14 in Cinquante-deux réflexions sur le
Proche-Orient ancien offertes à Léon De Meyer, ed. H. Gasche, et al. Mesopotamian History
and Environment, Occasional Publications 2. Leuven: Peeters.
Van de Mieroop, Marc
1987 Crafts in the Early Isin Period: Study of the Isin Craft Archive from the Reigns of Ishbi-Erra and
Shu-Ilishu. Leuven: Departement Orientalistiek.
2004 A History of the Ancient Near East, ca. 3000–323 bc. Malden: Blackwell.
2005 King Hammurabi of Babylon: A Biography. Oxford: Blackwell.
Vanstiphout, Hermann
1978 Lipit-Eštar’s Praise in the Edubba. JCS 30: 33–61.
1979 How Did They Learn Sumerian? JCS 31: 118–26.
1983 Problems in the “The Matter of Aratta.” Iraq 45: 35–42.
1985 Some Thoughts on Genre in Mesopotamian Literature. Pp. 1–11 in Keischriftliche Litera-
turen, XXXII RAI, ed. K. Hecker and W. Sommerfeld. Berlin: Reimer.
1989 Enmerkar’s Invention of Writing Revisited. Pp. 515–24 in DUMU-E2-DUB-BA-A: Studies
in Honor of Åke W. Sjöberg, ed. Hermann Behrens, Darlene Loding, and Martha T. Roth.
Occasional Publications of the Samuel Noah Kramer Fund, 11. The Samuel Noah Kramer
Fund.
1989–90 The Man from Elam: A Reconsideration of Ishbi-Erra “Hymn B.” JEOL 31: 53–62.
2003 Epics of Sumerian Kings: The Matter of Aratta. SBLWAW 20. Atlanta: Society of Biblical
Literature.
Veldhuis, Niek
1996 The Cuneiform Tablet as an Educational Tool. Dutch Studies on Near Eastern Languages and
Literature 2: 11–26.
1997 Elementary Education at Nippur. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Groningen.
2000 Kassite Exercises: Literary and Lexical Extracts. JCS 52: 67–94.
2003 Entering the Netherworld. CDLB 2003/6: 1–4.
Vincente, Claudine-Adrienne
1995 The Tall Leilan Recension of the Sumerian King List. ZA 85: 234–70.
Volk, Konrad
1995 Inanna und Šukaletuda: Zur historisch-politischen Literaturwerkes. SANTAG 3. Wiesbaden:
Harrassowitz.
1996 Methoden altmesopotamischer Erziehung nach Quellen der altbabylonischen Zeit. Saecu-
lum 47: 178–216.
2000 Edubba’a und Edubba’a-Literatur: Rätsel und Lösungen. ZA 90: 1–30.
2004 Altorientalische Tontafel, Keilschrift, ca. 2048 v. Chr. Pp. 29–31 in Gratianustiftung:
Samm­lungskatalog 1. Reutlingen: G. Lachnemaier.
Wagensonner, Klaus
2008 Nin-Isina(s)s Journey to Nippur: A Bilingual Divine Journey. WZKM 98: 277–94.
Waldron, Arthur
1992 The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 513

Walker, C. B. F.
1983 Another Babati Inscription. JCS 35: 91–96.
Wall-Romana, Christophe
1990 An Areal Location of Agade. JNES 49: 205–45.
Wasserman, Nathan
2003 Style and Form in Old Babylonian Literary Texts. Cuneiform Monographs 27. Leiden: Styx.
Weeks, Noel
1985 The Old Babylonian Amorites: Nomads or Mercenaries? OLP 16: 49–57.
Weidner, Ernst F.
1929 Historisches Material in der babylonischen Omina-Literatur. MAOG 4: 226–40.
Weiss, Harvey
2000 Beyond the Younger Dryas: Collapse as Adaptation to Abrupt Climate Change in Ancient
West Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean. Pp. 75–98 in Environmental Disaster and the
Archaeology of Human Response, ed. Garth Bawden and Richard Martin Reycraft. Maxwell
Museum of Anthropology, Anthropological Papers, No. 7. Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press.
Westbrook, Raymond
2005 Patronage in the Ancient Near East. JESHO 48: 210–33.
Westenholz, Aage
1999 The Old Akkadian Period: History and Culture. Pp. 17–117 in Mesopotamien: Akkade-Zeit
u. Ur III-Zeit, ed. Pascal Attinger and Markus Wafler. OBO 160/3. Freiburg: Universitäts-
verlag / Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Westenholz, Joan Goodnick
1997 Legends of the Kings of Akkade. MC 7. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.
2008 The Memory of Sargonic Kings under the Third Dynasty of Ur. Pp. 251–60 in On the Third
Dynasty of Ur: Studies in Honor of Marcel Sigrist, ed. Piotr Michalowski. JCSSup 1. Boston:
American Schools of Oriental Research.
Westenholz, Joan Goodnick, and Westenholz, Aage
2006 Cuneiform Inscriptions in the Collection of the Bible Lands Museum Jerusalem: The Old Baby-
lonian Inscriptions. CM 33. Leiden: Brill.
Whiting, Robert M.
1976 Tiš-atal of Nineveh and Babati, Uncle of Šu-Sin. JCS 28: 173–82.
1987 Old Babylonian Letters from Tell Asmar. AS 22. Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the
University of Chicago.
1995 Amorite Tribes and Nations of Second-Millennium Western Asia. Pp. 1231–42 in Civili-
zations of the Ancient Near East 2, ed. Jack Sasson. New York: Scribners.
Widell, Magnus
2003 The Administrative and Economic Ur III Texts from the City of Ur. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias.
Wilcke, Claus
1968 Das modale Adverb i-gi4-in-zu-in-zu im Sumerischen. JNES 27: 229–42.
1969a Das Lugalbandaepos. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
1969b Zur Geschichte der Amurriter in der Ur-III Zeit. WO 5: 1–33.
1970 Drei Phasen des Niedergangs des Reiches von Ur III. ZA 60: 54–69.
1974–77 Die Keilschrift-Texte der Sammlung Böllinger. AfO 25: 84–94.
1976 Kollationen zu den sumerischen literarischen Texten aus Nippur in der Hilprecht-Sammlung Jena.
Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
1988 Anmerkungen zum ‘Konjugationspräfix’ /i/- und zur These vom “silbischen Charakter der
sumerischen Morpheme” anhand neusumerischer Verbalformen beginnend mit ì-íb-, ì-im-
und ì-in-. ZA 78: 1–49.
1990 Zur Rekonstruktion der Šū-Sîn Inschriften-Sammlung B. N.A.B.U. 1990/33: 25–26.
1991 Die Lesung vos ÁŠ-da = kiššātum. N.A.B.U. 1991: 16.
514 Bibliography

