Working at Home in the Ancient near East [1 ed.] 9781789695922, 9781789695915

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Working at Home in the Ancient Near East Edited by

Juliette Mas Palmiro Notizia

Archaeopress Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology 7

Working at Home in the Ancient Near East

Edited by

Juliette Mas and Palmiro Notizia

Archaeopress Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology 7

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ISBN 978-1-78969-591-5 ISBN 978-1-78969-592-2 (e-Pdf) © the individual authors and Archaeopress 2020 Cover: Tell Beydar, Area B (courtesy of A. Pruß)

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Contents Working at Home in the Ancient Near East: New Insights and Avenues of Research������������1 Juliette Mas and Palmiro Notizia Working at Nuzi����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������9 Laura Battini The Organization of Labor at Tell Beydar����������������������������������������������������������������������������19 Alexander Pruß Oikoi and the State. Households and Production Evidence in 3rd Millennium BC Upper Mesopotamia��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������33 Juliette Mas Reconstructing the Flow of Life and Work in Mesopotamian Houses: An Integrated Textual and Multisensory Approach�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������55 Paolo Brusasco The House of Ur-saga: Ur III Merchants in Their Non-Institutional Context���������������������� 71 Steven J. Garfinkle Wealth and Status in 3rd Millennium Babylonia: The Household Inventory RTC 304 and the Career of Lugal-irida, Superintendent of Weavers������������������������������������������������� 83 Palmiro Notizia Working at Home, Traveling Abroad: Old Assyrian Trade and Archaeological Theory���� 107 Gojko Barjamovic and Norman Yoffee

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Working at Home in the Ancient Near East: New Insights and Avenues of Research Juliette Mas1 and Palmiro Notizia2 The contributions collected in the present volume draw from the workshop Working at Home in the Ancient Near East, held in Vienna on 27 April 2016 at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and organized within the framework of the 10th International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East. The idea of this workshop originated from a discussion of common questions and challenges faced in our personal research on the socio-economic role played by non-institutional households in Mesopotamia during the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC, and their interaction with the institutional economy. In our investigations, we had approached these topics from different perspectives and by analyzing two different datasets: Bronze Age Upper Mesopotamian archaeological data concerning domestic architecture and Ur III administrative documentation. Both datasets and methodological approaches offered many possibilities for the study of the modes of production of private households, but they also presented specific constraints and limitations. The patchy nature of the archaeological evidence, the incompletely published excavation reports, and the difficulty of interpreting the material remains always make it problematic for the archaeologist to identify household installations related to domestic production and to reconstruct the social use of domestic spaces. At the same time, most of the enormous mass of written documentation from the era of the Third Dynasty of Ur comes from royal and provincial archives. The available documentation thus provides a very detailed view of how institutional households and state-run industries operated, but reports almost nothing about the activities taking place in rural estates belonging to members of the elite or within the urban residential setting. This is a significant omission, as the economic interests of private households were usually beyond the administrative reach of the state. Finally, one has to consider that despite the fact that both archaeological material and epigraphical evidence from Bronze Age Mesopotamia is abundant, the study of the archaeological records can only rarely be combined with textual data. In fact, only a few private archives have been scientifically excavated, while the great majority of the cuneiform records have no precise archaeological provenience.

1 2

  UMR 7192, CNRS/Collège de France, [email protected]   Università di Pisa, [email protected]

1

Working at Home in the Ancient Near East To further address these issues from a more comparative perspective, and in order to profit from the discussion with other scholars, we decided to organize an international and interdisciplinary workshop, bringing together archaeologists, philologists, and historians specializing in ancient Mesopotamia. The invited speakers were encouraged to reflect on the topic of the workshop, to exchange their different views, and to discuss methodological concerns and common problems. Our aim was to integrate the archaeological and textual data available within a shared chronological and geographic horizon. The present volume brings together elaborated versions of the majority of the papers that were delivered during this meeting. The proceedings display a balance of archaeological and philological oriented contributions on specific Bronze Age sites and archives, from northern Mesopotamia to southern Babylonia. In her paper, Laura Battini focused on the presence or absence of workshops in the Nuzi houses and addressed the difficulty of identifying workshops in ancient Mesopotamian houses. She stresses the problem of dealing with data emerging from old excavations because of the medium quality of the excavations and of their reports. Despite the fact that only a small area of the lower town has been excavated, the Nuzi domestic architecture is well documented. Nevertheless, due to the incompletely published excavation reports, we lack most of the data concerning the material, pottery, furniture, and installations, that have been uncovered in these buildings. This situation makes complicated not only the identification of possible workshops set up in houses but also in a more general manner, the different functions of the Nuzi houses. In that respect, Battini was able neither to identify any workshops in the Nuzi houses, nor to find evidence of animal husbandry. Interestingly, the workshops in private houses were not set up in a room with a specific shape. The Nuzi excavation reports almost never attest the presence of material or installations within the Nuzi houses (even basic domestic installations related to cooking, for instance). However, Battini raises an important question: does silence mean absence in archaeology? By extension, does the absence of records attesting production and workshops in the Nuzi houses indicate the inexistence of workshops in the Nuzi houses? Despite the absence of such records, the excavation reports nevertheless attest material that could be related to crafts, agriculture, and commerce. This material was unearthed both in Level III and Level II, with, according to Battini, an increase during Level II. This increase would correspond, in her opinion, to the construction of the palace. Hence, the emergence of the palace would have led to an increase of needs and of commercial activities at Nuzi. In his paper, Alexander Pruß discussed the evidence from the site of Tell Beydar and, more specifically, the remains and finds from Beydar Phase IIIb, dated to the EJZ 3b period. The latest level of this phase yielded 220 cuneiform tablets in different parts of the upper town. These tablets belong to an administrative archive written within 2

Juliette Mas and Palmiro Notizia: Working at Home in the Ancient Near East the space of a few years. Several administrative texts relate the delivery of rations to the inhabitants of the city. They mention the official in charge, the recipients (with their name and profession), the number of rations and sometimes the month. The professions listed are related to agriculture and the herding of domestic animals, or else refer to artisans and specialized workers. We can note an absence of the mention of textile workers, priests, and temple workers. Tell Beydar’s 3rd millennium textual documentation brings forward new insights concerning the workforce and the organization of labor at the site, especially since this documentation can be correlated to substantial archaeological data (i.e. regarding contemporaneous domestic architecture and official buildings). The analysis of Beydar Phase IIIb houses reveals that the households who occupied them were likely dependent on the centrally distributed rations. In fact, the storage capacities of the houses corresponded to monthly rations and would not have enabled the households to survive between two harvests. Furthermore, none of the houses provided us with evidence of craft production; such production is attested only in specialized buildings. The same institutions that distributed the rations to the inhabitants of the city probably also controlled these specialized buildings. Taking all this into account, Pruß assumes that Tell Beydar’s economy was controlled by the central administration and that the basic households were dependent on the grain distributed by the central administration in exchange for their labor, which corresponded to crafts that were produced in the city’s specialized buildings, agricultural work in the city’s fields, and care of the city’s animals. Pruß points out the contrast between the picture that can be drawn from Beydar’s documentation, and the paradigm usually reconstructed by scholars concerning the ancient Mesopotamian economic system. He explains this dichotomy through the coincidence of excavations, archaeological strategies and the possible coexistence of different economic systems in Upper Mesopotamia during the EJZ 3b period. Juliette Mas’ research focused on the archaeological evidence of production both occurring in private and official contexts during the 3rd millennium BC in Upper Mesopotamia. On the one hand, a large number of the private houses she analyzed revealed evidence of craft production. On the other hand, the evidence of production in official buildings and in specialized buildings is very scant. The importance of the private groups within the economic system and most particularly in the production of goods is therefore not in doubt, and the well-known extended families may have played a decisive role in this regard. Indeed, the private oikoi probably represented important producing entities with diversified activities. Nevertheless, the organization of these groups, as well as their relations with the official institutions, remain little known. Mas points out the important differences in the Upper Mesopotamian region between the first and second halves of the 3rd millennium BC. Significantly, during the first part of the 3rd millennium BC—i.e. during the Ninevite 5 period—Upper Mesopotamia developed along a ruralization trajectory; small settlements were predominant, and there is no attestation of state and no written record. In contrast, during the second 3

Working at Home in the Ancient Near East part of the 3rd millennium, the second urban revolution occurred alongside a revival of state and bureaucracy. Mas focused on four case studies from rural and urban contexts. Her research demonstrates that two different systems occurred both in large cities and in small towns or villages. Within the first system, no production occurred within a private context but instead took place in specialized buildings, under the extensive control of the official institutions. The second system was characterized by a large proportion of craft production carried out in private houses. In the second system, the private groups handling a large-scale production of crafts would, in any case, have maintained strong relationships with the official institutions. Nevertheless, we could have expected a different picture. In reality, the size of the settlements, and therefore the presence or absence of official buildings and institutions, such as the palace or the temples, did not seem to have had an influence on the importance of the households within the economic system, or on the production of goods. In his article, Paolo Brusasco approached archaeological and archival data of the Old Babylonian period, originating from Ur and Nippur, from a multisensory, and interdisciplinary perspective. A combined use of architectural and textual evidence helped to shed some lights on how everyday life and working activities were regulated within ancient Mesopotamian houses. In this regard, business activities are analyzed through the interaction between visitors and residents, and their perception of the domestic space. Brusasco retrieves these social dimensions with the aid of ‘sensorial maps’: a combination of graphs showing how space is structured, how it is accessible and the extent of the sensorial zones. The complexity of these sensorial maps has been proved to be an index for hierarchical relations. The choice of the case studies is dictated by rich and solid archaeological evidence, accompanied by a good variety of legal and economic documents, which allow the retrieval of a connection between house space and social agents. Considerable residential areas, dated to the OldBabylonian period, have been discovered both at Ur and Nippur. Residential suites show a fixed set of architectural parameters, such as storage and processing rooms, together forming the kitchen. However, according to the degree of social complexity of the families (from nuclear to extended family-type), these residential suites are either clustered altogether and shared, or separated according to social status. For the topic at issue, spaces devoted to the reception of visitors are particularly significant, being equipped with specific sets of architectural features and pottery assemblages (benches, water jugs, stands) that suggest an intermingling of private and public functions. Some of these suites can be identified as bakeries, foundries, or workshops devoted to stone-cutting and seal-making. In his research based on sensorial spatiality, Brusasco identifies three types of architectural complexes. In these three types of houses, the degree of perception of smells, lights and sounds varies greatly according to the complexity of the architectural space, creating the effect of separation and seclusion between working activities and private time, which affected the sensorial perception of both the families and their visitors/clients. 4

Juliette Mas and Palmiro Notizia: Working at Home in the Ancient Near East In his contribution, Steven Garfinkle concentrated on the activities of a wealthy family of merchants, based at Ĝirsu/Lagaš during the Ur III period. He addresses the critical issue of the uncertain nature of merchants as economic agents, whether commercial actors engaged in entrepreneurial activities under the direct control of large institutions, or operating with some degree of independence and on behalf of their own non-institutional households. Garfinkle also highlights how the various activities in which merchants were engaged encouraged the documentation of their work in the cuneiform records. The epigraphical material documenting the merchants’ transactions was both preserved in the administrative archives of the state and stored in their homes. Garfinkle illustrates the role played by merchants as facilitators of exchange and as tax-farmers, as well as their involvement in long-distance trade on behalf of their institutional clients, especially in strategic resources and precious materials, such as copper and tin. He further argues that these activities directly connected the merchant families to the state-building enterprise of the Ur III kings. He examines in detail the activities of the best-attested family of merchants in Girsu/ Lagaš, headed by Ur-saga, in order to describe how merchant work was organized. He concludes that merchants, like other professional groups in the 3rd millennium BC, operated mostly as family collectives. By comparison with the evidence from excavations at Ur III Nippur and Susa, along with those of Old Babylonian Ur, Garfinkle shows that urban professionals, like Igibuni from Susa, the prominent merchant UrNusku from Nippur, and the copper-trader Ea-nāṣir from Ur, ran their operations from residential locations within the cities. In his paper, Palmiro Notizia offered a detailed reconstruction of the career and fortunes of Lugal-irida, a superintendent of weavers, who, for almost two decades, was in charge of the most important center for textile production of the entire Ur III state, located in the Guabba district of the Ĝirsu/Lagaš province. Based on the data drawn from administrative documents connected to Lugal-irida’s activity as a state official, and, in particular, on the extremely informative household inventory RTC 304, Notizia portrayed the economic well-being of this functionary by measuring his wealth in terms of real estate (arable land and garden plots) and movable property. His personal asset portfolio included a great variety of institutional goods and private assets: utensils, furnishings, clothing, foodstuffs, slave and servants, domestic animals, silver, precious metals and other native and imported products. Notizia assumes that Lugal-irida’s official residence was part of the administrative building from which he operated as superintendent of weavers. In his house, which functioned both as a home and office, the state surveyors found the great majority of the objects and valuables enumerated in RTC 304. Notizia argues that the active role played by Lugal-irida in the administrative machinery as a member of the restricted group of high-ranking functionaries in charge of temple households and production units allowed him to accumulate considerable wealth and enhance his social standing. Furthermore, his engagement in independent economic activity, especially in the trade of copper, luxury items, and exotic articles, provided him with an additional source of income. 5

Working at Home in the Ancient Near East Notizia’s research aims at improving our knowledge of the prosperity level and wealth investment strategies of the palatial and administrative elites of the Third Dynasty of Ur, and it has to be considered as a first attempt at ‘materializing’ wealthy households through textual analysis, when contemporary archaeological evidence is limited or even entirely lacking. Norman Yoffee and Gojko Barjamovic offered a new discussion of the Old Assyrian trading system and how it defies the logic of a ‘palace economy’, the notion of which would be more accurately applicable to other periods and areas of the ancient Near East, but is quite unfitting in the Old Assyrian context. In the first part of their paper, Barjamovic provides an overview of the current data on this trading system, drawing from the thousands of tablets retrieved at Kaneš (Kültepe), the Assyrian commercial colony located in Central Anatolia. His analysis shows how the palace, as economic and political center, was virtually absent from the written documentation. The significant level of support required for long-distant trade, such as infrastructure and travel security, was achieved through the reliance on a complex system of collective governance, which provided the necessary safety net. This oligarchy, based on kinship ties, operated through commercial and political treaties, in order to secure a suitable network for merchants and to ‘minimize risks’. Whether or not this civic assembly was formed by members who were themselves involved in commerce, it left the actual trade in the hands of private enterprises. After this reappraisal, Barjamovic provides stimulating comparisons among geographically and historically distant parallels (from medieval Europe to Aztec and Chinese empires) regarding communal or antithetical strategies in commercial and social organizations. In the second section of the article, Yoffee provides a re-evaluation of the history of trade studies in pre-modern societies and reassesses the importance of leading new researches from the perspective of how trade impacted on the society, how people perceived trade and traders, and how more or less structured political power interacted with those. Current and forthcoming bibliography will hopefully move in this direction, proving that, even tough a state would have gained benefit through trade, its participation in such dealings did not necessarily imply a state-controlled enterprise. On this basis, the authors raise a fundamental question: is there any longer a raison d’être for a distinction between private and public? The organized workshop and the resulting volume do not pretend to resolve all the questions related to the organization, scale and the socio-economic role played by non-institutional households within the ancient Mesopotamian economic systems. Nevertheless, thanks to both the analysis of specific case studies and the attempt to develop a theoretical framework, the present collection of articles provides new insights and opens up new avenues of research on household economy, which certainly constitutes a hot topic in the Ancient Near East studies. This workshop and its proceedings fit within the dynamics of research widely developed during recent years. We can notably mention three recently published volumes originating from 6

