Die Umma-Texte aus den archdologischen Museen zu Istanbul, vol. 5 (Nr. 3001-3500).

• Author: Sharlach, Tonia
• Position: Reviews of Books

Die Umma-Texte aus den archdologischen Museen zu Istanbul, vol. 5 (Nr. 3001-3500). By FATMA YILDIZ and TOHRU OZAKI. Bethesda, Md.: CDL PRESS, 2000. Pp. 306. $60.

The authors, F. Yildiz and T. Ozaki (formerly T. Gomi), have produced an excellent volume of some five hundred archival texts from Umma, presented in transliteration. This is the fifth book in this series, which began with MVN 14, published in 1988. The sixth and final volume is in production and will appear soon. Through their dedication and hard work, the authors have produced meticulous editions of some 3,500 Umma tablets from Istanbul in only twelve years. As in the previous volumes, the indices here are exemplary, enabling easy study of the texts presented.

The Umma corpus is the largest of all the known Ur III archives and numbers over ten thousand texts ranging over a period of four decades; despite this, analysis of the tablets and the many topics they can help elucidate has only begun. Now that a significant percentage of the Umma corpus has been published and carefully indexed, analysis of the archive is greatly facilitated. Publication of these texts is only the first step; as is well known, these texts must be placed in their archival contexts to be meaningful. Considered on their own, we might be tempted to agree with the description of Theophilus Pinches that these are "seemingly worthless documents" (The Babylonian Tablets of the Berens Collection [London, 1915], v). Considered in their archival contexts, however, these tablets can help us understand such topics as agriculture, craft production, exploitation of natural resources, geography, trade, labor relations, sealing practice, provincial taxation and, in fact, the structure of governance itself. A dditionally, administrative tablets provide many references to historical events, religious observances and so on, about which we would otherwise be ignorant. Each publication of new Umma documents brings new facts to light and fresh data to bear upon these important topics.

COMMENTS AND NOTES ON SELECTED TEXTS

3016: On g)ri-lam, a small basket, see R. Englund, Organisation und Verwaltung der Ur III-Fischerei (Berlin, 1990), 149 and 152.

3025, 3058, 3063, etc.: The field name here is read engaba-guba (the signs en-[DU.sub.8].DU); a cross-reference to the more common transliteration en-gaba-ra would have been helpful.

3027: This document, unfortunately not well preserved. records the sale of a small plot of land, which Dadaga bought from Dadumu. On...