1993 Politik im Spiegel der Literatur, Literatur als Mittel der Politik im älteren Babylonien.
Pp. 29–75 in Anfänge des politischen Denkens in der Antike, ed. Kurt Raaflaub. Schriften des
Historischen Kollegs, Kolloquien 24. Munich: Oldenburg.
1998 Zu “Gilgamesh und Akka.” Überlegungen zur Zeit von Entstehung und Niedershrift, wie
auch zum Text des Epos mit einem Exkurs zur Überliefung von “Šulgi A” und “Lugalbanda
II.” Pp. 457–85 in dubsar anta-men: Studien zur Altorientalistik: Festschrift für Willem H. Ph.
Römer zur Vollendung seines 70. Lebensjahres mit Beiträgen von Freunden, Schülern und Kol-
legen, ed. Manfred Dietrich and Oswald Loretz. AOAT 253. Münster: Ugarit-Verlag.
1999 Flurschäden, verursacht durch Hochwasser, Unwetter, Militär, Tiere und schuldhaftes
Verhalten zur Zeit der 3. Dynastie von Ur. Pp. 301–39 in Landwirtschaft im Alten Orient.
Ausgewählte Vorträge der XLI. Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale Berlin, 4.—8. 7. 1994,
ed. H. Klengel and J. Renger. Berliner Beiträge zum Vorderen Orient 18. Berlin: Reimer.
2000 Wer las und schrieb in Babylonien und Assyrie. Überlegungen zur Literalität im Alten Zweistrom-
land. Sitzungsberichte der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-His-
torische Klasse Jahrgang 2000, Heft 6. Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften.
2002 Der Kodex Urnamma (CU): Versuch einer Rekonstruktion. Pp. 291–333 in Riches Hidden
in Secret Places: Ancient Near Eastern Studies in Memory of Thorkild Jacobsen, ed. T. Abusch.
Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.
2007 Early Ancient Near Eastern Law: A History of Its Beginnings. The Early Dynastic and Sargonic
Periods. 2nd ed. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.
Wilson, Mark
2008 Education in the Earliest Schools: Cuneiform Manuscripts in the Cotsen Collection. Los Ange-
les: Cotsen Occasional Press.
Wiseman, D. J., and Black, J. A.
1996 Literary Texts from the Temple of Nabû. Cuneiform Texts from Nimrud, 4. London: British
School of Archaeology in Iraq.
Woods, Christopher
2003 The Element -re and the Organization of Erim-ḫuš. Paper presented at the 213th annual
meeting of the American Oriental Society, April 4th, 2003 in Nashville, TN.
2005 On the Euphrates. ZA 95: 7–45.
2006 Bilingualism, Scribal Learning, and the Death of Sumerian. Pp. 91–120 in Margins of
Writing, Origins of Culture: New Approaches to Writing and Reading in the Ancient Near East.
Papers from the Symposium Held February 25–26, 2005, ed. Seth Sanders. OIS 2. Chicago:
The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.
Wu, Yuhong
1994 A Political History of Eshnunna, Mari and Assyria during the Early Old Babylonian Period
(From the End of Ur III to the Death of Šamši-Adad). Changchun: Institute of History of
Ancient Civilizations, Northeast Normal University.
1998a Review of Lamia al-Gailani Werr, Old Babylonian Cylinder Seals from the Hamrin. JAOS
118: 577–8.
1998b Review of Ahmad Kamel Muhamed, Old Babylonian Cuneiform Texts from the Hamrin
Basin: Tell Hadad. JAOS 118: 578–80.
Yıldız, Fatma, and Gomi, Tohru
1988 Die Puzriš-Dagan Texte der Istanbuler Archäologischen Museen, Teil 2, Nr. 726–1379. FAOS
16. Stuttgart: Steiner.
Yoffee, Norman
1977 The Economic Role of the Crown in the Old Babylonian Period. Malibu: Undena.
1978 On Studying Old Babylonian History: A Review Article. JCS 30: 18–32.
1988 Context and Authority in Early Mesopotamian Law. Pp. 95–114 in State Formation and
Political Legitimacy, ed. Ronald Cohen and Judith Drick Toland. Edison, NJ: Transaction.
1995 Political Economy in Early Mesopotamian States. ARA 24: 281–311.
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 515

2005 Myths of the Archaic State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2010 Collapse in Ancient Mesopotamia: What Happened, What Didn’t. Pp. 176–203 in Ques-
tioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire, ed.
Patricia A. McAnany and Norman Yoffee. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Yoffee, Norman, and Cowgill, George L., eds.
1988 The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Zadok, Rsn
2006 The Geography of the Borsippa Region. Pp. 389–454 in Essays on Ancient Israel in Its Near
Eastern Context: A Tribute to Nadav Naʾaman, ed. Yairah Amit, et al. Winona Lake, IN:
Eisenbrauns.
Zarins, Juris
2008 Magan Shipbuilders at the Ur III Lagash State Dockyards. Pp. 209–29 in Intercultural
Relations between South and Southwest Asia: Studies in Commemoration of E.C.L. During
Caspers (1934–1996), ed. Eric Olijdam and Richard H. Spoor. Society for Arabian Studies
Monographs 7. BAR International Series 1826. Oxford: Archaeopress.
Zettler, Richard L.
1984 The Genealogy of the House of Ur-Meme: A Second Look. AfO 31: 1–9.
1992 The Ur III Temple of Inanna at Nippur: The Operation and Organization of Urban Religious
Institutions in Mesopotamia in the Late Third Millennium b.c. Berlin: Reimer.
2006 Tišatal and Nineveh at the End of the 3rd Millennium bce. Pp. 503–14 in If a Man Builds
a Joyful House: Assyriological Studies in Honor of Erle Verdun Leichty, ed. Ann K. Guinan
et al. Leiden: Brill.
Zhi, Yang
1989 Sargonic Inscriptions from Adab. Changchun: Institute for the Study of Ancient Civiliza-
tions, Northeast Normal University..
 List of
Sumerian Literary Texts Cited