Juliette Mas and Palmiro Notizia: Working at Home in the Ancient Near East a workshop: House and Household Economies in 3rd Millennium B.C.E. Syro-Mesopotamia,3 Labor in the Ancient World4 and Household Studies in Complex Societies: (Micro) Archaeological and Textual Approaches.5 The present workshop Working at Home in the Ancient Near East and its proceedings are complementary and contribute to the debate. Indeed, numerous questions regarding the location, organization, control mechanisms and production strategies of both non-institutional and state-run workshops and industries in ancient Mesopotamia still need to be further investigated and discussed. Nevertheless, the contributions assembled in the present volume will hopefully help to bridge the gap between archaeological records and cuneiform sources, in order to provide a more accurate reconstruction of the Mesopotamian economies during the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC. For these reasons, the authors express their gratitude to the contributors for their involvement in this project, which we as organizers personally believed in. Bibliography Buccellati, F., T. Helms and A. Tamm (eds) 2014. House and Household Economies in 3rd Millennium B.C.E. Syro-Mesopotamia (British Archaeological Reports International Series 2682). Oxford: Archaeopress. Müller, M. (ed.) 2015. Household Studies in Complex Societies. (Micro) Archaeological and Textual Approaches, Papers from the Oriental Institute Seminar held at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 15–16 March 2013 (Oriental Institute Seminars Number 10). Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. P. Steinkeller, P. and M. Hudson (eds) 2015. Labor in the Ancient World: a Colloquium held at Hirschbach (Saxony), April 2005 (International Scholars Conference on Ancient Near Eastern Economies 5). Dresden: Islet.

  Buccellati, Helms and Tamm (eds) 2014.   Steinkeller and Hudson (eds) 2015. 5   Müller (ed.) 2015. 3 4

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Working at Nuzi Laura Battini1 What is a workshop? Or, even more difficult, what is a workshop in antiquity? The concept of workshops varies with regions and times: it is sufficient to open the dictionaries of different times and different regions of the world to perceive it. And this is true also in the forms that the workshops have taken over time and space.2 Identification is also problematic. So, what are the archaeological evidences to interpret the ancient reality, broken, damaged and eroded  by time?3 What are the means to detect the existence of workshops in the homes of ancient time? When houses are dug with scientific methodology,4 four elements—single or better combined—assume the existence of a workshop: 1) the type of architecture; 2) the objects found inside the building; it also depends on its quantity: only an important amount of objects of the same production can be made in place;5 3) the presence of tools especially if combined with numerous specific objects or furniture; 4) specific structures, such as, e.g. hydraulic installations for textile work, furnaces for working metals,6 as well as pottery production. But when the activity does not leave traces or when excavations are not conducted with a scientific method, in a word, in the case of the absence of data, is it possible to suggest some craft activities?

  UMR 7192, CNRS/Collège de France, [email protected]   Thus, we can deduce that there is a link between the definition of workshop and the society that produced it. 3   I repeat here a theme dear to Jean Margueron (cf. Margueron 1986, 1996, 2012), the fact that earthen architecture arrives in crumbled, fragmentary form and like a puzzle the archaeologists rebuild little by little. 4   Archaeology is still in progress: our scientific method of excavation, our way of registration and our reports too will appear ‘childish’ in the future. The problem is that archaeology destroys the subject of its researches (Carandini 2000). 5   Luciani 2004: cf. Rooms R and Y of the Lower Town Palace of Tell Mishrifeh/Qatna with more then 200 objects (140–141). Cf. Henrickson 1982 (Diyala); Pfälzner 1996 (Tell Bderi), 2001 passim (Syrian Middle Euphrates sites): Battini 1999 (Ur and Mesopotamian sites of the Old Babylonian period). The suburbs of Ur (especially Diqdiqqah) in the Middle Bronze Age probably contained houses with workshops of clay figurines, given the amount of figurines found there. 6   As in Room C of the so-called ‘Jeweler House’ in Qatna (Luciani 2004: 143–144). Cf. the ‘artisanal zone’ at Mari (Area L): Margueron 2015a: 138–143; 2015b: 162–172. The importance of furniture for the comprehension of the use of space starts to be understood by archaeologists but few understand the richness of this topic. 1 2

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Working at Home in the Ancient Near East

N

0

20 m

Figure 1: Nuzi plan (after Starr 1937: pl. 13)

The Houses of Nuzi The city of Nuzi was investigated in the 1920s by an American mission.7 Both its method of excavation and its reports, without being very bad, are not very good either. On the acropolis, Starr dug the palace and the houses around it, and in the lower city four buildings (Figure 1). The rest of the lower city is completely unknown and probably holds surprises, and not only for what concerns domestic architecture. This means that the analysis of domestic 7

  Starr 1937 and 1939.

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Laura Battini: Working at Nuzi workshops in Nuzi can be distorted by the incomplete state of excavations. In fact, even if for the Late Bronze Age Nuzi is the most important site,8 the excavations concerned at least 77 houses, but only 44 of them are sufficiently or quite entirely known, that is, only 57.1%.9 The problem also concerns the incomplete state of conservation of the houses: only half of those dug are really useful, that is, their plan is almost completely known. But for half of the building excavated by Starr it is impossible to establish relations with other surrounding rooms and to propose a restitution of the original shape of the house. And unfortunately most of the interesting objects and furniture have been found in these fragmentary architectures. On the contrary, when the building is sufficiently conserved and excavated, the reports remain very silent on objects, furniture, and specificities of its rooms. For example, the largest house after the ‘little palace’ of the royal prince ŠilwaTeššub, the house of Šurki-Tilla, c. 1000 m2 of surface, conserved objects and furniture only in four rooms out of 18 (i.e. 15% of the total space); or perhaps the excavations’ reports attributed objects only to four of them. In a word, it is possible that the excavations’ reports are not complete. For some types of structures the search did not find them, as the drain under the domestic floor. Others, like storage spaces, could not be recognized, since Starr was not interested in ceramics, especially if pots had been crushed by the collapse of the walls. Others were probably forgotten. In any case, it is not only the domestic workshop but also all the functions of the house that cannot be understood due to the limited number of objects and furniture brought back to light. Architecture In Nuzi, the way of building and the house plan fit perfectly with the Old Babylonian tradition.10 Despite the long life of existence of the domestic architecture, which includes alterations, changes, sales, and purchases, it is possible to recognize three construction plans, called central spaced house, tripartite house (or houses with a central room), and linear or elongated house (Figure 2). And as in the Old Babylonian period, the Late Bronze Age architecture of Nuzi does not show any element that recalls of the presence of domestic workshops, nor of space devoted to animal husbandry. In a word, no room has an exceptional shape that allows the identification of a workshop. But a workshop does not need a special shape of space,11 it can be adapted to different situations and different needs, especially if it is inside a house. It is possible to imagine a room used for family life during part of the day and for the workshop the other part. Therefore, it is only through the analysis of all objects and all fixed structures and 8   Out of one hundred houses known for this period, 77 are in Nuzi, four in Assur, three in Nippur and one in Ur (plus fragmentary pieces of houses in Isin, Babylon, Zubeidi, Imliyeh, Ajamat, Uruk: cf. Battini 2009: note 1). 9   Cf. Battini 2009: 325–327. 10   In Nuzi, levels II and III pertain to the Late Bronze Age; no houses of the Old-Babylonian period have been found. For the Old Babylonian architecture, see Battini 1999. For the relations between the architectures of Old Babylonian period and Middle Babylonian period, see Battini 2009: 640–645. 11   Furthermore, it is dangerous to link too strictly the form and the function of a built-up space-room or building whatever (Zevi 2009; Malcovati et al. (eds) 2013).

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Working at Home in the Ancient Near East Types de maisons de Nuzi

furniture that it will be possible to suggest the identification of a workshop.12

Linéaire

Furniture, Objects, Tools

N

P323

P335

P335 A

P331

0

5m

À espace central 0

N

N

N

N

C11C11 C11 C11 C10C10 C10 C10 H1

C16

C8

C16C16 C16 C16

C8 C8 C8

C8

C9

C9C9 C9 C9

H1 H1 H1 H1

C10

C11 0

00

5 m5 m 5 m

N

0

À salle centrale N

B23 B34

As I have already pointed out, excavation reports do not frequently mention either objects or fixed structures. In the Level III13 only 30% of houses had furniture, the Level II a little more (55%), so in total 44% in Nuzi houses had fixed furniture. And the differences from one house to another are very large: one house can have 15 structures and another not one. It is in fact disconcerting that 12.5% of houses in Level II do not have a structure: no cooking facilities, no drain for hygienic purposes, nothing. It is not only the structures that serve the comfort of the house (such as benches, or graves) but also the essential structures for the life of the house,14 such as the cooking space, the evacuation of waste 5 m water, the storage room and so on. Just over 50% of the houses had a fireplace or an oven: only 37.5% had fixed storage locations or drains (Figure 3).

B30

B37

B42

B18

B36

B25 B20

B24 G10

B39

B40

B33

B28

G15

0

5m

Figure 2: Different plans for houses (Battini and Dewilder in preparation) 12

  The case of rooms devoted to animal husbandry is a little more complex: at least in some cases the room has to be adapted to beings with four legs. For the moment no chemical, or coprolithic or any other analysis has been made in level of the domestic floors and probably their presence in the city was marginal. 13   Both levels, Level III, more ancient, and Level II, belong to the second half of the 2nd millennium BC. 14   For this distinguo see Battini 2015: 336–337. 12

B21

5 m

Laura Battini: Working at Nuzi There is a link between the size of the house and the presence of fixed structures: larger houses have more structures,15 maybe because the larger houses are also those that probably cost more in material and men and therefore the richest.16 And this also happens for objects: the larger houses have more objects and more variety than the smaller ones. But none of the furniture or objects found suggests a workshop. So, were there no domestic workshops in Nuzi? To Work at Home or Not: That Is the Question The absence of architectural data on craft activities in Nuzi is due to the incomplete state of excavation, and conservation, reports17 comprehension of the site. Starr was not able to identify objects, which can be either the refusal of work or raw material to be worked. In the published material, nothing Figure 3: Exemples of drainage and storage in domestic suggests craft activities…18 There areas: on top water drainage pipe, F2; on bottom storage is no house with an exceptional room, P47 (after Battini 2015: fig. 13) number of objects, that is, with a number of objects outside the norm of a house. But there are some interesting cases, which suggest some artisanal activities in the domestic area: two partially conserved buildings had whet stones,19 another house conserved a ‘shaper for bone pins’,20 at   Battini 2015: 338.   I discussed this problem, first in my thesis (Battini 1999), then in some articles, most en passant but two in a specific and deeper manner (Battini 2010 and 2014). 17   In comparison with his time (for ex. with Leonard Woolley), Starr was less precise in writing the reports of excavations 18   Starr 1937: pl. 99–103, 116–127. 19   Starr 1937: pl. 122 J and K. J was conserved in an isolated room (that is, without connections with the surrounding others) which I cannot say if it belonged to a house or a larger building. On the other side, the whet stone published in pl. 122 K belongs to a house partially conserved between the square V and W (this explains 15 16

the error of localization, given as W5—impossible, there are no buildings dug here—but being as V5).

20

  Starr 1937: pl. 122 I. It is a shaper, probably not for bone pins, in any case it is used for a specific activity.

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Working at Home in the Ancient Near East

Figure 4: Examples of ‘special’ objects (reworked after Starr 1937: pl. 99-101, 125) 14

Laura Battini: Working at Nuzi least one house a sickle,21 one two adzes,22 another one hafted chisel and one weight,23 one only a chisel,24 and one had a hook (Figure 4).25 Of course, the cases from which a real artisanal activity can be deduced without any doubt are not so numerous. But since the other houses have not conserved such tools, it is their exceptionality, which constitutes the beginning of a proof. Another proof is the fact that at least in two houses built on the acropolis there was not only a special object, but two, as in the house formed by room S 152 + 183 + 182 + 133 + 129 + 128+ 137 + other rooms. Also two of the four largest houses26 built far away from the palace, the house of Šilwa-Teššub and of Zike, had more than one special object: Zike four (a hafted hook and three weight)27 and Šilwa-Teššub three (a muller, two weights). 28 It is worth mentioning that the rooms in which the special objects or tools were found— the supposed workshops—do not differ in shape, size, or proportions compared to the others of the house: this makes it more difficult to identify domestic workshops. The activities in question are therefore agricultural (sickle), artisanal (shaper for pins or for adzes), nutritional (whet stones) and the most common, commercial transactions (weights in several houses). And they concern both Strata III and II, with an increase during the Stratum II. In fact, apart from two houses, which belong to the Stratum III, all the other ten houses belong to Stratum II. This increase, attested in the spread of weights (the two richest houses, Šilwa-Teššub and Zike, and two other medium-sized houses), is well suited to the appearance of the palace, which implies a major need of commercial and artisanal needs. Furthermore, textual data confirm the importance of economic transactions in Nuzi.29 Finally, archaeology fails at least in part: we must admit the inability to detect certain types of work which leave no archaeological traces such as animals husbandry, textiles, pottery and clay figurines. Silence and Archaeology The problem of the existence of domestic workshops in the case of old excavations— that is not only when the excavations could not be conducted not in a scientific way, but also when the archaeological reports failed—leads us to the problem of silence   Starr 1937: pl. 124 E.   Starr 1937: pl. 125 A and E.  23   Starr 1937: pl. 124 H and pl. 122 V. 24   Starr 1937: pl. 125 C. 25   Starr 1937: pl. 125 J. 26   The two others, Šurki-Tilla and Tehip-Tilla, had only weapons. 27   Starr 1937: pl. 122 N, P and W and pl. 125 K. In the house were also found four arrowheads and one armor plate (Starr 1937: pl. 125 N, O, GG, JJ and pl. 126 D). 28   Starr 1937: pl. 122 E and S, pl. 123 A. In the house were also found one arrowhead (Starr 1937: pl. 125 DD), one corselet (Starr 1937: pl. 126 B) and an armor plate (Starr 1937: pl. 126 O). 29   Dosch 1996. 21 22

