McCormick Adams, R.
The city and province of Umma were part of the southern Mesopotamian core of the Third Dynasty of Ur imperium in the 21st century B.C. Its importance to comparative as well as regional scholarship stems from the discovery there by looters a century ago of some 20,000 cuneiform tablets comprising a large part of the province’s central administrative archive. There is, on the one hand, no remotely comparable source of information on particularly the economic, agricultural and labor management regimen of a prominent urban center of that period and kind. But its wider usefulness is admittedly impaired by the circumscribed, formulaic and myopic limitations of this textual corpus. Archaeological knowledge, meanwhile, is essentially confined to a four-decade-old surface survey of difficult, dune-covered terrain. This is now importantly supplemented by recent, very high quality satellite imagery that corroborates the texts on the limited extent of the state-maintained irrigation system. Taken together, this provides a kind of “contextual” counterpoint to the cuneiform record. Details are available on very large scale, efficient economic transfers by barge around the core of the empire, on activities by merchants both within and independent of the provincial government, on textile-producing establishments employing many thousands of primarily female employees, on an apparently ongoing transition from an earlier ration system to wages, and on complex gradations of landholding with private as well as public features. The heterogeneous resources of data have stimulated a radically different, interdisciplinary effort to establish at least some features of a synthesis. Texts provide some quantitative details of the agricultural regime maintained under the supervision of the provincial government, including its reliance on corvée labor, a steeply sloping socio-economic hierarchy, and many imposed rules, inducements, constraints and penalties. Largely by omission, I argue that they also reveal a sweepingly complete absence of textual reference to large population elements. These appear to have been less permanently settled around the peripheries of the province’s directly managed lands, only periodically employed on them, and for the most part following a mosaic of less intensive subsistence and extractive pursuits. This leads to a discussion of the ambiguous intersections of royal and provincial control, seemingly more partial and less all-embracing than royal rhetoric has suggested to some authorities who tend to concentrate on the texts alone. It also leads to concluding reflections on the puzzlingly skewed characteristics of the literate, supposedly “bureaucratic” system that in spite of its rigidity surely was a factor in holding the empire together for a few generations. While there are many uncertainties in this picture, it is both more illuminating in its detailed complexity and strikingly different in the social stratification and dynamics it implies than would probably be taken for granted for most other states and early civilizations elsewhere in the world at comparable stages in their trajectories of development.