Amurrum Hymn A Falkenstein 1959: 120–40

An Axe for Nergal (SEpM 10) Behrens 1988, Kleinerman 2011
Announcement of a Lost Seal (SEpM 14) Kleinerman 2011
Code of Ur-Namma mss. M. Civil
Curse of Agade Cooper 1983
Enki and Ninhursanga Attinger 1984
Enki and the World Order mss. J.S. Cooper
Enki’s Journey to Nippur Al-Fouadi 1969
Enlil-bani Hymn A Kapp 1955, mss. S. Tinney
Enmerkar and Ensuhgirana Berlin 1979
Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta Mittermayer 2009
Eridu Lament Green 1978
Farmer’s Instructions Civil 1994
Father and Son Sjöberg 1973a
Flood Story Civil 1969
Gilgameš and Aga Römer 1980, Katz 1993
Gilgameš and Huwawa A Edzard 1990
Gilgameš, Enkidu, and the Netherworld Gadotti 2005
Gudea Cyl. A & B Edzard 1997: 68–101
Gudea St. B Edzard 1997: 30–8
Iddin-Dagan Hymn B Römer 1965: 209–35
Išbi-Erra Hymn A Sjöberg 1993a
Išbi-Erra Hymn B van Dijk 1978
Išme-Dagan Hymn A + V Ludwig 1990: 161–225
Inana and Ebih Attinger 1998, Mss. B. Eichler
Inana and Šukaletuda Volk 1995
Ininšagura Sjöberg 1975b
Instructions of Šuruppak Alster 2005: 56–102
Lamentation Over the Destruction of Sumer and Ur Michalowski 1989
Letter of Etel-pi-Damu to Amurrum Hallo 1998: 405–9
Letter of Gudea to his God Kleinerman 2011
Letter of Iddatum to Sumutara Kleinerman 2011
Letter of Iddin-Dagan to Sin-illati (SEpM 3) Kleinerman 2011
Letter of Inim-Enlila UET 6/2 173 i 5–14; ii
Letter of Inim-Inina to Lugal-ibila (SEpM 22) Kleinerman 2011
Letter of Ininka to Nintinuga (SEpM 19) Kleinerman 2011
Letter of Lipit-Eštar to Nanna-kiag̃a (SEpM 5) Kleinerman 2011

516
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 517

Letter of Monkey to Mother(SEpM 16) Kleinerman 2011

Letter of Nanna-ki’ag̃a to Lipit-Eštar (SEpM 4) Kleinerman 2011
Letter of Ninšatapada to Rim-Sin Brisch 2007: 245–61
Letter of Sin-iddinam to Nininsina Brisch 2007: 142–56
Letter of Sin-iddinam to Utu Brisch 2007: 158–78
Letter of Sin-šamuḫ to Enki Hallo 1968: 82–88
Letter of Sin-tillati to Iddin-Dagan (SEpM 2) Kleinerman 2011
Letter of Šamaš-ṭab to Ilad-ni’id (SEpM 17) Kleinerman 2011
Letter of Ursaga to a King (SEpM 6) Kleinerman 2011
Letter to the Generals (SEpM 11) Kleinerman 2011
Letter to Zimri-Lim Charpin 1992, mss. P. Michalowski
Lipit-Eštar Hymn A Vanstiphout 1978
Lugalanemundu Inscription Güterbock 1934: 40–47; mss. P. Michalowski
Lugalbanda II Wilcke 1969
Lugale van Dijk 1983
Marriage of Amurrum Klein 1996
Message of Ludig̃ira Çıg̃ and Kramer 1976, mss. P. Michalowski
Nidaba Hymn C mss. P. Michalowski
Ningišzida Hymn A van Dijk 1960: 81–107
Nippur Lament Tinney 1996
Rim-Sin Hymn B Brisch 2007: 186–98
Rim-Sin Hymn E Brisch 2007: 212–26
Sargon and Ur-Zababa Heimpel and Cooper 1983, Attinger 2010
Schooldays Kramer 1949, Edzard 2004: 531–9
Sheep and Grain Alster and Vanstiphout 1987
SP Coll. 2 Alster 1997: 40–75
SP Coll. 5 Alster 1997: 119–43
SP Coll 13 Alster 1997: 206–15
Sumerian King List Jacobsen 1939
Summer and Winter mss. M. Civil
Supervisor and Scribe mss. M. Civil
Šulgi Hymn A Klein 1981: 182–217, Edzard 2004: 500–9
Šulgi Hymn B Castellino 1972: 27–242, mss. G. Haayer
Šulgi Hymn C Castellino 1972: 247–94
Šulgi Hymn D Klein 1981: 70–123
Šulgi Hymn G Klein 1991
Šu-Sin Hymn B Sefati 1985: 400–6
Tale of the Three Ox-drivers of Adab Alster 2005: 377–81
Tree and Reed mss. M. Civil
Tumal Inscription (SEpM 9) Kleinerman 2011
Two Scribes mss. M. Civil
Ur Lament Samet 2009
Ur-Namma Hymn A Flückiger-Hawker 1999
Ur-Namma Hymn B Flückiger-Hawker 1999
Ur-Namma Hymn C Flückiger-Hawker 1999
Ur-Ninurta Hymn A Sjöberg 1977
Uruk Lament Green 1984
 List of CKU Tablets

Tablet Place Type Comp Sigla

3 N-T 306 (A 30207) Nippur III 21 N1
3 N-T 309 (A 30231) (SL liii) Nippur III 4 N2
3 N-T 311 (IM 58418) (SL xxii– Nippur I (M) 1, 2, 23 N1(1), N1(2),
xxiii, Sumer 26 171–72) N1(23)
3 N-T 8 (IM 58335) (SL xxxvii) Nippur III 4 N1
3 N-T 80 (30135) (SL xxxi) Nippur III 7 N1
3 N-T 900,25 (SLF 21) Nippur III 1 N2
3 N-T 903,102 (SL xxxiv, Sumer 26 Nippur III 2 N2
176)
3 N-T 918,440 (SLF 22) + 3 NT Nippur III 1 N3
919,486 (Sumer 26 174)
3 N-T 919,459 (Sumer 26 178; SLF Nippur III 23 N2
22)
3 N-T 927,516 (SLF 21 and Sumer Nippur III 1 N4
26 174)
A 7475 X (Sippar?) I (M) 21, 22, 23, X1 (21), X1 (22),
24 X1(23), X1(24)
A w/n X I (M) 1, 2, 3, 13, X1(1), X1 (2),
14 X1(3), X1(13),
X1, X3(14)
AO 10630 (PRAK II C10) Kish III 24 Ki1
AO 10819 (PRAK II D60) Kish III 13 Ki1
AN1922-163 (OECT 5 26) X III 6 X1
AN1922-165 (OECT 5 27) X III 22 X2
AN1922-167 (OECT 5 29) X III 21 X2
AN1930-581 (OECT 5 28) X (“Warka”?) III 21 X3
BM 108869 X (Sippar?) III 3 X2
BM 108870 X (Sippar?) III 14 X2
BM 16897+22617 X (Sippar?) III 1 X3