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Working at Home in the Ancient Near East in archaeology. Without considering it a failure, why do not take it as different way of research? According to Vencl,30 archaeologists need to research better and more ‘silences’ than evidences. The case of Nuzi is paradigmatic: the presence of a private sector of economy attested since the Bronze Age in other Mesopotamian sites and in textual evidence led to look for other information that archaeology had not left clear. Nuzi demonstrates that the absence of archaeological data does not mean the absence of workshops: by querying all possible sources, interesting results can be obtained. Bibliography Battini, L. 1999. L’espace domestique en Mésopotamie de la IIIe dynastie d’Ur à l’époque paléobabylonienne (British Archaeological Reports International Series  767). Oxford: Archaeopress. Battini, L. 2009. Le tissu urbain de Nuzi: Nouvelles perspectives. Studies on the Civilization and Culture of Nuzi and the Hurrians 18: 637–663. Battini, L. 2010. Des méthodes pour une maison : analyse des théories archéologiques appliquées à l’architecture du Proche-Orient ancien. Syria 87: 3–19. Battini, L. 2014. Famille élargie ou famille nucléaire? Problèmes de démographie antique, in L. Marti (ed.) La Famille dans le Proche-Orient ancien : réalités, symbolismes et images. Proceedings of the 55th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Paris 6–9 July 2009: 3–26. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns. Carandini, A. 2000. Storie dalla terra. Manuale di scavo archeologico. Torino: Einaudi. Dosch, G. 1996. House and Household in Nuzi: the Inhabitants, the Family, and Those Dependent on It, in K.R. Veenhof (ed.) Houses and Households in Ancient Mesopotamia. Papers Read at the 40e Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Leiden July 5–8 1993 (Publications de l’Institut Historique-archéologique néerlandais de Stamboul 78): 301–308. Leiden/Istanbul: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten. Henrickson, E.F. 1982. Functional Analysis of Elite Residences in the Late Early Dynastic of the Diyala Region. Mesopotamia 17: 5–33. Malcovati, S., F. Visconti, M. Caja, R. Capozzi and G. Fusco (eds) 2013. Architettura e Realismo. Riflessioni sulla costruzione architettonica della realtà. Santarcangelo di Romagna: Maggioli Editore. Luciani, M. 2004. Palazzi, abitazioni e botteghe tra la prima età del bronzo tardo e ferro nell’antica Qatna. Il cantiere K a Mishrifeh, in A. Guidi and S. Ponchia (eds) Ricerche archeologiche in Italia e Siria: 133-146. Padova: Sargon Editore. Margueron, J.-C. 1986. Quelques principes méthodologiques pour une approche analytique de l’architecture de l’Orient antique. Contributi e materiali di archeologia orientale 1: 261-286. Margueron, J.-C. 1996. La maison orientale. in K.R. Veenhof (ed.) Houses and Households in Ancient Mesopotamia. Papers Read at the 40e Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Leiden July 5–8 1993 (Publications de l’Institut Historique-archéologique néerlandais

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  Vencl 1984.

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Laura Battini: Working at Nuzi de Stamboul 78): 17-38. Leiden/Istanbul: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten. Margueron, J.-C. 2012. Notes d’archéologie et d’architecture orientales 16. De la strate à la ‘couche architecturale’ : réexamen de la stratigraphie de Tuttub/Khafadjé. Il’architecture civile. Syria 89: 59-84. Margueron, J.-C. 2015a. Mari: Rapport préliminaire sur la 39e campagne (Automne 2002). Akh Purattim 3: 135-157. Margueron, J.-C. 2015b. Mari: Rapport préliminaire sur la 40e campagne (2003). Akh Purattim 3: 159-180. Pfälzner, P. 1996. Activity and Social Organisation of Third Millennium B.C. Households, K.R. Veenhof (ed.) Houses and Households in Ancient Mesopotamia. Papers Read at the 40e Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Leiden July 5–8 1993 (Publications de l’Institut Historique-archéologique néerlandais de Stamboul 78): 117–127. Leiden/Istanbul: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten. Pfälzner, P. 2001. Haus und Haushalt: Wohnformen des dritten Jahrtausends vor Christus in Nordmesopotamien (Damaszener Forschungen 9). Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern. Starr, R.F.S. 1937. Nuzi. Report on the Excavations at Yorgan Tepa near Kirkuk, Iraq conducted by Harvard University in conjunction with the American Schools of Oriental Research and the University Museum of Philadelphia 1927–1931. Vol. II: Plates and Plans. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press. Starr, R.F.S. 1939. Nuzi. Report on the Excavations at Yorgan Tepa near Kirkuk, Iraq, conducted by Harvard University in conjunction with the American Schools of Oriental Research and the University Museum of Philadelphia 1927–1931. Vol. I: Text. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press. Vencl, Sl. 1984. War and Warfare in Archaeology. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 3: 116-132. Villard, P. 2015. Les champs disciplinaires et la notion de maîtrise en Mésopotamie ancienne, in C. Breniquet and F. Colas-Rannou (eds) Art, artiste, artisan. Essais pour une histoire de l’art diachronique et pluridisciplinaire: 45-53. Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal. Zevi, B. 2009. Saper vedere l’architettura. Saggio sull’interpretazione spaziale dell’architettura. Torino: Einaudi.

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The Organization of Labor at Tell Beydar Alexander Pruß1 The Site of Tell Beydar Tell Beydar is an archaeological site of c. 22 ha size, situated in the Khabur plains in the North-East of Syria. It lies at the bank of the Wadi Uwaij, one of the tributaries of the Khabur river. Investigation of the site began with a very short visit in the 1920s2 and was started earnestly with a first campaign of a Belgian-French mission under the direction of Marc Lebeau (Brussels) in 1991. The mission was enlarged and became first a European endeavor (1993) and finally (1994) a joint European-Syrian mission.3 Until 2010, 17 excavation campaigns were conducted.4 They revealed an urban site of the 3rd millennium BC, resettled for a short time in the Hellenistic period.5 The EJZ 3b Administrative Archive The excavation of the 3rd millennium site concentrated on the unearthing of Phase IIIb, the latest phase in which the site was inhabited on a large scale (c. 7 ha). This phase belongs to Period IIIb of the regional Early Jezirah chronology and dates to c. 2425– 2340 BC.6 In a late (though not the latest) level of this phase c. 220 cuneiform tablets written in an early form of the Akkadian language were found at different parts of the upper town. The vast majority of these tablets had been part of an administrative archive and was written within a few years.7 The tablets reveal some general information on the site of this period: its ancient name was most probably Nabada,8 it had about 2000 inhabitants9 and was, at the time of the archive, part of the state of Nagar10 with its capital at the site of the same name, modern Tell Brak.11 The city of Nabada, a provincial capital within the kingdom of   Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, [email protected]   Brossé 1929: 36–39. 3   Co-Directors of the mission were Marc Lebeau for the European side and Hamido Hamade (1994–1995), Antoine Suleiman (1995–2004), and Abd el-Masih Baghdo (since 2004) for the Syrian side. 4   Pruß 2013 gives an overview on the excavations at the site; for detailed reports see Lebeau and Suleiman (eds) 1997, 2003, 2007, 2011, 2014. 5   For the chronology of the 3rd Millennium (Early Jezirah) periods of Tell Beydar, see Quenet 2011: 24–26. 6   See for the dating of the EJZ periods in general Lebeau (ed.) 2011: 359–370. 7   Ismail et al. 1996; Milano et al. 2004. 8   Sallaberger 1998. 9   Sallaberger and Pruß 2015: 103–113. 10   Sallaberger 2011: 320. 11   Oates, Oates and McDonald 2001. 1 2

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Working at Home in the Ancient Near East Nagar, was ruled by 5 (or 6) officials which were responsible for different sectors of the city’s population.12 Several of the administrative documents of the Nabada archive relate to the delivery of rations to the inhabitants of the city. These texts have the following structure:13 after the mentioning of the official in charge the recipients (numbering from 75 to c. 250) are listed, each entry followed by a number. Occasional other expenditures follow before the mentioning of the month. Even though the documents do not mention the nature of the expended commodity, it is reasonably certain that it was grain, most probably barley. The numbers must correspond to sila3 of grain distributed in that particular month. The recipients are either grouped by name, by profession, or by gate (= city quarter). Particularly the mentioning of the professions14 and their respective rations allow some insight into the composition of the workforce and the organization of their labor at Tell Beydar. An important observation concerns the dimension of the ration system within the population of Nabada. Nearly the whole population of Nabada, or at least a very large percentage of it, were included in the centrally administered ration system;15 there is not enough space in the city to house a large group of economically independent inhabitants.16 It is thus possible to reconstruct some basic outlines of the system of labor management at the site from the information in the worker lists. Professions Not every recipient of rations at Tell Beydar received the same amount. The basic ration for an adult male was 60 sila3 (c. 60 liters17), while women and juvenile recipients received 30 sila3. Some privileged groups received higher rations: the ba-ri2 udu, related to the flocks of sheep,18 received 90 sila3; and the lu2-geš-DU, most probably the holders of sustenance land,19 received monthly rations of 120 sila3. Both groups did not only receive the largest rations, but were also most numerous in the worker lists, numbering up to 40 lu2-geš-DU and up to 30 ba-ri2 udu per list. Unsurprisingly, professions related to agriculture and the herding of domestic animals were thus most prominently represented in the Nabada workforce. Besides the mentioned groups the worker lists also mention gardeners and specialists for the   Sallaberger and Pruß 2015: 88.   Sallaberger and Pruß 2015: 87–94. 14   Sallaberger 1996: 96–97. 15   Sallaberger and Pruß 2015: 104. 16   This does not exclude the possibility of other sources of income for some or even most of the recipients. However, the amount of grain distributed through the ration system was sufficient to cover the basic caloric needs of the recipients: Ur and Wilkinson 2008: 313. 17   See Powell 1984 on the volume of sila3. 18   Sallaberger and Pruß 2015: 96. 19   Sallaberger and Pruß 2015: 94. 12 13

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��������������: The Organization of Labor at Tell Beydar care of grain-fed oxen, lambs, and donkeys or onagers. During the harvest and other periods of high labor demand in the agriculture, nearly the whole workforce was employed on the fields. But there were also different artisans and specialized workers who lived at Tell Beydar. The lists mention potters, millers, fullers, basket-weavers, leather workers, cartwrights, one sculptor, and possibly a seal-cutter.20 Non-artisanal specialists were scribes, cart-drivers, guards of doors and of the prison as well as overseers of buildings and of the messengers. Absent from the ration lists are textile workers, which must have played a significant role in the economy, judging from the size of the sheep flocks and the amount of workers engaged in wool-plucking21 as well as the number of spindle-whorls and loom weights found in the houses.22 Also missing are priests and temple personnel, which most probably were supplied by a different system. Where Did They Work? The workers mentioned in the texts had been present at the site, since they regularly received their rations there. Their traces must be present in the archaeological record of Tell Beydar, where the best-known architectural Phase IIIb (Figure 1) is contemporary with the administrative archive. In order to determine the spatial organization of labor at the site, one has to analyze the private houses first. Excavations have revealed remains of 28 houses of phase Beydar IIIb at the site, of which 17 were uncovered completely or nearly complete.23 The average size of the excavated houses is 59 m². If one excludes the exceptional large house B1,24 the Beydar houses measured just 40 m² in average, which is a rather low figure, compared with other contemporary sites in the region.25 Several of the excavated houses are the result of a partitioning of the original house plots. House 6 in Field B26 is a good example for such a remodeled house (Figure 2): the two north-eastern rooms were originally part of the house, which was separated by the blocking of an original door and the creation of a new, separate entrance. Such house separations can be explained by changes in the family structure of the inhabitants, e.g. when an adult son creates his own household after his marriage.27   Sallaberger and Pruß 2015: 97.   Sallaberger 2004. Wool was also imported to Nabada: Sallaberger and Pruß 2015: 98. 22   See Baccelli 2014 for the textile industry at Beydar. 23   Sallaberger and Pruß 2015: 107–108. 24   On this building, see Van der Stede and Devillers 2014: 11–31. 25   See the compilation of Pfälzner 2001: 399, fig. 121 for several Upper Mesopotamian sites, which, however, includes only houses of the most frequently attested type (‘Parzellenhäuser’) at these sites. The inclusion of all excavated houses of these sites would have yielded somewhat lower figures. 26   Van der Stede 2007: 10. 27   All evidence from the Ancient Near East shows that the brides left her parent’s households upon marriage: Ebeling 1938: 282–285. 20 21

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Figure 1: Upper City of Tell Beydar. Excavated structures of the EJ IIIb period (after Lebeau and Suleiman (eds) 2011: pl. I) 22

��������������: The Organization of Labor at Tell Beydar

Figure 2: Tell Beydar, Field B. Schematic plan of house 6 (drawing by the author after Van der Stede 2007: pl. II)

This kind of partition is a frequent feature of the Beydar houses and is an indication of the dense occupation of the site and the scarcity of building space within the city. Many of the houses have yielded domestic installations and inventories of pottery and household tools. The installations include grinding stones, ovens, and cooking-pots for the preparation of food, tableware (bowls and beakers) for the consumption of 23

Working at Home in the Ancient Near East

Figure 3: Tell Beydar. Location of workshops and storage buildings on the acropolis (after Lebeau and Suleiman (eds) 2014: fig. 3, modified by the author)

food and liquids, normally one storage vessel (of up to 120 l volume) and one so-called ‘decantation jar’,28 which was most probably used for beer-production. The storage capacities of the houses correspond roughly to the monthly rations. The households were thus dependent from the rations, since they simply had not enough storage vessels to cover their basic food needs for the period from one harvest to the next. None of the excavated private houses has yielded any indication for the localization of professional artisanal activities. Such activities can be traced in separate nondomestic workshop buildings, which were found at different spots within the site (Figure 3). One bakery, recognizable by the presence of several contemporary breadovens and the absence of other domestic installations, was found within the temple

28

  Rova 2003: 400, pl. 10; 2011: 73–74, pl. 11, 5–6, EJZ type 71.

