Ur III-Texte der St. Petersburger Ermitage.

• Author: Garfinkle, Steven J.
• Position: Book Review

By NATALIA KOSLOVA. SANTAG vol. 6. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ VERLAG, 2000. Pp. 415. DM 104.

The handsome volume under review presents transliterations of 385 Ur III texts from Umma that form part of the extensive collection (approximately 1580 Ur III texts) of the Hermitage Museum. Some of this collection has previously been published in MVN 20 and MVN 21 (a history of the collection appears in the introduction to MVN 20). The texts in this volume are arranged in chronological order (from S 21 to IS 2, with an additional 43 texts lacking year names) and are offered in transliteration with partial hand copies of the difficult passages. A volume like this reinforces the great value of the continuing rapid publication of Ur III texts. The 385 texts provide information on a wide range of topics from cultic matters to the administration of the textile industry to the incarceration of prisoners.

The texts published here by Koslova will not change our picture of Umma, but they will certainly deepen our understanding of the Ur III state and its society. In particular, these texts further inform us about several important aspects of that society. We see once again the bias in the available source material from Umma. These texts document almost exclusively the administration of the provincial and temple economies at Umma under the direction of the local elite, and especially the families of the provincial governors. The royal sector is indirectly apparent throughout these texts (e.g., in seal impressions and in frequent references to the bala, the resources of which were directed towards the crown), but it is rarely directly attested,t This is especially noticeable in the small number of military officials who appear in these texts.

Additionally, the texts published here show that while the institutional economy with which we are familiar for the province of Umma was vast in terms of the scale and breadth of its holdings, it involved primarily a limited circle of economic actors and decision makers. This volume supports many of the conclusions drawn by M. Stepien in his prospographic study of Umma, and it highlights the value of such studies. (2)

We encounter here many familiar individuals from previously published collections (some of these individuals are discussed below). In particular, we are rewarded with numerous texts form various members of the family of Ur-nigar. (3) Once again, this demonstrates the need for a prosopograpby of the province of Umma. The Umma corpus, large as it is, does not involve an unmanageable number of people. Obviously, we still must reckon with the administrative bias in our sources, hut such a prosopography would be a major step toward a real understanding of Umma society.

In lieu of a traditional catalog, Koslova offers a series o tools at the beginning of the volume, including concordance of museum and volume numbers, a classification of the texts a list of the dated texts, and a list of the seal impressions. (The seal legends also accompany the transliterations of the texts, but this list provides Koslova with the opportunity to describe the seals in some detail.) While I am still a proponent of the traditional catalog, the resources provided by Koslova, which are similar to those included in other recent publications of Omma texts, are in many ways more useful.

The classification of the texts demonstrates once again what a rich source of information the Umma texts constitute. The classification is arranged on the basis of the content of the texts. Hence many of the texts are listed in more than one category. The list of seals, which is arranged alphabetically according to the owner of the seal, is particularly effective as it includes detailed descriptions of the representations on the seals. (4) A complete set of indices--divine names, personal names, toponyms, year names, month names, and glossary--follows the transliterations. The indices are both exhaustive and accessible.

The hand copies that come at the end of the volume are the one failing in an otherwise excellent publication...