518
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 519

Tablet Place Type Comp Sigla

BM 54327 X (Sippar?) I 1, 2, 13, X2(1), X2(2),
19, 23 X2(13), X1(19),
X2(23)
BM 54894 X (Sippar?) I 13 X2
CBS 10069 Nippur III 4 N10
CBS 14224 (PBS 13 3) Nippur III 24 N2
CBS 14230 (PBS 13 6) + N2964 + Nippur III 24 N3
N 3003
CBS 2272 (PBS 13 9) Nippur III 21 N2
CBS 346 (PBS 10/4 8) Sippar? III 9 Si1
CBS 6513 + N 3096 (SL xxxiii, Nippur III 2 N3
Sumer 26 177)
CBS 6895 + 6896 + 6906+ 7663 Nippur III 23 N3
CBS 6987+N 3603+N 4154+Ni. Nippur III? 23 N4
9463 (ISET 1 228[170)
CBS 7096 Nippur III? 1 N5
CBS 7772 (MBI 9) Nippur III 24 N1
CBS 7787 + Nippur I (M) 3, 23, 24 N1(3), N5(23),
N4(24)
CBS 7848+7856 (SL xxxviii) Nippur I (P) 5, 7 N1(5), N2(7)
CBS 8007 (STVC 110) +Ni. 4592 Nippur III 4 N3
(ISET 2 21)
CBS 8385 + N 3290 Nippur III 3 N2
CBS 8875 (Sumer 26 175) + N 6672 Nippur III 1 N6
Cornell 63 X III 23 X4
Cotsen 40832 (Wilson, Education X III 4 X3
159 [p. 251])
Cotsen 521157 (Wilson, Education X III 1 X8
158 [p. 250])
Crozer 206 X I 4 X1
HMA 9-1815 (JCS 28 102) X (“Tutub”) III 1 X6
HMA 9-1820 (JCS 28 103) X (“Tutub”) III 2 X4
HS 1438 (TMHnf 4 42) Nippur III 13 N1
HS 1456 (TMHnf 4 43) Nippur III 4 N4
HS 2394 Nippur III 23 N9
IM 13347 (TIM 9 38) X III 23 X3
IM 13712 (Sumer 15 pl. 6; TIM 9 X III 10 X1
39)
IM 44134 (Sumer 15 pl. 6; TIM 9 X III 21 X4
40)
IM 78644 (IB 733) Isin III 17 Is1
LB 2543 (TLB 3 172) X oval 1, 2 X4(1), X3(2)
520 List of CKU Tablets

Tablet Place Type Comp Sigla

MDP 18 51 Susa IV 4 Su1
MDP 27 207 Susa IV 4 Su2
MDP 27 212 Susa IV 23 Su1
MDP 27 87 Susa IV 2 Su1
MDP 27 88 Susa IV 2 Su2
MM 1039 X (“Babylon”?) III 21 X2
MS 2199/1 X III 1a X1 [Z(1), Z(2)]
MS 2199/2 X III 8 X1
MS 3275 X III 1 X5
N 1447 (SL xxiv, Sumer 26 176) + Nippur III 23 N8
N 3102
N 1555 Nippur III 4 N8
N 2884 Nippur III 3 N3
N 2901 Nippur III 16 Ni1
N 3264 + 3266 + 3294 + 3301 + Nippur I 4 N6
3303 + 3308 + 3310 +Ni. 9701
(ISET 2 114) +­UM 29-16-139
(SL xxiv-xxv)
N 3461 Nippur III 4 N9
N 3773 Nippur III 13 N4
Ni. 13180 (ISET 2 117) Nippur III? 23 N7
Ni. 2191 (ISET 1 64[122] = BE 31 Nippur III 3 N4
54)
Ni. 2317 (SLTN 126) Nippur III 2 N4
Ni. 2723 (SLTN 136) Nippur III 2 N5
Ni. 2786 (ISET 2 120) Nippur III 7 N4
Ni. 3045 + 3093 + 4489 (ISET 2 Nippur III 21 N3
121)
Ni. 3083 (ISET 2 115) X I (M) 13, 14,16, X3(13), X4(14),
17, 18, X1(16), X1(17),
23 X1(18), X5(21)
Ni. 4149 (ISET 2 122) Nippur I (M) 1, 2N7(1), N6(2)
Ni. 4164 (ISET 2 117) Nippur I (M) 20N1
Ni. 4165 (ISET 1 136[78]) Nippur III? 23N6
Ni. 4389 (ISET 1 144[86]) Nippur III? 2N7
Ni. 4490 (ISET 2 122) Nippur III 1N8
Ni. 4586 Nippur III 7N4
Ni. 9702 (ISET 2 122) Nippur I (P) 6, 7N1(6), N5(7)
Ni. 9703 (ISET 2 122) Nippur I (P) 5N1
Ni. 9706 (ISET 2 112) Nippur I (M) 1, 2, 3, 13N9(1), N8(2),
N5(3), N2(13)
Ni. 9709 (ISET 1 180[122]) Nippur III 2 N9
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 521