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��������������: The Organization of Labor at Tell Beydar

Figure 4: Tell Beydar, Field O. Schematic plan of workshops in front of Temples B and C (drawing by the author after Suleiman 2007: pl. II)

quarter in the city center,29 another one within a large workshop building in Field I.30 Both areas of the city contained other workshops and workshop buildings which lack purely domestic installations. A good example of such a workshop building complex was excavated opposite temples B and C in Field M (Figure 4).31 It consists of four units of three to four rooms, each one accessible from a street to the north. The rooms contained storage vessels, platforms, benches and water installations, but no grinding installations or ovens. The most convincing interpretation is that of a row of workshop and storage buildings where goods controlled by the temples were kept and processed.

  Suleiman 2007: 87, fig. 17–18.   Milano and Rova 2004: 10. 31   Suleiman 2007: 86–88. 29 30

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Figure 5: Tell Beydar, Field I. Schematic plan of houses and workshops in level 2 (after Milano and Rova 2014: fig. 6) 26

��������������: The Organization of Labor at Tell Beydar

Figure 6: Upper City of Tell Beydar. Functional interpretation of excavated structures (after Lebeau and Suleiman (eds) 2014: fig. 3, modified by the author)

A comparable workshop building was uncovered in Field I (Figure 5); it contained installations and small-finds which lead to an interpretation as ‘specialized industrial area’ for the production of figurines and pottery.32 This building is situated in a neighborhood of mixed domestic and workshop buildings. Even the former Eastern Palace of Tell Beydar, a large formal building connected with the city’s elite, was transformed into a metal workshop at the time of the main 32

  Milano and Rova 2014: 93–95, fig. 11–14.

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Working at Home in the Ancient Near East Table 1: Use of the excavated area of the upper city of Tell Beydar (latest EJ IIIb phase) Excavated area in ha 0.05 0.135 0.12 0.195 0.39 0.16 0.13 1.18

City wall and gate Streets and open spaces Palace and official reception Temples Storage buildings, workshops Houses Indistinguishable Total:

Share 4.2% 11.4% 10.2% 16.5% 33.0% 13.6% 11.0% 100%

administrative archive, when small kilns for the smelting of metal were set into the former banquet hall of the palace.33 The upper city of Tell Beydar thus contained a large share of workshop and storage buildings which were situated outside the private houses, but also outside the palace (‘Acropolis Palace’) of the archive phase (Figure 6). Nearly a third (33.0 %) of the excavated area of Tell Beydar’s upper city was used for non-domestic storage facilities and workshop buildings (Table 1). This is an extraordinary high share of such buildings which is not matched by any other contemporary site of the region.34 The Organization of Labor at Tell Beydar Combining the information from the worker lists and the archaeological excavation, it appears evident that not only the core food supply of a very large part of the population was organized by the central administration, but also the actual work performed by the recipients of the grain rations. It can be assumed that most artisanal work at Tell Beydar was done in specialized workshop buildings outside the private houses. It is thus likely that these buildings were constructed and administered by the same central institution which was responsible for the monthly distribution of grain. The local economy appears thus dominated by the central institution. The single private households must have been—at least to a large degree—dependent from the administration of the city which provided them with grain for their basic food needs in exchange for their labor. This labor was performed in workshops and offices run by the city’s administration, on the city’s fields, or by caring for the animals of the city. All these places of work appear to have been administered by the same central   Pruß 2011: 113–128.   Sallaberger and Pruß 2015: 106, table 11. One has to note the relatively large excavated area at Tell Beydar.

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��������������: The Organization of Labor at Tell Beydar institution. This layout of the economy is the reason for the small houses and the large share of storage and workshop buildings in the upper city of Tell Beydar. This reconstruction of the local economy differs substantially from the picture drawn by several authors for the economy of most Upper Mesopotamian cities of the 3rd millennium, which emphasizes the economic independence of the single households and their self-sufficiency in terms of food production and supply with goods of daily need.35 The different situation at Beydar is not only caused by the knowledge of the cuneiform archive and its administrative perspective, but also by the largescale excavation of the site. But the differences between Beydar and contemporary sites, like Khuera or Melebiya, cannot only be explained by the randomness of archaeological evidence and different excavation strategies, but evidently also by different economic approaches in antiquity. The densely urbanized settlement system of Upper Mesopotamia of the EJZ 3 period contained communities with rather different economic organization. Bibliography Baccelli, G. 2014. The Spinning and Weaving Material from Tell Beydar, in L. Milano and M. Lebeau (eds) Tell Beydar, Environmental and Technical Studies II (Subartu 33): 3–15. Turnhout: Brepols. Brossé, C.-L. 1929. Tell Beïdar en Haute Djézireh. Syria 10: 36–39. Ebeling, E. 1938. s.v. Ehe. Reallexikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischen Archäologie, vol. 2: 281–286. Ismail, F., W. Sallaberger, Ph. Talon and K. Van Lerberghe. 1996. Administrative Documents from Tell Beydar (Seasons 1993–1995) (Subartu 2). Turnhout: Brepols. Lebeau, M. (ed.) 2011. Jezirah (ARCANE 1). Turnhout: Brepols. Lebeau, M. and A. Suleiman (eds) 1997. Tell Beydar, Three Seasons of Excavations (1992– 1994). A Preliminary Report (Subartu 3). Turnhout: Brepols. Lebeau, M. and A. Suleiman (eds) 2003. Tell Beydar, the 1995–1999 Seasons of Excavations. A Preliminary Report (Subartu 10). Turnhout: Brepols. Lebeau, M. and A. Suleiman (eds) 2007. Tell Beydar, The 2000–2002 Seasons of Excavations, The 2003–2004 Seasons of Architectural Restoration. A Preliminary report (Subartu 15). Turnhout: Brepols. Lebeau, M. and A. Suleiman (eds) 2011. Tell Beydar, The 2004/2–2009 Seasons of Excavations, The 2004/2–2009 Seasons of Architectural Restoration. A Preliminary Report (Subartu 29). Turnhout: Brepols. Lebeau, M. and A. Suleiman (eds) 2014. Tell Beydar, The 2010 Season of Excavations and Architectural Restoration – A Preliminary Report (Subartu 34). Turnhout: Brepols. Milano, L. and E. Rova. 2004. Tell Beydar 2004 – Field I, in M. Lebeau and A. Suleiman (eds) Euro-Syrian Excavations at Tell Beydar. Report on the Twelfth Season of Excavations at Tell Beydar (2004): 10–12.   Pfälzner 2001: 395: ‚Ein großer Teil der nordmesopotamischen Haushalte bildete selbständig wirtschaftende Einheiten.‘

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Working at Home in the Ancient Near East Milano, L. and E. Rova. 2014. Tell Beydar 2010 – Fields I and R, Study of the Glyptic Material, in M. Lebeau and A. Suleiman (eds) Tell Beydar, The 2010 Season of Excavations and Architectural Restoration – A Preliminary Report (Subartu 34): 83–105. Turnhout: Brepols. Milano, L., W. Sallaberger, Ph. Talon and K. Van Lerberghe. 2004. Third Millennium Cuneiform Texts from Tell Beydar (Seasons 1996–2002) (Subartu 12). Turnhout: Brepols. Oates, D., J. Oates, J. and H. McDonald. 2001. Excavations at Tell Brak, 2. Nagar in the third millennium BC. Cambridge/London: British School of Archaeology in Iraq. Pfälzner, P. 2001. Haus und Haushalt. Wohnformen des dritten Jahrtausends vor Christus in Nordmesopotamien (Damaszener Forschungen 9). Mainz: Zabern. Powell, M.A. 1984. Late Babylonian Surface Mensuration. A Contribution to the History of Babylonian Agriculture and Arithmetic. Archiv für Orientforschung 31: 32–66. Pruß, A. 2011. Excavations in Field P in the years 2004–2009, in M. Lebeau and A. Suleiman (eds) Tell Beydar, The 2004/2–2009 Seasons of Excavations, The 2004/2–2009 Seasons of Architectural Restoration. A Preliminary Report (Subartu 29): 111–175. Turnhout: Brepols. Pruß, A. 2013. A Synopsis of the Euro-Syrian Excavations at Tell Beydar, in D. Bonatz and L. Martin (eds) 100 Jahre archäologische Feldforschungen in Nordost-Syrien – eine Bilanz (Schriften der Max Freiherr von Oppenheim-Stiftung 18): 133–148. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Quenet, Ph. 2011. Stratigraphy, in M. Lebeau (ed.) Jezirah (ARCANE 1): 19–47. Turnhout: Brepols. Rova, E. 2003. The III Millennium Pottery Morphology. The Typology Principles, the Coding System, and some Preliminary Results, in M. Lebeau and A. Suleiman (eds) Tell Beydar, the 1995–1999 Seasons of Excavations. A Preliminary Report (Subartu 10): 395– 489. Turnhout: Brepols. Rova, E. 2011. Ceramic, in M. Lebeau (ed.) Jezirah (ARCANE 1): 49–121. Turnhout: Brepols. Sallaberger, W. 1996. Grain Accounts: Personnel Lists and Expenditure Documents, in F. Ismail, W. Sallaberger, Ph. Talon and K. Van Lerberghe, Administrative Documents from Tell Beydar (Seasons 1993–1995) (Subartu 2): 89–106. Turnhout: Brepols. Sallaberger, W. 1998. Der antike Name von Tell Beydar: Nabada (Na-ba4-daki/Na-ba-tiumki). Nouvelles Assyriologiques Brèves et Utilitaires 1998/130: 122–125. Sallaberger, W. 2004. A Note on the Sheep and Goat Flocks. Introduction to texts 151– 167, in M. Milano, W. Sallaberger, Ph. Talon and K. Van Lerberghe, Third Millennium Cuneiform Texts from Tell Beydar (Seasons 1996–2002) (Subartu 12): 13–21. Turnhout: Brepols. Sallaberger, W. 2011. History and Philology, in M. Lebeau (ed.) Jezirah (ARCANE 1): 327– 342. Turnhout: Brepols. Sallaberger, W. and A. Pruß. 2015. Home and Work in Early Bronze Age Mesopotamia: “Ration Lists” and “Private Houses” at Tell Beydar/Nabada, in P. Steinkeller and M. Hudson (eds) Labor in the Ancient World (Colloquium held at Hirschbach/Saxony 2005): 69–136. Dresden: Islet. Suleiman, A. 2007. Temples B and C, Storage Building and Artisanal Quarter (Fields F3, M & O, Seasons 2000–2002), in M. Lebeau and A. Suleiman (eds) Tell Beydar, The 2000–2002 Seasons of Excavations, The 2003–2004 Seasons of Architectural Restoration. A Preliminary report (Subartu 15): 85–97. Turnhout: Brepols. 30

��������������: The Organization of Labor at Tell Beydar Ur, J.A. and T.J. Wilkinson. 2008. Settlement and Economic Landscapes of Tell Beydar and its Hinterland, in M. Lebeau and A. Suleiman (eds) Beydar Studies 1 (Subartu 21): 305–327. Turnhout: Brepols. Van der Stede, V. 2007. Le chantier B: résultats des campagnes 2000–2002, in M. Lebeau and A. Suleiman (eds) Tell Beydar, The 2000–2002 Seasons of Excavations, The 2003–2004 Seasons of Architectural Restoration. A Preliminary report (Subartu 15): 7–39. Turnhout: Brepols. Van der Stede, V. and A. Devillers. 2014. Le Chantier B: résultats de la campagne 2010, in M. Lebeau and A. Suleiman (eds) Tell Beydar, The 2010 Season of Excavations and Architectural Restoration – A Preliminary Report (Subartu 34): 11–40. Turnhout: Brepols.

31

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Oikoi and the State. Households and Production Evidence in 3rd Millennium BC Upper Mesopotamia Juliette Mas1 The Southern Mesopotamian Economy, Extended Families and Oikoi From the early 3rd millennium BC onwards, Southern Mesopotamia was marked by the emergence of complex and stratified societies, organized by state structures within the framework of urban settlements. The spread of urbanization occurred alongside the reorganization of the economy. In fact, even though the cities relied on rural communities and sites,2 the rural population decreased, becoming a goods provider of lesser importance, while, on the other hand, urban life created new needs among its people. In response, a new type of households was created: the extended family, who took on a new productive and economic role. These were not ‘family’ households, biologically speaking. Indeed, the groups were not necessarily based on kinship, but were often built on dependent and official relationships, and later on legal arrangements, such as adoption (from the 2nd millennium BC),3 and members did not necessarily live together in the same house. Despite emergence of these households, state and official institutions (i.e. palace and temples) still held a key role in terms of the economy. Thanks to a rich textual documentation, scholars studying Mesopotamia have, for decades, relied on the assumed importance of the knowledge of extended families as a mean to understanding all aspects of the Mesopotamian economy.4 Extended families are well documented in Southern Mesopotamian textual evidence, especially through receipts for raw materials, estate farmlands contracts, and lists of persons along with their profession. These families were mainly oriented towards the satisfaction of their own needs.5 The different households, or economic units, were responsible for the production of goods for their own use, but also for the storage of raw materials and goods, and the manufacture of goods that were essential for exchanges. Indeed, their production fulfilled their own needs and, further, provided them with available goods for exchange and trade. Moreover, according to C.C. Lamberg-Karlovsky, these   UMR 7192, CNRS/Collège de France, [email protected]   Nevertheless, the Southern Mesopotamian sites could also be characterized by monumental architecture and therefore look ‘urban’ (Stone 2007; Creekmore 2014). 3   Among others, see Foster 1987; Yoffee 1995; Lion 1999, 2004; Schloen 2001. 4   See notably Gelb 1979; Foster 1982; Diakonoff 1985; Jankowska 1986; Maisels 1993; Diakonoff 1996; Lamberg-Karlovsky 1999. 5   Gregoire and Renger 1988. 1 2

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Working at Home in the Ancient Near East families exchanged their own work and service activities for goods or services from other families.6 However, according to J.N. Postgate, such extended families mainly occured in a rural context.7 In reference to the Greek economic model, historians of Mesopotamia named these private economic entities using the term of oikos. In fact, two different types of oikoi coexisted: the private oikoi and the official ones, which were linked to the palace or to the temples. The official oikoi institution was first described by A. Schneider and A. Deimel, who reconstructed the 3rd millennium BC Mesopotamian city as a templestate.8 According to their model, the temple was a totalitarian control center, managing land tenure, production and workforce. This model has been widely discussed and the extent of the power of the temple has been minimized, notably by I.J. Gelb and I.M. Diakonoff.9 Furthermore, it seems that the palace took over the role of the temple at the end of the 3rd millennium.10 Instead, private oikoi constituted private producing entities, sometimes hiring non-kin employees to increase their workforce, practicing a diversified economy and numbering at least one member mastering writing and counting, in order to deal with administrative tasks, as has been pointed out in the study of the ‘Great Household’ by B. Foster.11 In many cases, these private economic entities participated in diversified activities and were mainly subsisting by crafts, which they produced in their own houses, but they also likely practiced agriculture and, animal breeding, as well as pastoralism or animal husbandry.12 This range of activities would not be surprising, since the history of the region has always been largely dimorphic.13 Research on rural communities in Mesopotamia has revealed that two economic systems concerning land tenure existed from the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC. The first was state-based and hired individuals to work on the farmlands, while the second involved private groups, usually extended families, and was controlled by the community.14 It seems that the private economic units played a key role in the production of crafts, but that they also owned fields and land, which were exploited in a collective way. Nevertheless, the agricultural production of these private units barely provided their members with the goods needed for their own subsistence.15 Because of the climatic instability and pluvial regime, it was not easy to prosper or even to survive in times of hardship. Individuals therefore had to become involved in complex 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Lamberg-Karlovsky 1999. Postgate 1995. Schneider 1920; Deimel 1931. Gelb 1969; Diakonoff 1969. Yoffee 1995; Marzhan 2002. Foster 1982; Foster 1993. Mas 2013. See notably Rowton 1976; Rowton 1981. Fox and Zagarell 1982; McCorriston 1997; Algaze 2008. Renger 1990.

