Archives and Bookkeeping in Southern Mesopotamia during the Ur III period

Abstract

The Ur III period (2110-2003 BC) is documented through an imposing corpus of administrative cuneiform tablets. It is estimated that some 120,000 documents, plus an indeterminate number of texts stored in the Iraq Museum, are currently kept in collections all over the world. Unfortunately, most of them are deprived of archaeological context, which makes it difficult to identify their provenance and reconstruct their archival relationships. This contribution provides an overview of the physical features of Ur III texts, their administrative typology, the places and the kinds of archives where they were kept, and some of the administrative procedures followed in large institutions.