Tablet Place Type Comp Sigla

Ni. 9711 (ISET 1 63[121] ) Nippur III 3 N6
Ni. 9854 (ISET 1 189[131]) Nippur I 2, 13 N10(2), N3(13)
Ni. 9866 (ISET 1 133[191]) Nippur III 3 N7
NYPL 334 X X 23 X5
Relph 16 X III 16 X2
Si. 420 (USFS 134) Sippar IV 3 Si1
Si. 524 Sippar III 23 Si1
Si. 557 Sippar III 24 Si1
Susa A XX/1 1962/3 (MDAI 57 1) Susa I (M) 14, 15 Su1A&B (14),
Su1(15)
U. 16853 (UET 6/2 174) + UET 6/3 Ur I (M) 1, 2, 23 Ur1(1), Ur1(2),
557 (*532) Ur1(23)
U. 16857 (UET 6/2 178) Ur III 4 Ur2
U. 16885 (UET 6/2 183) Ur III 18 Ur1
U. 16894B (UET 6/2 179) Ur III 4 Ur3
U. 17900v (UET 6/2 181) Ur III 2 Ur2
U. 7741 (UET 6 173) Ur I 4 Ur1
UET 6/3 558 (*264) Ur III 23 Ur2
UET 6/3 561 (*187) Ur III (11?), 12 (Ur1[11]?),
Ur1(12)
UM 29-13-20 + 29-13-24 (both SL Nippur I (M) 4 N5
liii)
UM 29-13-330 (Sumer 26 176) Nippur III 2 N11
UM 29-15-535 Nippur III 4 N7
UM 29-15-555 (SL xxxvii, Sumer Nippur III 1 N10
26 177)
W 16743 gb (Cavigneaux, Uruk Uruk I (M) 1 Uk1
143)
YBC 4185 X III 2 X5
YBC 4596 X III 1, 2 X7(1), X6(2)
YBC 4606 X III 13 X4
YBC 4654 X III 13 X5
YBC 4672 X III 18 X2
YBC 5011 X III 11 Ur1
YBC 6458 X III 4 X2
YBC 7149 X I (M) 18, 19 X3(18), X2(19)
 List of Joined Elements

BM 22617; see BM 16897 N1203; see CBS 7787

CBS 6896; see CBS 6895 N1204; see CBS 7787
CBS 6906; see CBS 6895 N1208; see CBS 7787
CBS 7663; see CBS 6895 N1210-27a; see CBS 7787
CBS 7856; see CBS 7848 N1210-27b; see CBS 7787
N 2964; see CBS 14230 N1210-27d; see CBS 7787
N 3003; see CBS 14230 N1210-27e; see CBS 7787
N 3096; see CBS 6513 N1212; see CBS 7787
N 3102; see N 1447 N1214; see CBS 7787
N 3266; see N 3264 N1218; see CBS 7787
N 3290; see CBS 8385 Ni. 3093; see Ni. 3045
N 3294; see N 3264 Ni. 4061; see CBS 7787
N 3301; see N 3264 Ni. 4188; see CBS 7787
N 3303; see N 3264 Ni. 4489; see Ni. 3045
N 3308; see N 3264 Ni. 4592; see CBS 8007
N 3310; see N 3264 Ni. 9463; see CBS 6987
N 3603; see CBS 6987 Ni. 9701; see N 3264
N 4154; see CBS 6987 UET 6/3 557; see U. 16853
N 6672; see CBS 8875 UM 29-13-24; see UM 29-13-20
N1200; see CBS 7787 UM 29-16-139; see N 3264

522
 Index of Passages Cited
from Sumerian Literary Texts
and Royal Inscriptions

In the following indexes, the references are either to the commentaries on individual
letters in Part 2 or to page numbers of Part 1.

Amurrum Hymn A 40 18:40 Inana and Šukaletuda 298, 301 1:9

CBS 145 rev. 6′ 14:12 Ininšagura 161 24:B 10
CT 15 18:37 14:12 Lambert, JNES 33 (1974) 290:21 4:12–14
Curse of Agade 45–46 p. 93 Lamentation Over the Destruction
Curse of Agade 57 p. 214 n. 76 of Sumer and Ur 1:14
Curse of Agade 156 24: A32 = B51 Lamentation Over the Destruction
Curse of Agade 222–224 23:48–49 of Sumer and Ur 1:14
Enki and Ninhursanga 49 c–e 1:28 Lamentation Over the Destruction
Enki and the World Order 434 3:5′ of Sumer and Ur 1:14
Eridu Lament 1:22 24: B44 Lamentation Over the Destruction of
Father and Son 63 24: A28 = B47 Sumer and Ur 1:14
Flood Story 201 3:2′ Lamentation Over the Destruction of
Gilgameš, Enkidu, and the Sumer and Ur 1:14
Netherworld 23–26 4:23 Letter of Gudea to his God 2 4: 4:27–29
Gudea Cyl. A v 25–vi 2 2:31 Letter of Iddatum to Sumutara 3–4 11:4
Gudea Cyl A vi 15 p. 72 Letter of Iddin-Dagan to Sin-illati 7–8 2:29
Gudea Cyl. A x 7–14 1:23 Letter of Inim-Enlila 3 15:9
Gudea Cyl. B iv 20–21 4:23 Letter of Inim-Enlila 8–9 18:24
Gudea St. B v 3–8 p. 115 Letter of Inim-Inina to Lugal-ibila 7–11 12:11
Gudea St. B v 13–16 p. 116 Letter of Ininka to Nintinuga 16 4:27–29
Hammurabi Hymn TLB 2 3:23 14:8 Letter of Lipit-Eštar to Nanna-kiʾag̃a
Išbi-Erra Hymn B 5 p. 143 15–16 2:29
Išbi-Erra Hymn B p. 165 Letter of Nanna-kiʾag̃a to Lipit-Eštar
Išbi-Erra Hymn B p. 197 5–6 19:33, 24: A36 = B61 [18]
Išbi-Erra Hymn B p. 210 n. 71 Letter of Sin-iddinam to Utu 10:5
Išme-Dagan Hymn A + V 97 12:12 Letter of Sin-tillati to Iddin-Dagan 5 19:12
Išme-Dagan Hymn A + V Letter of Šamaš-ṭab to Ilad-niʾid 18 19:43–44
Segment A 219 3:2′ Letter of Šamaš-ṭab to Ilad-niʾid 5 19:12

523
524 Index of Passages Cited from Sumerian Literary Texts and Royal Inscriptions