34

Juliette Mas: Oikoi and the State kinship networks and to diversify their activities in order to secure their livelihood. In reality, they could rarely generate surpluses, except in the case of field rentals. When a field was rented out, its owner, whether that was the palace, the temples or a private group, automatically received surpluses from the exploitation of that field’s crops.16 Concerning the private groups, the management of the stocks of products obtained from agricultural activities constituted a large part of their economic activities. During the good years, surpluses obtained from the farmlands offered the opportunity for the households to prosper, to breed animals from which they gained secondary agricultural products, to brew beer, to practice trade over a medium or long distance, and to gather the necessary funding to purchase raw materials for their craft activities. Textiles were often used for these types of exchanges because of their low weight/value ratio.17 The Organization of the Oikoi I believe that the private economic groups may have been organized into a kind of corporations including several households, thus reducing risks, and developing their productivity, their cooperation and networks, in addition to securing their livelihood in times of hardship. Members would then have been subjected to some form of supervision (by an individual or an assembly). The well-known institution of ‘elders’ could have played a decisive role in this system, perhaps from as early as the Early Bronze Age18. The institution of elders, the šibūt ālim, is well known from the 3rd millennium onwards and is even mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Aside from literary texts, this institution is often cited in diplomatic, legal and economic documents, and can be traced back to the pre-Sargonic period. The institution is often attested in the archive of the city of Mari, especially in letters. The Mari documentation shows that the elders were usually given a diplomatic role and that they notably intervened in cases of conflicts, which could occur in military issues or with nomadic populations, and that they sometimes represented the sedentary authorities alongside the sugāgu. There is no evidence in the Mari archive that the elders constituted a council or a body of officials acting for community interests. When in Mari the elders would have been related to several entities, such as the district (hālsum) or the land (mātum). In Babylonia, they were always known as the ‘city elders’ and they fulfilled a different role during the 3rd millennium and the Old-Babylonian period. These city elders were involved in city real estate property sales, but also in rentals and the exchange of fields and houses. They also participated in the management of agricultural affairs, particularly in the distribution or confiscation of plots, and in irrigation. Finally, they further participated in resolving legal issues and disputes.19 Concerning Upper Mesopotamia, the elders are also well attested in the Late Bronze Age Syrian Euphrates,     18   19   16 17

Renger 1990. Maisels 1993; Pollock 1999; Stein 2004. See notably Gelb 1979; Yoffee 1995; Diakonoff 1996; Seri 2005; Creekmore 2014. Fleming 2004.

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Working at Home in the Ancient Near East at Tell Munbāqa/Ekalte, Meskene/Emar and Tell Hadidi/Azû.20 Unlike in the case of the Mari documentation previously cited, reference to the elders does occur in the economic documents of Ekalte and Emar. It seems that the elders adopted the role of seller in Eklate public land sale contracts, where they are cited as owners of real estate, together with the city-god, Ba’laka. In the Emar documents, meanwhile, they are cited as co-owners, together with the city god Ninurta. The elders also largely appear as witnesses in real estate contracts. The lack of attestation of the elders in the economic affairs of Mari could be explained by the nature of the surviving documentation: they are mainly mentioned in letters from the royal archive. Despite the lack of supporting documentation, we may surmise that the elders also fulfilled an economic role in Mari and at earlier periods than is attested in the Upper Syrian Euphrates. The Upper Mesopotamian Economic System At the current stage of researches on Mesopotamian society, Southern Mesopotamian economic systems are quite well known, contrasting with, those of Northern Mesopotamia, which remain less well known. My previous research has already highlighted the fact that the private groups were a main component of the economic system of Bronze Age Upper Mesopotamia.21 In some cases, they were even assimilated into private enterprises. Nevertheless, if the importance of the private economic entities during the Bronze Age is now not in doubt, their organization and their relationship with official institutions have still to be defined. Upper Mesopotamian settlement patterns during the 3rd millennium differ from those observed during the same period in Southern Mesopotamia. During the first half of the 3rd millennium BC—the so-called ‘Ninevite 5’ period—Upper Mesopotamia experienced a ruralization trend. It seems that small settlements became more numerous when large cities became more rare; little is known about these large cities, as those areas have not been widely excavated. At the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC, and after the collapse of the Uruk system, Mesopotamia revealed a regionalization trend, along with the development of local trajectories, displaying the development of local styles and of specific settlement patterns. The advent of these regional specificities occurred in line with the different urban and political dynamics of the time. During this period, we can identify a development of small settlements and rural communities in Upper Mesopotamia. In this way, the 3rd millennium saw Mesopotamia’s settlement patterns, polities, and administrative and economic management halve the region into Upper and Southern Mesopotamia, and the two areas then proceeded to follow completely different trajectories. The city-states that arose in Southern Mesopotamia continued to display a high level of bureaucracy, as attested by important economic and administrative records, while the North developed according to rural dynamics, and evolved a distinctive material culture. 20 21

   

Among others, see Fijalkowska 2007; Mayer 2001; Torrecilla 2014; Viano 2010, 2012, and 2016. Mas 2013, 2014a, and 2104b.

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Juliette Mas: Oikoi and the State Upper Mesopotamia, which seems to have abandoned writing for a period of more than five centuries, also apparently experienced a complete reorganization of its land management, resources and economic system. Moreover, the available archaeological dataset reveals that Upper Mesopotamia was characterized by less complex societies than it had been during the preceding Uruk period. Nevertheless, these data suggest that the elites (or chiefdoms?), craft specialization, and control of agricultural surpluses developed considerably during the first part of the 3rd millennium, or the so-called ‘Ninevite 5’ period. During the second part of the 3rd millennium, Upper and Southern Mesopotamia went on to share a more similar development, in terms of settlement patterns, material culture, administration of the land, craft production, and polities. Households and Production Evidence in Upper Mesopotamia Households constituted a major element of the Mesopotamian city. They provided the main labor force and had the highest levels of consumption but they also employed other people to participate in their economic activities. Furthermore, they provided the populations with the food, goods and services essential for urban life. The official institutions, and especially the palace, were also institutions of main importance in this regard. However, defining the interactions between the oikoi and the palace is quite difficult, as is defining the importance of both these components individually. On the other hand, although the archaeological data provides us with evidence of production through the workshops set up in houses (installations and finds), the textual evidence is lacking concerning such production in private contexts. In fact, the majority of administrative documents discovered in houses consists of sale or loan contracts. On the other hand, although the palace provides us with official textual documentation evidencing production, except in rare cases, we have no identified archaeological evidence of production. In the cases where the public institutions did supply the raw materials, hire the workforce, and dealt with the distribution of produced goods, based on the Upper Mesopotamian archaeological data, it seems that the production usually did not take place in the palace itself. Specialized buildings are also very rare, a situation which contrasts with what could be observed in private houses.22 The attestations of production in official buildings are sporadic and sometimes doubtful. This scarcity could, of course, be due to the difficulty of recognizing such buildings during excavation, and to the coincidence of the excavations. Nevertheless, this situation contrasts greatly with what we can observe in private dwellings. In fact, the results of our previous research,23 based on the systematic analysis of the remains and finds from 375 houses indicated that 26% of the private houses 22 23

   

Mas 2013, 2014a, 2014b, and in press a. Mas 2013.

37

Working at Home in the Ancient Near East

Figure 1: Considered Upper Mesopotamian Bronze age sites in Mas 2013 (after Mas 2013)

excavated in Bronze Age levels of 35 Upper Mesopotamian sites (Figure 1) were a place to live, but also a place to produce. According to the model I suggested in this previous research, a link would have existed between the morphological shape of the houses and the means of subsistence of the inhabitants who occupied them.24 Interestingly, my research highlighted the fact that the type and size of houses were not connected to their number of inhabitants or to their wealth. We can of course assume that the households produced goods for their own use and needs within their own houses. Nevertheless, focusing on the workshops set up in these houses, it seems that these installations were built to produce goods beyond the amount required to meet the household’s own needs.25 We may wonder whether an equivalent proportion of houses were used as workshops at every site or in a systematic way, according to the type of settlement. We considered the 24 25

   

Mas 2013, 2014a, and 2014b. Mas 2013 and in press b.

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Juliette Mas: Oikoi and the State 36°E

37°E

38°E

41°E

40°E

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37°N

37°N

Tell Arbid Tell Barri

Tell Beydar Tell Abu Afur

Tell Chuera

Tell Brak

Tell al-Raqa'i

Halawa

36°N

Tell Bi'a Euphr ate

ur bo

Or o

e nt

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Selenkahiye

Tell Bderi

Tell Kneidej

Kh a

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Mer Mediterranée

Balik h

Tell Melebiya

35°N

Terqa

Mari

34°N

an

i

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t

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0

Carte J. MAS 36°E

37°E

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39°E

40°E

25

50

100 41°E

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Kilomètres 42°E

Figure 2: Considered 3rd Millennium BC Upper Mesopotamian sites (reworked after Mas 2013)

available 3rd millennium documentation (Figure 2), setting aside the houses that were not well enough preserved for us to draw any conclusions, plus the sites where fewer than five houses had been excavated and/or sufficiently preserved. We were able to select 15 sites based on these criteria, and our goal was to be able to identify any recognizable trends across those sites. The proportion of houses attesting workshops varied significantly according to the sites. Six sites showed 50% or more of their well-preserved, excavated houses with evidence of workshops having been set up within them (Table 1). This high occurrence of workshops within houses appeared not to be connected to the type of settlement. Interestingly, capital cities and large urban centers, such as Mari or Tell Bi’a, revealed a high number of workshops within houses, but that was also the case in smaller towns and villages, such as Selenkahiye, Tell Melebiya, Tell Kneidej, and Tell Bderi. According to our examination of the evidence to date, the presence of well-embedded official institutions, such as palaces and temples, does not seem to have prevented the occurrence of production, even at a large scale, in 39

Working at Home in the Ancient Near East a domestic context. However, it is also the case that small towns, and medium or large urban centers had only a few or no workshops at all in a domestic context, as was the case at Tell al Raqa’i, Tell Beydar, and Tell Arbid. Production Evidence in an Upper Mesopotamian Urban Context

Table 1: 3rd millennium selected analyzed sites Number of well-preserved excavated houses

Proportion of houses attesting workshops

Halawa

11

45%

Selenkahiye

16

50%

Tell Bi’a

8

50%

Terqa

6

17%

Mari

12

58%

Tell Chuera

33

27%

Site

Several types of organization of Tell Abu Afur 5 20% production coexisted, taking place Tell al-Raqa’i 14 0% in private houses, in specialized Tell Melebiya 12 50% buildings and/or in official Tell Kneidej 9 67% buildings. In some rare cases, Tell Bderi 15 60% evidence from urban centers allows Tell Beydar 17 0% the correlation of textual evidence Tell Arbid 5 0% with archaeological data. This is Tell Barri 8 37.5% notably the case for Tell BeydarTell Brak 16 37.5% Nabada and for Mari. Concerning Tell Beydar, it seems that production did not usually take place in private houses during the EJZ 3b period, but in specialized buildings and workshops discovered at the site. Additionally, the textual evidence reveals that the central power at the time greatly controlled the economic life of the city.26 Instead, in Mari, we can see that workshops were set up in the majority of the houses. These workshops could have been important in size and they likely employed a large number of craftsmen. This is notably the case of the so-called ‘Maison aux installations artisanales’, dated to the so-called ‘Ville II’ period (c. 2550–2300 BC) (Figure 3), whose installations were either dedicated to dyeing activities, according to J.-C. Margueron or connected to the caulking of boats and carts, according to W. Sallaberger.27 No matter which interpretation we accept, this house was a large-scale workshop. In addition, this production center included a bakery, where the grain provided by the institutions was processed, and it was also involved in animal breeding. It seems, then, that the workshops set up in private houses belonged to private groups and were managed by these households. Despite the fact that these households were clearly linked to the palace, the nature of this relationship is still unclear. In reality, it is likely that the   Concerning the archaeological and textual evidence from Tell Beydar attesting workshops and production, see Sallaberger and Pruß 2015, Pruß this volume, and related bibliography. 27   Margueron 2007; Sallaberger 2014. 26

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Mari : la maison d’habitation de la Ville II

Juliette Mas: Oikoi and the State

Figure 3: Mari. Plan themaison so-calledaux ‘Maison aux installations artisanales’ (after Margueron 2007: fig. 6) Fig. 6 –ofLa Installations artisanales (chantier B) .

households maintained only commercial relations with the palace. The groups could also have been assimilated into official oikoi, in line with the model well-known in Southern Mesopotamia.

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Working at Home in the Ancient Near East The large proportion of workshops set up in private houses in Mari28 contrasts with the evidence of production in other types of context. However, J.-C. Margueron reconstructs the so-called ‘Palais de la Ville II’ as a ‘factory-temple’ (Figure 4). This interpretation is mainly based on the comparison of installations discovered in the building with the installations unearthed in the Tell Beydar temples, interpreted by their excavators as toilets.29 Margueron interprets the Tell Beydar findings as craft installations and rejects the identification of these buildings as temples.30 In the same way, he reconstructs the ‘Ville II’ Mari palace installations as craft installations.31 Margueron also deduces that the building was an inlay objects workshop, because of the discovery of lithic tools there.32 A part of this chipped stones inventory was discovered by A. Parrot between 1964 and 1974, but the context of its discovery is unclear, and according to Parrot, the different elements could come from different phases of occupation. Finally, inlays elements have been discovered in different locations of the building or even outside33. According to Margueron, the storage of inlay-decorated panels in upper story and a possible destruction of the building by an earthquake would explain the dispersion of these finds.34 Nevertheless, whether the so-called ‘Palais de la Ville II’ was or was not an inlay workshop, does not change the reality of the situation. It is evident that, even though some kinds of specific and luxury productions may have occurred in official contexts, such as at Megiddo’s palace, for instance (as cited by Margueron), houses seem to have been, if not the only, certainly the main place of craft production in Mari, and private households a major actor of the economic system. It seems, therefore, that two different systems co-existed in large urban centers. Within the first system, craft production apparently did not take place in private contexts, but in specialized buildings, and it was either highly or completely controlled by the state. Within the second system, craft production occurred in private houses, and was managed by households, which were likely either to have been assimilated into official oikoi, or else to have been maintaining business relationships with the state. Production Evidence in an Upper Mesopotamian Rural Context This dichotomy regarding craft production also seems to have occurred within a rural environment. Looking at the Middle Khabur area during the 3rd millennium,   We can also mention the so-called ‘Maison rectangulaire de l’Espace 4’ (Margueron 2008b), the ‘Maison occidentale’ (Margueron 2008b), the ‘Maison orientale’ or ‘Maison des ânes et de la roue’ (Butterlin 2008; Margueron 2008b), the ‘Maison du Souk’ (Margueron 2007), the ‘Maison rouge’ (Margueron 2007 and 2008b) and the ‘Maison du potier’ (Margueron 2004). 29   Lebeau and Suleiman 2005; Lebeau 2006; Van der Stede 2003. 30   Margueron 2014. 31   Margueron 2008a and 2014. 32   Coqueugniot 1993; Margueron 2014. 33   See Couturaud 2013: 88–93 for A. Parrot bibliographical references and a critical analysis of the context of discovery of these finds. 34   Margueron 2014. 28

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Syria supplément 2 (2014)

MARI, VILLE II

: PALAIS OU TEMPLE-MANUFACTURE ?

273

Juliette Mas: Oikoi and the State

Figure 3. Emplacement des principales activités observées dans l’édifice dit « le palais de la Ville II » (niveau P-1) Figure 4: Plan of the so-called ‘Ville II’ Palace and suggested location of workshop. (© Mission archéologique de Mari, J.-Cl. Margueron).

Margueron (after Margueron 2014: fig. 3)

for example, we can also observe On the one hand, SILEX TAILLÉSthe DANStwo LE « different PALAIS » DE situations. MARI attestations of the workshop function are few or even absent in the houses excavated dire vrai,ofc’est certaine surprise que l’on vu apparaître des lots de are silex at Àthe sites Tellavec Abuune Afur and Tell al-Raqa’i. Ona the other hand, theimportants workshops taillés. Il ne semblaitin pas tout à fait of naturel de trouver un telKneidej, matériel and dansTell un palais du milieu du well represented the houses Tell Melebiya, Tell Bderi. e III millénaire, mais dans un premier temps la réflexion n’a pas été poussée plus loin.

At Tell al-Raqa’i, a large part of a domestic quarter has been excavated, north of the so-called ‘Round Building’ (Figure 5). In total, 14 houses have been excavated in Tell 43

Working at Home in the Ancient Near East

Figure 5: Level 3 excavated architecture and suggested extension of the site by G.M. Schwartz (after Schwartz 2015: fig. 2.84)

al-Raqa’i Level 3, dated to the EJZ 2 period (Figure 6).35 Even though the houses were all small-sized, a great deal of care has been paid to their construction. From a functional point of view, these houses offered no evidence of work installations. Furthermore, due to the characteristics and the size of the houses, we can easily deduce that these dwellings could not have housed specialized workshops dedicated to the production of goods beyond the needs of the households who occupied them. These households were, according to G.M. Schwartz, ‘economically independent’, because they were able to produce their own food. However, they did not produce goods to provide for more than their own needs, and it is difficult to determine whether these households corresponded to nuclear or extended households, and to permanent or seasonal residents.36 The excavations also revealed an ‘industrial area’ in the southwest. Even though access to this area seems to have been somehow restricted, it was certainly used by several households and/or could have been a work area controlled by the local administration. Additionally, the so-called ‘Round Building’ provided impressive 35 36

   

Schwartz 2015a. Klucas and Schwartz 2015.

44

Juliette Mas: Oikoi and the State

Figure 6: Level 3 suggested houses by E.E. Klucas and G.M. Schwartz (after Klucas and Schwartz 2015: fig. 3.2)

storage facilities, which were dedicated to grain storage. Whether these facilities were used to store grain for local consumption or for export,37 they were obviously filled thanks to the work of substantial agricultural teams. The remains of houses excavated at Tell Kneidej, at Tell Bderi and at Tell Melebiya contrast heavily with the situation observed at Tell al-Raqa’i. In fact, although some of the houses excavated at these three sites were also small in size and offered no production evidence, a large number of the excavated houses attest workshops. At Tell Melebiya, 50% of the 12 private houses excavated in Levels 3 and 2 (dated to the EJZ 3 period) attest work installations (Figures 7–9).38 Additionally, according to M. Lebeau, possible specialized production rooms or buildings have been unearthed at the site. These consist of rooms 1916, 1444, and 1445, which do not seem to belong to any house of the neighborhood (Figure 10)39. Nevertheless, the function of these rooms/buildings remains unclear and, even though they would constitute specialized buildings, they would not reduce the importance of the production installations found in a private context. In any case, most of the production seems to have occurred in private houses. This production probably provided for more than the households’     39   37 38

Schwartz 2015b. Lebeau 1993; Mas 2013. Lebeau 1993: 45, 98, pl. 14, 17 XV.5–6.

45

Working at Home in the Ancient Near East

Figure 7: Tell Melebiya. Topographical map with excavated architecture (after Lebeau 1993: pl. 12) 46

Juliette Mas: Oikoi and the State

Figure 8: Tell Melebiya. Plan of house B1 (after Lebeau 1993: pl. 44)

Figure 9: Tell Melebiya. Schematic plan of house B1 and suggested rooms functions by M. Lebeau (after Lebeau 1993: pl. 51)

needs and was dedicated to supplying goods for exchanges. Additionally, if these buildings were specialized and related to production, their size and their location within a domestic quarter indicate that they were likely built and used by households living in the neighborhood, and were not necessarily managed by official institutions. In fact, we have no evidence of any kind of control by an official institution or for the existence of official buildings at Tell Melebiya, as no textual documentation has been discovered and no official building excavated. Two Systems of Production in Upper Mesopotamia during the 3rd Millennium BC? It seems that two systems of production co-existed in both urban context and rural environments, with craft production occuring both in specialized buildings and in private houses. As this organization of production seems to have occurred both in urban and rural contexts, this would seem to invalidate the often reconstructed dichotomy between cities and villages, between the urban world and its hinterland. Indeed, although the cities and the countryside would probably have belonged to different, 47

Working at Home in the Ancient Near East

Figure 10: Tell Melebiya. Plan of excavated architecture in Area B and location of possible specialized rooms/buildings (reworked after Lebeau 1993: pl. 14)

48

Juliette Mas: Oikoi and the State yet connected, economic spheres, in each case, the organization of production seems to have taken place through the same two different systems. Although we might have imagined a more controlled system of production within the urban settlements, we should keep in mind the fact that even if there was no powerful official institution directly established in the villages, their inhabitants would have been submitted to the supervision and maybe governance of elites and/or of official households, or the oikoi. The archaeological results show that there was no site where all the excavated houses evidenced workshops. At the settlements where the majority of the houses evidenced craft production, the other houses would have belonged to people who did not work in their own home, but rather worked either as civil servants in palaces or temples, or in other households, as craftsmen or agricultural employees. We can conclude that households obviously constituted a major element of the Mesopotamian cities and villages, and that they were, in fact, the most important consumption entities. Moreover, the members of these households either constituted the main labor force and were employed by the official institutions, or they employed people themselves to participate in their economic activities. Even though it is difficult to determine the structure of the households that carried out crafts in their house, we can assume that a large number of these private groups were probably dependent on the state in some way, or were at least maintaining business relationships with the official institutions, and would likely have been assimilated into the official oikoi. However, we may wonder whether the 3rd millennium BC Upper Mesopotamian economic system, as well as the involvement of households in production, can be considered as a whole. In fact, the urban examples examined in this contribution are both dated to the second part of the 3rd millennium, while the rural examples surveyed are dated to different periods. Tell al-Raqa’i Level 3 is dated to the end of the Ninevite 5 period (i.e. to the EJZ 2 period), while Tell Melebiya Levels 2 and 3 are dated to the EJZ 3 period and are contemporaneous with the second urban revolution. Therefore, we can speculate that the economic system and the location and management of the workshops varied during the two different periods. Indeed, the first and second halves of the 3rd millennium BC are characterized by divergent dynamics regarding settlement patterns, bureaucracy, and possibly the economy. Furthermore, we have no attestation of a state during the Ninevite 5 period and little information concerning its polity. The evidence from Tell Al-Raqa’i reveals no inhouse production providing beyond the households’ needs, and we can point to the same pattern in Tell Arbid houses. Nevertheless, only two of the five well-preserved houses excavated in the Tell Arbid 3rd millennium levels are dated to the Ninevite 5 period.40 It also the case that, at the current stage of research, the Ninevite 5 Upper 40   Mas 2013. About 3rd millennium houses from Tell Arbid, see Bieliński 2000, 2004, 2007, and Smogorzewska 2004.

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Working at Home in the Ancient Near East Mesopotamian settlements are little known. Tell al-Raqa’i and Tell Arbid are the two only sites where substantial archaeological data concerning domestic architecture and housing have been collected to date. The current archaeological exploration of the Kurdistan region of Iraq, the heartland of the Ninevite 5 phenomenon, will hopefully yield new data, which will allow us to better understand the production systems in Upper Mesopotamia during the whole 3rd millennium BC timespan. Bibliography Algaze, G. 2008. Ancient Mesopotamia at the Dawn of History. The Evolution of an Urban Landscape. Chicago/London: The Chicago University Press. Bieliński, P. 2000. Tell Arbid. The Fourth Season. Polish Archaeology in the Mediterranean XI: 273–284. Bieliński, P. 2004. Tell Arbid. The 2003 Campaign of Polish-Syrian Excavations. Preliminary Report. Polish Archaeology in the Mediterranean XV: 335–353. Bieliński, P. 2007. Tell Arbid. Report on the Syrian-Polish Explorations in 2005. The Tenth Season. Polish Archaeology in the Mediterranean XVII: 451–471. Butterlin, P. 2008. Le Quartier L de Mari  : Stratigraphie et évolution du bâti, in H. Kühne, R.M. Czichon and F.J. Kreppner (eds) Proceedings of the 4th International Congress of the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East. Vol. 2. Social Cultural Transformation: The Archaeology of Transitional Period and Dark Ages. Excavations Reports: 293–300. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Coqueugniot, E. 1993. Un atelier spécialisé dans le Palais de Mari. Mari, annales de recherches interdisciplinaires 7: 205–250. Couturaud, B. 2013. Mise en scène du pouvoir au Proche-Orient au IIIe millénaire : étude iconographique du matériel d’incrustation en coquille de Mari. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Université de Versailles-St-Quentin-en-Yvelines. Creekmore, A.T. 2014. The Social Production of Space in Third-Millennium Cities of Upper Mesopotamia, in A.T. Creekmore and K.D. Fischer (eds) Making Ancient Cities: Space and Place in Early Urban Societies: 32–73. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Deimel, A. 1931. Sumerische Tempelwirtschaft zur Zeit Urukaginas u. seiner Vorgäner (Analecta Orientalia 2). Rome: Istituto Biblico. Diakonoff, I.M. 1969. The Rise of the Despotic State in Ancient Mesopotamia, in I.M. Diakonoff (ed.) Ancient Mesopotamia: Socio-Economic History. A Collection of Studies by Soviet Scholars: 173–203. Moscow: Nauka Publishing House. Diakonoff, I.M. 1985. Extended families in Old Babylonian Ur. Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und Vorderasiatische Archäologie 75: 47–65. Diakonoff, I.M. 1996. Extended Family Households in Mesopotamia (III–II millennia B.C.), in K.R. Veenhof (ed.) Houses and Households in Ancient Mesopotamia. Papers Read at the 40e Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Leiden July 5–8 1993 (Publications de l’Institut Historique-archéologique néerlandais de Stamboul 78): 55–60. Leiden/ Istanbul: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten. Fijalkowska, L. 2007. La propriété immobilière à Emar et en Syrie, du XIVème au XIIème siècle av. J.-C. Revue Internationale des droits de l’Antiquité LIV: 13–26. 50