Letter of Ursaga to a King 10 12:12 Sumerian King List subscript (Ur III) 1:10
Letter of Ursaga to a King 7 9:3; Sumerian King List 284 21:47
Letter to the Generals 8 13:33 Summer and Winter 230 1:18
Letter to the Generals 9–10 13:27 Supervisor and Scribe 18 3:9′
Letter of Ininka to Nintinuga 16 4:27–29 Šulgi Hymn A 3 4:23
Letter to Zimri-Lim 14 10:5, 14:4–5 Šulgi Hymn A 45–47 p. 128
Letter to Zimri-Lim 16′–17′ 4:15–17 Šulgi Hymn A 48 4:2–4
Letter to Zimri-Lim 22′ 4:27–29 Šulgi Hymn A 70 1:30
Lipit-Eštar Hymn A 85 15:17–18 Šulgi Hymn B 229 6:5/8
Lugalbanda II 74–77 24: A14–16 Šulgi Hymn B 339–341 1:14
Lugale I 25 9:4 Šulgi Hymn B 66 4:22
MDP 27 104:1–2 p. 44 n. 9; 12:12 Šulgi Hymn B 70 9:6
Ningišdiza Hymn A 27 p. 229 Šulgi Hymn B 98–99 18:24
Nippur Lament 229 24: B37 Šulgi Hymn C (Seg A) 28 1:23
Nippur Lament 231 p. 119 n. 54 Šulgi Hymn G 22 19 25–27
Rim-Sin Hymn B 35 12:13 Šu-Sin inscription E3/2.1.4.1.1
Rim-Sin Hymn E 1–2 1:23 v 24–29 p. 86
Samsuiluna inscription TCL 16 89:10 21:25
E4.3.7.8:61–62 14:8 Tree and Reed 243 2:3
Schooldays 8 18:31 UET 6/2 350:4 1:35
Schooldays 53 4:18 Ur Lament 221–222 21:25
Schooldays 88 2:3 Ur-Namma Hymn A 8–9 p. 210–11
Sheep and Grain 128–29 3:2′ Ur-Namma Hymn A 10–11 p. 244
Sin-idinnam Inscription Ur-Ninurta Hymn A 49 18:8/10
E4.2.9.1:79–83 4:23 Uruk Lament 1a:3 13:16c
Siniddinam Inscription D 66–71 19:38 VAS 17 14:17–18 24: B37
SP Coll. 5.74 B 5–6 19:29 YOS 11 86:33–34 21:25
SP Coll 13 39 2:3
 Indexes to the Text Editions

In the following indexes the first number refers to the composition, the second to the
line number in the commentary or in the text itself.

Index of Words Discussed

Sumerian
7200 13:27 bala 3:5′
á . . . ág̃ 18:3–7 bar inim-ma 7:4
á-ág̃-g̃á 2:31, 14:39 barag 1:18
a-ba-àm lugal-g̃u10 21:47 bir-bir( . . . dug4) 24:A17 = B22
á-bàd 14:12 buranuna 23:7/23
a bal 3:18–19 dab5 3:9&12, 15:17–18,
a g̃ar 3:8 & 15 21:12
á-bi-šè gin 3:9′ dag̃al 14:4
á . . . dar 11:18 /dana/ (dan2/3/4/6) 4:20
á-diri 24:B40 dana 18:11
á . . . g̃á-g̃á 18:19 de5-(g) 21:6
á . . . g̃ar 18:19 di4-di4 23:24
á-gàr 3:8/15 dím-ma dab5 13:30
á-g̃i6-ba 3:9′ dím-ma ma-da kúr 18:24–25
a-ma-ru-kam 15:15 diri u4-bi-da-šè/ka 24:A27 = B46
a-na-aš-àm 2:5 d/ri(g) 21:6
á u4-da 1:8 dugud(-)RI 6:5
a-ša-an-gàr-ra 16:10 duh 18:31, 21:12
á-še 1:8 dù-luh 14:8
á šub 14:27 du11-ga-du11-ga dab5 24:A18 = B23
ad-gi4-gi4 15:9 du10-ud-ak 24:A27 = B47
àga-ús sag̃-g̃a 1:21 (g̃iš)
dupsik 13:27, 18:16
agrig šu-dim4-ma 3:10′ dúr . . . g̃ar 1:11
alal 1:35 dúr(. . .)zi 1:11
al-me-a 3:11′ dusu 13:27
an-ga-àm 2:5 e11/è(d) 21:17
a-rá zu 1:5 é-gal 1:9
ba-al 19:38 é kaskal-(la) 1:14
bal 14:36–37 eme5-gal 12:17

525
526 Indexes to the Text Editions

émedu 2:30 hi-ri-tum 19:38

é nam-šul 15:28 hu-luh 14:8
eden 3:2′–7′ hul 15:26
en 23:20 hul . . . gig(gi4) 24:A13 = B18
en-nu-ùg̃ 3:9&12 hur-sag̃ 16:9
en-nu-ùg̃ kala-ga 3:9&12 íd-kur-ra 21:16
èn . . . tar 4:27/29, 14:18 igi-du 15:20
ereš-dig̃ir 23:20 igi . . . g̃ar 10:7, 18:3–7, 23:48–
erin 11:4 49
érin 5, 18:16 igi . . . hul 2:23
érin (zú-kešda) 7:3 IGI.IGI 2:13
ga-nam 24:A17 = B22 igi . . . kár 3:9&12
gaba . . . zi 4:22 igi-tur . . . gíd-i 24:B 10
ganba 15:17–18 g̃iš
illar 21:14
gi4 11:5, 11:15, 15:6 im/tumu 4:13
gi4-bi 12:13 im-ri-a 18:24
gin-gin 23:41 im-sar-ra 2:31
gu 24:B41–42 im si-si(g) 3:2′
gu-la 18:24 im-sik 14:15 = 22
gú 24:B14–42 inim du10 24:A27 =B46
gú . . . ak 23:14, 23:46 inim . . . sì 21:42
gú . . . bar 23:46 in-nu-(ù) 19:29
gú . . . dù 3:9′ išib an-na 1:23
gú-érim 9:9 ka . . . bal 22:B4
gù . . . g̃ál 14:32, 23:14 ka . . . de6 1:8
gù . . . sì 21:42 KA.ŠÚM.ŠÚM 21:42
gú . . . šub 14:27 KA . . . tak4 14:32
gù . . . šúm 21:42 ka-ta(. . .) tak4 4:23
gub 2:22, 4:12–14 kan 1:24
gul 2:23 kar (-da-) 11:9
gur 23:39 kár 1:29
gúr 23:39 kaskal si . . . sá 1:3
gur(u)21 23:46 kaš4 1:34
guru7 23:46 kešd 18:31
gun g̃éš-u 15:10 ki-duru5 16:7
g̃á-a-ra 23:13 KI.LAM 15:17–18
g̃á-e-gin7-nam 2:6 ki-ni-šè gur 23:29
g̃ál 14:32 ki-sag-g̃ál 5:19
g̃alga ur-re 24:A31 = B51 ki-tuš ne-ha 14:8
g̃ar 2:22, 14:12 kíg̃-gi4-a 18:3–7, 24:B39
g̃á-rig7 14:12 kíg̃-gi4-a-aš . . . gi4 18:3–7
g̃árza 2:21 kirid 3:5′
g̃éštu . . . g̃ar 24:B36 kud 2:15
g̃éštu . . . ri 24:B36 kur-gam-ma-bi (PN?) 9:10
g̃i6 an-bar 14:38 lá 14:37, 24:B41–42
g̃iš
g̃ìri-gub 1:19 li-mu-um 1:23
g̃ìri bad 9:6 lib4-lib4 2:13
G ̃ IŠ.G ̃ IŠ 21:15 lirum (lirum) 21:25
g̃iškim 13:12 lú dù-luh 14:8
g̃iškim . . . dug4 15:7, 15:25 lú-dun-a 2:3
heš5 23;34–35 lú-gud-apin-lá 3:7′
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 527