Juliette Mas: Oikoi and the State Fleming, D.E. 2004. Democracy’s Ancient Ancestors. Mari and Early Collective Governance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foster, B. 1982. Administration and Use of Institutional Land in Sargonic Sumer (Mesopotamia. Copenhagen Studies in Assyriology 9). Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag. Foster, B. 1987. People, Land, and Produce at Sargonic Gasur, in D.I. Owen and M.A. Morrison (eds) Studies on the Civilization and Culture of Nuzi and the Hurrians 2: 89–107. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns. Foster, B. 1993. Management and Administration in the Sargonic Period, in M. Liverani (ed.) Akkad: the First World Empire. Structure, Ideology, Traditions: 25–39. Padova: Sargon. Fox, R.G. and A. Zagarell 1982. The Political Economy of Mesopotamian and South Indian Temples: The Formation and Reproduction of Urban Society. Comparative Urban Research 9: 8–27. Gelb, I.J. 1969. On the Alleged Temple and State Economies in Ancient Mesopotamia. Studi in onore di Edoardo Volterra, Vol. 6: 137–154. Gelb, I.J. 1979. Household and Family in Early Mesopotamia, in E. Lipiński (ed.) State and Temple Economy in the Ancient Near East. Proceedings of the International Conference organized by the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven from the 10th to the 14th of April 1978, Volume 1 (Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 5): 1–97. Leuven: Department Oriëntalistiek. Gregoire, J.-P. and J. Renger 1988. Die Interdependenz der wirtschaftlichen und gesellschaftlichen Strujturen von Ebla: Erwägungen zum System der OikosWirtschaft in Ebla, in H. Hauptman and H. Waetzoldt (eds) Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft in Ebla: Akten der Internationalen Tagung Heidelberg 4–7 November 1986 (Heidelberger Studien zum alten Orient 2): 211–224. Heidelberg: Heidelberger Orientverlag. Jankowska, N.B. 1986. The Role of the Extended Family in the Economic Life of the Kingdom of Arraphe. Oikumene 5: 33–42. Klucas, E.E. and G.M. Schwartz 2015. Spatial and Social Organization of Level 3, in G.M. Schwartz (ed.) Rural Archaeology in Early Northern Mesopotamia. Excavations at Tell alRaqa’i (Monumenta Archaeologica 36): 177–191. Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press. Lamberg-Karslovsky, C.C. 1999. Households, land tenure, and communication systems in the 6th–4th millennia of Greater Mesopotamia, in M. Hudson and B.A. Levine (eds) Urbanization and Land Ownership in the Ancient Near East. A Colloquium Held at New York University, November 1996, and The Oriental Institute, St. Petersburg, Russia, May 1997 (Peabody Museum Bulletin 7): 167–201. Cambridge (MA): Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology and Harvard University. Lebeau, M. 1993. Tell Melebiya, Cinq campagnes de recherches sur le Moyen-Khabour (1984– 1988) (Akkadica Supplementum 9). Leuven: Peeters. Lebeau, M. 2006. Les temples de tell Beydar et leur environnement immédiat à l’époque Early Jezirah IIIb, in P. Butterlin, M. Lebeau, J.-Y. Montchambert, J.L. Montero Fenollos and B. Muller (eds) Les Espaces syro-mésopotamiens. Dimensions de l’expérience humaine au Proche-Orient ancien. Volume d’hommage offert à Jean-Claude Margueron (Subartu XVII): 101–140. Turnhout: Brepols. Lebeau, M. and A. Suleiman 2005. La cité à l’époque Jezirah archaïque IIIb, in M. Lebeau and A. Suleiman (eds) Tell Beydar/ Nabada : une cité du Bronze ancien en Jezireh syrienne. 10 ans de travaux (1992–2002) (Documents d’Archéologie syrienne 6): 14–28. Damas: Direction générale des Antiquités et des Musées de Syrie. 51

Working at Home in the Ancient Near East Lion, B. 1999. Les archives privées d’Arrapha et de Nuzi, in D. I. Owen and G. Wilhelm (eds) Nuzi at Seventy-Five (Studies on the Civilization and Culture of Nuzi and the Hurrians 10): 35–62. Bethesda: CDL Press. Lion, B. 2004. Les adoptions d’hommes à Nuzi. Revue Historique de Droit Français et Etranger 82: 537–575. Maisels, C.K. 1993. The Households as Entreprise, in A. Wheatcraft (ed.) Near East Archaeology in the ‘Cradle of Civilization’: 171–191. London/New York: Routledge. Margueron, J.-C. 2004. Mari, métropole de l’Euphrate au IIIe et au début du IIe millénaire avant J.-C. Paris: Picard/ERC. Margueron, J.-C. 2007. Mari : la maison d’habitation de la Ville II. Akh Purattim 2: 227– 244. Margueron, J.-C. 2008a. Notes d’archéologie et d’architecture orientales. 15 – Installations hygiéniques ou artisanales ? Syria 85: 175–222. Margueron, J.-C. 2008b. L’architecture domestique de la Ville I de Mari (XXXe-XXVIIe siècles), in H. Kühne, R.M. Czichon and F.J. Kreppner (eds) Proceedings of the 4th International Congress of the Archaeology of Ancient Near East 29 March–3 April 2004, Freie Universität Berlin, Volume 1: 421–430. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. Margueron, J.-C. 2014. Mari, Ville II : Palais ou temple-manufacture ?, in Mari, ni Est, ni Ouest (Syria Supplément II): 265–290. Beyrouth: Institut Français du Proche-Orient. Marzahn, J. 2002. ‘Oikos’ und Tributwirtschaft – Wirtschaftsmodelle des Alten Orients in der Kritik, in A. Hausleiter, S. Kernen and B. Müller-Neuhof (eds) Material Culture and Mental Spheres. Rezeption Archäologischer Denkrichtungen in Der Vorderasiatischen Altertumskunde: Internationales Symposium Für Hans J. Nissen, Berlin, 23.-24. Juni 2000 (Alter Orient und Altes Testament 293): 267–271. Münster: Ugarit Verlag. Mas, J. 2013. Maison, architecture domestique et société dans le Moyen-Euphrate et la Djézireh syrienne à l’âge du Bronze. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Université Lumière Lyon 2. Mas, J. 2014a. Early Bronze Age Houses in Upper-Mesopotamia: Evidence of Dwellings or Private Enterprises?, in F. Buccellati, T. Helms and A. Tamm (eds) House and Household Economies in 3rd Millennium B.C.E. Syro-Mesopotamia (British Archaeological Reports International Series 2682): 95–102. Oxford: Archaeopress. Mas, J. 2014b. Bronze Age Domestic Architecture in Eastern Syria: Familiar, Social and Economic Implications, in P. Bieliński, M. Gawlikowski, R. Koliński, D. Lawecka, A. Soltysiak, Z. Wygnańska (eds) Proceedings of the 8th International Congress of the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East, 30 April–4th May 2012, University of Warsaw, Volume 1: 251–270. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Mas, J. in press a. Espaces et fonctions. Le cas des maisons de Haute-Mésopotamie à l’âge du Bronze, in L. Battini (ed.) Penser l’espace en Mésopotamie : entre aménagements et interprétations (Archaeopress Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology 8). Oxford: Archaeopress. Mas, J. in press b. Les aménagements immobiliers. Problèmes d’identification et d’interprétation, in L. Battini (ed.) Penser l’espace en Mésopotamie : entre aménagements et interprétations (Archaeopress Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology 8). Oxford: Archaeopress. Mayer, W. 2001. Ausgrabungen in Tall Munbaqa – Ekalte Band II. Die Texte (Wissenschaftliche Veröffentlichungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 102). Saarbrücker: Saarbrücker Druckerei und Verlag. 52

Juliette Mas: Oikoi and the State McCorriston, J. 1997. The Fiber Revolution: Textile Extensification, Alienation, and Social Stratification in Ancient Mesopotamia. Current Anthropology 38: 517–549. Pollock, S. 1999. Ancient Mesopotamia. The Eden that Never Was. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Postgate, J.N. 1995. Early Mesopotamia. Society and Economy at the Dawn of the History. London/New York: Routledge. Renger, J. 1990. Different Economic Spheres in the Urban Economy of Ancient Mesopotamia, in E. Aerts and H. Klengel (eds) The Town as Regional Economic Centre in the Ancient Near East. Tenth International Economic History Congress, Session B-16 (Studies in the Social and Economic History 20): 20–28. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Rowton, M.B. 1976. Dimorphic Structure and the Parasocial Element. Journal of Near Eastern Studies 36: 181–198. Rowton, M.B. 1981. Economic and Political Factors in Ancient Nomadism, in J. Silva Castillo (ed.) Nomads and Sedentary People: 25–36. Mexico: Colegio de Mexico. Sallaberger, W. 2014. Urban Organizations for Offerings, Overland Traffic and the Euphrates Trade at Pre-Sargonic Mari, in Mari, ni Est, ni Ouest (Syria Supplément II): 341–354. Beyrouth: Institut Français du Proche-Orient. Sallaberger, W. and A. Pruß 2015. Home and Work in Early Bronze Age Mesopotamia: ‘Ration Lists’ and ‘Private Houses’ at Tell Beydar/Nabada, in P. Steinkeller and M. Hudson (eds) Labor in the Ancient World: a Colloquium held at Hirschbach (Saxony), April 2005 (International Scholars Conference on Ancient Near Eastern Economies 5): 69–136. Dresden: Islet. Schloen, J.D. 2001. The House of the Father as Fact and Symbol. Patrimonialism in Ugarit and the Ancient Near East (Studies in the Archaeology and History of the Levant 2). Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns. Schneider, A. 1920. Die Anfänge der Kulturwirtschaft: die sumerische Tempelstadt (Staatswissenschaftliche Beiträge 4). Essen: G.D. Baedeker. Schwartz, G.M. 2015a. Stratigraphic and Architectural History, in G.M. Schwartz (ed.) Rural Archaeology in Early Northern Mesopotamia. Excavations at Tell al-Raqa’I (Monumenta Archaeologica 36): 21–176. Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press. Schwartz, G.M. 2015b. Discussion and Conclusions, in G.M. Schwartz (ed.) Rural Archaeology in Early Northern Mesopotamia. Excavations at Tell al-Raqa’I (Monumenta Archaeologica 36): 627–643. Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press. Seri, A. 2005. Local Power in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia. London: Equinox. Smogorzewska, A. 2004. Late Ninivite 5 Quarter at Tell Arbid. Orient-Express 2004/3: 69–71. Stein, G. 2004. Structural Parameters and Sociocultural Factors in the Economic Organization of North Mesopotamian Urbanism in the Third Millennium B.C., in G.M. Feinman and L.M. Nicholas (eds) Archaeological Perspectives on Political Economies: 61–78. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Stone, E.C. 2007. The Mesopotamian Urban Experience, in E.C. Stone (ed.) Settlement and Society: Essays Dedicated to Robert McCormick Adams: 213–234. Los Angeles/ Chicago: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology and Oriental Institute. Torrecilla, E. 2014. Late Bronze Age Ekalte. Chronology, Society, and Religion of a Middle Euphrates Town. Saarbrücken: Scholars’ Press. 53

Working at Home in the Ancient Near East Van der Stede, V. 2003. Drains verticaux et matériel associé, in M. Lebeau and A. Suleiman (eds) Tell Beydar. Rapport préliminaire sur les campagnes de fouilles 1995-1999 (Subartu 10): 189–202. Turnhout: Brepols. Viano, M. 2010. The Economy of Emar I. Field Property Sales. Aula Orientalis 28: 259– 283. Viano, M. 2012. The Economy of Emar II. Aula Orientalis 30: 109–164. Viano, M. 2016. The Economy of Emar III. Aula Orientalis 34: 149–177. Yoffee, N. 1995. Political Economy in Early Mesopotamian States. Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 281–311.

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Reconstructing the Flow of Life and Work in Mesopotamian Houses: An Integrated Textual and Multisensory Approach Paolo Brusasco1 Introduction It is well known that to gather a more comprehensive picture of how life and work are regulated in ancient Mesopotamian houses, a combined analysis of textual and architectural data must be carried out. However, texts are rarely present in domestic quarters, nor do they always speak the truth about daily practices occurring at home. Nevertheless, investigations of social dynamics related to household composition, social hierarchy and labour have been almost exclusively grounded on textual evidence,2 while rarely sociological approaches to space use have been employed to detect how life and work actually developed in the material world.3 Moreover, the architectural data are also not easy to study, given the fragmentary nature of mudbrick houses whose malleable material allows for multiple changes. However, extensive neighbourhoods from Old Babylonia Ur and Nippur in southern Mesopotamia, excavated in the 1920s and in the post-World War II by British and American joint Expeditions respectively, are ideal venues of study: they have great expanses of excavated houses and a great deal of archival evidence in the form of legal transactions and business documents found in situ within the houses, thus allowing to establish a direct link between space and house owners. Although these are old excavations and thus lack the modern technique of micro-morphological analysis,4 Woolley’s methods of dig were well ahead of their time in terms of the precision of the recording system. Drawing on and developing work I have published elsewhere,5 I combine here social space analysis with textual evidence in order to problematise the relationship between habitual action/work carried out on a daily base and the way this is conceptualised in the written sources. I emphasise the role played by ‘lived space’, namely multisensorial semiosis and human perceptions.

  Scuola di Scienze Umanistiche-Università degli Studi di Genova, [email protected]   Cf. Charpin 1986; Stone 1987; Van De Mieroop 1992; Baker 2015. 3   Cf. Pfälzner 1996; Matthews 2003: 155–182. 4   See Stone 2015: 437–438, for a critical assessment of the potentials of micro-archaeological analysis as opposed to studies based on old excavations. 5   Cf. Brusasco 1999/2000: 1–173; 2004: 142–157; 2007; 2015: 117–150.

1 2

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Working at Home in the Ancient Near East The Archaeological Evidence Situated on the Euphrates river near the provincial capital of Nasiriyah, Ur, the ancient capital city of Ur-Nammu (2112–2095 BC), has a size of approximately 60 ha. The city’s commercial role is clearly shown by the presence of at least two harbours, one on the west side, the other in the northern sector of the city, for overland commerce and overseas trade with the Persian Gulf.6 It is to the Joint Expedition of the British Museum and the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, directed by Leonard Woolley in the years 1922–1934, that one owes the exposure of the main sites considered here. Evidence of private working activities were found in the four residential sites AH, EM, MS and EH, especially in the former two major neighbourhoods measuring respectively about 8000 m² and 2900 m². All of them have a main occupation in the Isin-Larsa and Old Babylonian periods, when ‘The houses then were violently overthrown at one and the same time, in 1738 BC’.7 While I offer a cursory review of the main aspects associated with different kinds of working activities in the AH site (Figure 1), I focus primarily on square houses such as No. 2 Church Lane and the double court house No. 1 Old Street/ 3 Straight Street, for their potential of combining directly texts and space layout. Some general considerations on the EH peculiar houses are also relevant to the association of labour and residential activities discussed here (Figure 2). More modest linear buildings with a single row of rooms such as House H from TA Nippur are also analysed, in order to investigate relatively less fortunate and wealthy citizens. Nippur covers about 73 ha and was excavated in post-World War II by the Joint Expedition of the University Museum of Philadelphia and the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago which uncovered the two major domestic areas TA and TB whose main remains date to the Isin-Larsa and Old Babylonian periods.8 Theory and Method for the Study of Nonverbal Semiosis In order to trace workshops and business activities of various kinds occurring at home, analyses of traditional, two-dimensional plans are obsolete, since houses are lived more like physical experiences involving all the human senses. As I have recently shown, a move in this direction is represented by the introduction of the concept of ‘sensorial map’ emphasising the flow of life.9 Methods stemming from environmental/social psychology as well as Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory and Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of habitus stress the importance of recurrent nonverbal cues as indicators of ancient behavioral responses.10 From 6   See Van De Mieroop 1992 for a comprehensive analysis of society and enterprise in the Old Babylonian period at Ur which is mainly based on the textual evidence. 7   Cf. Woolley and Mallowan 1976: 13. 8   Cf. McCown and Haines 1967; see Stone 1987: appendix II for the discussion of field entries of tablets. 9   Cf. Brusasco 2015: pl. 117–149 10   Bourdieu 1977: 72; Giddens 199