lú-g̃árza 2:21 pirig̃ 4:23

lú im-sa10-sa10 nu-luh-hasar 24:A15=B20 púzur 14:1
lú-kár-ak 1:29 ra-bi sí-ik-ka-tum 8:5
lú-kíg̃-ak 3:7′ RI 21:6
lú-la-ga 3:2′ sá (-da-) 23:48–49
lú-mah 23:20 sá-di 21:5
lú nam-tag-ga 15:26 sá . . . dug4 1:23, 21:5
lú-NE.RU-ša 24:A19 = B24 sa10(-)RI-dè 21:6
lú níg-ha-lam-ma 21:40 ság . . . dug4 24:A18 = B22
lú sag̃-du nu-tuku 22:B 17 sag̃ (. . .)gíd 13:16
lú sag̃ kíg̃ 14:24 sag̃-gin 15:25
lugal-g̃u10 1:1 sag̃ g̃iš . . . ra 4:23
lú-ùlu 2:24 sag̃-sìg 3:18–19
LÚ×GÁNA-tenû 23:34–35 sag̃a 23:20
lul du8-du8-da túm 24:A27 = B47 sahar 3:16
lul . . . sì 12:11 si 18:30
g̃iš
má-gur8 21:13 si . . . sá(+ kaskal) 1:3
maš-gána 14:13 sì (sig10) 4:13
me-er-ga 12:13 sìg-sìg 2:13
me-še de6 22:B 3 silig 18:41
me-še gin 22:B 3 silim-ma 1:10, 14:18
mí . . . dug4 1:17 sipa níg̃-gi-na 10:5
mi-ir-ga 12:13 sisig 2:13
mud 1:12 su . . . zi 1:30
na4-nir-babbar(2)-dili 12:14 šà-bal 14:18
na4-zú-lum 12:16 šà ki-bi gi4 4:28
nam 2:29, 13:15 šabra 23:20
nam-lú-ùlu 2:29 šaga . . . ak 23:34–35
nam-nir-g̃ál 19:25–27 šakanka 15:17–18, 21:5
nam-ur-sag̃ 2:29 šakkana 15:25
ní 24:A24–25 = B29–30 še-bé-da 21:54
ní . . . te 1:30, 2:22 še . . . dé 4:13
ní-ul4 24:B10 še . . . lá 4:13
níg̃- 24:B37 še sìg 21:11
níg̃ (-a-na) 14:15 = 22 šen 1:35
níg̃ a-na 2:5 šer7-da 6:5/8
níg̃-á-taka4 14:32 šu . . . dim4 3:10′
níg̃ g̃á-e-gin7-nam 2:6 šu-du8-a 2:3, 15:17–18
níg-ha-lam-ma 21:40 šu-luh 1:23
níg̃-šà-ga+PRO 12:12 šu-PRO-ta g̃ál 22:A 20′
níg̃-šám 11:9 šu . . . gi4 3:14′, 9:5
ninda kaskal-la 14:31 šu sá . . . dug4 23:16, 24:A30 = B50
NIR-da 6:5/8 šu . . . tak4 6:4/14
nir-g̃ál 19:25–27 šu . . . zi 12:12
nu-bánda 2:3 šu-zi/zu . . . g̃ar 9:4, 15:5
nu-du10-ga 12:10 šub 21:54
nu-luh-hasar 24:A15 = B20 šubtum7 19:12
numun ki-en-gi-ra nu-me-a 24:A16 = B21 šukur 1:14
palil 15:20 šám 11:9
PA.PA 2:13 šu . . . g̃ar 24:B43
peš10 16:7 túg
šutur 1:18
528 Indexes to the Text Editions

tak4/tuku 4:23 usu-gin7 15:3

tehe 16:8 usu til 13:13
g̃iš
tubsik 13:27 ušum 4:23
túg-mah 1:18 ušum-gal 4:23
g̃iš
tukul á zi-da 24:B41–42 ušumgal 4:23
g̃iš
tukul gùb-bu 24:B41–42 uzu 24:B39
tur 18:30 uzu gùb-bu 24:B40
TUR.TUR 23:24 uzu silim-ma 24:B39
u18-ru 18:20 uzu zi-da 24:B40
u4-bi-da-(k) 24:A27 = B46 -ra 1:3
ù-na-a-dug4 2:31 za-e-me-en-zé-en 19:29
u4 na-an-ga-ma 24:A13–15 = B18–20 za-e-en-zé-en 19:29
u4 na-me-ka(m) 22:A 13′, 24:A13–15 za-lam-g̃ar 14:13
= B18–20 g̃iš
za-am-ru-tum 21:14
/ugubi/ 22:A 14′ zà-mi-rí-tum 21:14
ú-gu . . . dé 2:13 zag-gu/gú-la/lá 23:18
ugu-bi diri 3:13 zag . . . tag 24:A34 = B56
ugu tuku 21:19 zar 21:17
ugnim 19:33 zar . . . sal 21:17
ul4 15:17–18, 24:B 10 zal-la 3:16
umuš-bi aša-àm 19:16 zi 8:22
ur4 15:17–18 zig 18:8/10
ur5-gin7 24:A6 = B11 zu 2:9
ur5 ì-me-a 2:5 zú-kešda 7:3
ur-mah 4:23

Akkadian (cited without mimation)

abātu 2:23 qāta kašādu 23:16, 24:A30 = B50
aḫa šakānu 18:19 kīam 24:A6 = B11
aḫītu 24:B40 kīamma 24:A6 = B11
anumma 1:8 kirimmu 21:25
ana qāti mullū 24:B423 kiṣir šarri 7:3
ana šīmi leqû 21:6 kunšī-mātum (PN) 9:10
appūna 24:A17 = B22 lapātu 2:23
apputu 15:15 litir limṭi 18:30
arāḫu 15:17–18 maḫiru 15:17–18
arāru 15:17–18 matima 22:A 13′, 24:A13–15
awata ṣabātu 24:A18 = B23 = B18–20
birtu 7:3 maṭû 18:30
bīt eṭlūti 15:28 metlūtu 15:28
danniš 15:3 mitluku 15:9
dekû 14:23 muntalku 15:9
dunnunu 21:12 mãšu u muṣlalu 14:38
eṭlūtu 15:28 mušu u urru 14:38
galātu 1:12 nasāḫu 2:23
ḫalwu 1:14 nuḫurtu 24:A15=B20
ilkum 13:27 parādu 1:12
išu: 15:5 pīḫātu 2:29
kak imitti 24:B41–42 qullulu 15:26
kak šumēli 24:B41–42 qulu 1:12
 The Royal Correspondence of the Ur III Kings 529

rabi sikkatu/i 8:5 šubtu 19:12

sakāpu 24:A34 = B56 šudmuqu 15:5
samūrtu 21:14 šutlumu 15:5
sīrum 24:B39 tēkīta rašû 14:32
ṣidītu 14:31 tērtum 24:B39
šaḫluqtu 21:40 tījatu 24:A15=B20
šēpa parāsu 9:6 uddû 15:7, 15:25
šertu 5:5, 8 zamirītu 21:14
šīru šalmu 24:B39

Index of Personal Names

s = sender
s= recipient
v = variant
Aba-indasa Lu-Nanna, governor of Zimudar
s: 4 r: 20
5:3, 6:3, 7:3, 7:7, 8: 14 (a-ba-an-da-sá), 9:11 14 OB1a:20, 14 OB1a: 4′, 14 OB1b: 19, 14
Amar-Sin, future ruler of Ur MB1:29, MB1:35, 18:27 (v. Lu-Enki [X3]),
s: 16 119:31 (written d en-ki [X2])
r: 17 Nig̃dugani, temple administrator of Nippur
Apilaša, prefect 23:33
1:6, 1a:11, 2:14, 3B: 14′, 8:14, 11:8 Nur-aḫi (=Nur-aḫum), governor of Ešnunna
Aradmu, (grand vizier) 22A:18′(written I nu-úr-é-a), 23:36 (v: Nur-Ea
r: 2, 5, 6 [Si1, X1])
s: 1, 1a, 3, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12? Puzur-Numušda 1, governor of Kazallu
11:12, 14 1a: 6′, 14 MB1:37 r: 24 (v Puzur-Šulgi [X1])
Babati, high commissioner s: 23 (v Puzur-Šulgi [Ur1, Ur2, X1])
11:12, 15:8, 19:35 22B:14
Girbubu, governor/ruler of Girkal Puzur-Numušda 2, governor of Ullum-ṣeḫrum
23:45, 24A:11, 24B:15 13:15(v: Šu-Marduk [Ki1], Šu-Nunu [X1])
Ibbi-Sin, king of Ur Puzur-Šulgi, general of Bad-Igihursag̃a
r: 22, 24 r: 14 (v: Puzur-Numušda [N4], Puzur-Marduk
s: 21, 23 [Ki1])
21:43 s: 13
Iddi of Malgium Puzur-Tutu, governor/ruler of Bad-ziaba
23:44 (v: Iddiluma [X1]) 22A:19′, 23:38
Išbi-Erra, in royal service/king of Isin Šarrum-bani, prefect
r: 15, 22 r: 19, 20?
s: 21 s: 18
23:4, 24A:8, 24A:10, 24A:17, 24A:21, 24B12, Šu-Enlil, governor/ruler of Kish
24B:14, 24B30 22A:17′, 23:37
Kakugani, governor of the inland territory Šulgi, king of Ur
13:19 (v. Šu-Numušda [X1]) r: 1, 1a, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12?, 13, 15, 16
Kunši-matum s: 2, 5, 6, 14, 17
9:10 (Sum.: Kurgamabi) 3:8′, 4:28, 13:32, 19:28, 19:30
Kurgamabi Šulgi-x-x-x
9:10 (Akk.: Kunši-matum) 8:18
Lugal-melam, the overseer of the Šu-Sin, king of Ur
    Šeššektum canal r: 18
13:17 s: 19 (written d šu), 20?
530 Indexes to the Text Editions

Takil-ilišu, Canal Inspector of the Abgal and Ur-Namma, king of Ur

    Me-Enlila Waterways 6:10
19:21 Zinnum
Ur-dun, commerscial agent 23:34
s: 11
12:8, 12:9, 12:14, 12:19

Index of Geographical Names

Includes cities, territories, “peoples,” construc-
tions, as well as watercourses.
Aʾaba Magana Isin
23:9 21:3, 21:29, 22A:24′, 23:11, 23:18, 23:27, 23:30
Abgal Kish
13:21, 14 1b:5, 18:9, 23:7, 23:43 22A:17′, 23:37
Amurrum Kazallu
9:9, 14 1b:4, 15:20, 18:13, 21:7, 21:9, 21:11, 21:3, 23:2, 23:16, 24:1, 24:5
22A:8′, 22A:12′, 22B:15, 24:33 Mada murub
Bad-Igihursag̃a 13:19, 18:21
22A:11′, 22B:14 Malgium
Bad-ziaba (Borsippa?) 23:44
22A:19′, 23:38 Mari
Buranun 10:6′, 24:21, 24:32
10:8, 14 1a:5, 18:6, 23:7, 23:43 Me-Enlila
Ebih 13:21, 23:7, 23:43
18:15 Muriq-Tidnim
Ekišnug̃al 18:3
21:39, 23:23 Nippur
Ekur 21:29, 22A:24′, 23:32, 23:33
23:22 Rapiqum
Elam 10:6′
15:20, 21:23, 21:40, 24:34 Simurru
Ešnunna 18:14
22A:18′., 23:36 Subir
Girkal 1:3, 1a:3, 23:34
23:45, 24:11 Sudalunutum
Gutium 13:28
10:5′ Šegšeg (Šeššektum canal)
Hamazi 13:17
23:9, 23:35 Ullum-ṣeḫrum
Hursag̃ 13:15
16:9 Ur
Idigna 21:35, 21:46, 21:35, 22B:7, 24:20
10:8, 10:9, 14 1a:5, 18:6, 23:7, 23:43 Zimudar
Idil-pašunu 7:5, 11:13, 14 1a:19, 14 MB:29, 14 MB:35, 18:9,
23:31 19:31