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Figure 1: AH site at Ur (after Woolley and Mallowan 1976: pl. 124) 57

Working at Home in the Ancient Near East this perspective, business activities imply an emphasis on the interaction between visitors and residents, as well as their perception of domestic space. These dimensions can be captured by sensorial maps: a combination of space syntax graphs showing accessibility systems (the distance of each room from the outside and their relations within the network) and sensorial zones decreasing in size through vision (co-presence zone of radius 91.4 m), hearing (30.17 m), smell (9.14 m), indirect touch (2.7 m) and tactile contact (c. 1 m).11 Although access/ privacy and hierarchy of senses are culture-specific, they universally share the idea of the control of undesired interpersonal contact. According to social psychology, graphs with strong accessibility and proximity between different Figure 2: EH site at Ur (after Woolley and Mallowan spaces and actors, as well as simple 1976: pl. 127) sensorial inputs, indicate relatively friendly-informal interactions, while more structured charts with restricted access and complex sensory manipulations point to more hierarchical relations.12 Detecting Work through Preliminary Activity Area Analysis Owing to the extensive sample of excavated houses and their good preservation due to the fire that burnt the buildings and their tablets and finds, in my previous work I was able to determine the main functions of the single loci of most of the Ur houses.13 Overall, there is a relatively small degree of architectural segmentation: most of the rooms analysed have a small density of features and finds and thus are multifunctional spaces, while spaces with an emphasis on working activities such as archive rooms, storerooms and workrooms represent the most task-specific loci.14 Ciolek 1982: 223–242.    Cf. Brusasco 2007: 24–25. 13   Cf. Brusasco 1999/2000: 60–93; see also Stone 2015: 438–439, 440–442, for a critical discussion of context and activity areas. 14   Cf. Brusasco 2015: 126, figure 6.6. 11

12

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Brusasco: Reconstructing the Flow of Life and Work in Mesopotamian Houses Working activities have been highlighted through archaeological parameters. Storage areas can be identified by the significant presence of ‘quantities of burnt straw and, in some cases, carbonised grain and date-stones’ from some loci ‘smoothly faced with mud plaster’ in No. 3 Store Street, AH, Ur (Figure 3).15 Their average size of 5 m² (range between 2 and 9 m²) offers an estimator for the identification of rooms with similar functions. Likewise, workrooms-service rooms have a mean size of 11 m² and show remains of brick platforms, dry goods, foods, utensils hinting at daily tasks such as milk and food processing, tool repairing, etc. Storage and workshop areas are generally located in an utilitarian suite (with the kitchen) serving the entire household. Alternatively they may be found within the chapel-main living room suite thus being controlled by a dominant family.16 In fact, a strong asymmetric patterning is clearly visible in the layouts of Ur houses: a distinction between a dominant family sector located in the main living room within the extremely large chapel suite (the biggest self-contained area of the house) and smaller residential rooms in which probably less powerful residents live (secondary branches with poorer graves). The chapel suite has hearths and benches, as well as valuables such as tablets, weapons and decorated ware; it is thus a multifunctional space where, in addition to the ancestor cult carried out in the chapel itself, business activities are regulated by the dominant family and archived in different files kept near the altar.17 However, despite this spatial subdivision, which is corroborated by textual evidence (a preferential share to the eldest son), the household should have shared toilets, kitchen, courtyard and, particularly during festivities, the chapel suite where the common ancestors were buried.18 As suggested by ethnographic parallels, if each living room is inhabited by one single nuclear family, then the archaeological identification of residential spaces highlights family composition, namely nuclear families and extended families.19 Particularly important for interfacing trade and business activities are boundary spaces such as the entrance area of the house, in some cases expanded into a set of loci forming articulated suites. The presence of benches, stands and water jars suggest they are used as reception rooms for outsiders. The intermingling of residential, private and public functions are evident, for example, in houses such as No. 1 Broad Street, a scribal school as shown by the hundreds of literary texts found in the courtyard, No. 14 Paternoster Row, probably a bakery for the presence of bread ovens and jars in a room facing the street, and No. 1 B Baker’s Square, the house and workshop of a copper smith for the presence of furnaces in open spaces. Single spaces like those   Cf. Woolley and Mallowan 1976: 140; Brusasco 1999/2000: 83.   Cf. Brusasco 1999/2000: 83–85. 17   Cf. Woolley and Mallowan 1976: 29–30; Brusasco 2015: 125. 18   Stone 2015: 413, rightly points out this sharing of space; I have always implied the same pattern but probably have not made it clear. 19   Cf. Brusasco 1999/2000: 69–70, table 2.5. 15 16

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Figure 3: Storerooms in No. 3 Store Street, AH, Ur (after Woolley and Mallowan 1976: pl. 124)

in Bazaar Alley may also be used as shops or storerooms, though no shop counters have been found (Figure 4).20 A few areas of Ur were specialised industries for the production of different goods. In particular, the outlying suburb of Diqdiqqah, located on the north-east of the Figure 4: Workshops, shops and storerooms in the AH site, Ur (after Woolley and Mallowan 1976: pl. 124) city close to ‘a meeting-place of waterways constructed or restored by Ur-Nammu’ and used until the Old Babylonian period and later, was a ‘workingclass suburb given over to the minor handicrafts such as the moulding of terracottas and the making of cylinder seals and glazed frit amulets’.21 Moreover, the site EH (Figure 2), located in the south corner of Nebuchadnezzar’s temenos wall, though badly eroded, may be the home and workshop of artisans whose activities required the presence of water, as shown by the particular range of small buildings formed of

  Cf. Woolley and Mallowan 1976: 24, 136–137, 153–159; Brusasco 1999/2000: 87–90; ‘storehouse/ storeroom’ are also shown in textual evidence: É-G̃Á-NUN, arahhum and ašlukkatum; Kalla 1996: 248; Brusasco 2007: 47. 21   See Woolley and Mallowan 1976: 81–87, for the presence of clay moulds from which the terracotta figurines were cast, and trial-pieces of cylinder seals and gem-cutters. 20

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Brusasco: Reconstructing the Flow of Life and Work in Mesopotamian Houses a forecourt with two small back chambers, with graves and numerous terracotta ring drains associated with them.22 Work in Textual Sources and Sensorial Plans The combination of textual evidence and sensorial plans suggests different specific family sociologies with the presence of various degrees of tension among residents and between residents and visitors. Privacy-accessibility and sensory control tend to progressively increase from linear houses to square and double court houses with a parallel increase in the degree of complex social relations and business activities at larger scale. I consider here three examples. Simple Linear Houses The shallow graphs of linear houses display a generally interior-exterior orientation with an affiliative/interactive dimension both among residents and between residents and visitors—a feature which correlates with local scale business as evidenced by textual archives. For example, in House H, TA, Nippur, of about 60 m², the 12 school texts and three contracts found in the latest occupation dated to 1734 BC shed light on the history of three generations living in this house for about 50 years (1792–1734 BC, Hammurapi and Samsu-iluna) (Figure 5).23 After the fissioning of the square House H/G, House H went first to Lipit-Ištar, and then to his cousin Imgur-Sîn, and finally to Enlil-nīšu, probably Imgur-Sîn’s younger cousin. These actors engage in entrepreneurial activities such as the lending of money (Text 57, silver loan in 1755 BC), sales and rentals of fields (Text 59, 1739 BC), scribal training, and probably also temple or palace administration.24 Although some residents may have ties with the temple organisation, they belong to the non-state sector and work as private traders and businessmen. The witnessing of each other’s documents may suggest close kinship and economic relations with the related inhabitants of House G.25 Sensorial plans of the house spatialise such activities in the following way. The linear House H is relatively small, and with a circulation path of about 13 m, from the entrance 1 to the farthest room 4, it is set up within the co-presence zones of all major senses. Only the 9.14-meter co-presence smell zone divides space (see two yellow circles): cooking undertaken in the furthest space 4 with respect to the entrance is out of   Cf. Brusasco 1999/2000: 89–90; see Woolley and Mallowan 1976: 72-79, for their interpretation as public structures: ‘a range of quarters intended for the priests or others attached to the religious building’. 23   As shown in Stone 1987: 67–69, the contracts were found in the lobby 1 (Text 59), the courtyard 2 (Text 57), and the chapel/family room 4 (Text 58). 24   See the temple ties of Lipit-Ištar’s brother Iddin-Ninurta, a nu-èš temple agent, residing in the neighbouring House G; Brusasco 2007: 60, 62. 25   See Diakonoff 1996: 55–60 and Brusasco 2007: 62, for the pattern of witnessing economic texts by members of the same extended family. 22

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Working at Home in the Ancient Near East olfactory reach for inhabitants or visitors standing in the entrance lobby 1 or close-by.26 Square Houses Fully-flanked courtyard houses such as No. 2 Church Lane at Ur, of about 200 m², map business activities on local scale, but family archives show that these activities are more articulated than in the linear houses (Figure 6). The family genealogy may be reconstructed through the 45 texts recovered in situ in two pots laying on the floors of the main living room 8 and the Figure 5: Linear House H, TA, Nippur: family genealogy and sensorial map entrance sector 11. In 1820 BC (Rim-Sîn 2), the initial phase of the house, Tāb-ilišu, the only house occupant, is involved in local trade, the acquisition of real estate and storage space, as well as boat building (UET V, 439).27 The dowry of his wife, Rubātum, consists of 1.5 kg of silver, five slaves, many pieces of furniture and different utensils for textile home production and grain grinding (looms and spindles, grindstones) (UET V, 793); this provides clues about the main domestic tasks carried out by women and their slaves on a daily base. In 1803 BC (Rim-Sîn 19), the inheritance text UET V, 12a-b confirms the presence of an extended family with vertical inheritance and social inequality among the resident families. In fact, at Tāb-ilišu’s death, the elder brother Sîn-tukultī inherits the 10% extra-share of 40 m² which roughly corresponds to the chapel and main living room suite 7-8-9; he is consequently in charge of the ancestor cult. The second elder brother Lipit-Eštar probably occupies the smaller living room 6 (19 m²), while the two junior brothers Sîn-iqīšam and Eštar-iltī may either live in some residential spaces on the upper floor or take up residence somewhere else. In the last occupation, the dominant family member is the businessman Apil-kittim who possibly inhabits the main living room 8, where his archive was found, and controls the chapel suite, while his cousin and business partner Iddin-Ea may reside in the living room 6 as he often acts as witness in Apil-kittim’s deeds and both of   Drawing from the textual evidence (house omens), smell of bread, meat, oil, ghee, aromatic plants and wine are all likely possibilities, but also garbage smell like in modern crowded neighbourhoods of the region; Brusasco 2015: 131; Stone 2015: 443. 27   UET V corresponds to Ur Excavations Texts V published by Figulla and Martin 1953. 26

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Brusasco: Reconstructing the Flow of Life and Work in Mesopotamian Houses

Figure 6: Square house No. 2 Church Lane, AH, Ur: family genealogy and sensorial map

them share a similar type of seal impression. As shown by texts UET V, 38, 630, 822–824, 826–833, 838, spanning the years 1792–1787 BC (Rim-Sîn 31-36), Apil-kittim supervises a broad organisation of merchants (Nidittum, Ahiya, etc.) and manages numerous cowherds, herds of cattle and dairy products; his clients include also the temple (UET V, 821, 846).28 Social asymmetry among resident families is spatialized by the stronger integration of the main living room 8 with respect to the secondary living room 6 which is more marginalised in the graph. Visual dynamics, smell, as well as dark and light contrasts are also emphasised in order to reinforce power inequality. The house’s main entrance from the courtyard 3 would have impressed business partners by creating a better and wider view of Apil-kittim’s main living room 8.29 When cooking is carried out in the single living rooms 6 and 8, where fireplaces are also present, the 9.14-meter co-presence smell zone may split the house into two nearly equivalent sectors, the   Brusasco 2007: 92; see also Diakonoff 1996: 59, for stressing the presence of related people witnessing each others’ documents. 29   The two-dimensional 60° isovist area, the volume of space visible from a specific vantage point, is of 17.8 m². 28

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Working at Home in the Ancient Near East olfactory zone of the dominant family being independent from the smell range of both the additional family and visitors. Further, a pattern of light-lightshadow-light may be evidenced by following the path of users or visitors from the street and the entrance courtyard 3 to the main living room 8 and the chapel 9 (only half covered) at the farthest end of the house (Figure 7). Conversely, the pattern ending in the darkness of the secondary living room 6 would decrease the visual importance of the junior family which is relatively more Figure 7: Pattern of shadow and light in No. 2 Church Lane, separated from visitors. If locally AH, Ur based kin such as Ibni-Ea, his wife Tabni-Ištar and slaves,30 instead of business partners and merchants, visit the house, they may be received in the separate entrance suite 1-2-10-11 with an emphasis on darkness and corridor-like spaces. Double Court Houses In double court houses such as No. 1 Old Street/ 3 Straight Street, AH, Ur (c. 300 m²), the doubling of the chapel suite points to complex social inequality among resident families, while such extremely structured graph with very expanded entrance suites correlate with complex social relations and international business (Figure 8). Fortysix texts shed light on the family history between 1834 and 1804 BC. In my previous analysis, based on the study of tablets’ provenance, I have shown that Ea-nāṣir’s family probably resides in the main living room 5 of the north sector No. 1 Old Street (where his archive was found), while his father Sîn-magir lives in the additional main living room 6 of the south unit No. 3 Straight Street, and Sîn-magir’s junior brother Ur-Ningal probably resides in the living room 4 of the same house. An interesting specialisation in terms of business activities occurs within the household firm: as shown in texts UET V, 81, 520, 554, 661, 673, 796, Ea-nāṣir is a seafaring merchant of international repute working in long distance expeditions. He is an ālik Telmun, ‘one who travels to Tilmun’ (UET V, 81, 796), modern Bahrain, where he acquires copper ingots in exchange of silver, sesame oils and garments.31 By contrast, Sîn-magir and   This couple and their slaves are attested in UET V, 94, 1783 BC (Rim-Sîn 39).   These texts were found in lobby 1, entrance 7, courtyard 2 and chapel 6 of No. 1 Old Street; see Brusasco 1999/2000: 6, 164–165, for the findspot analysis of the archive based on Woolley’s original field

30 31

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Brusasco: Reconstructing the Flow of Life and Work in Mesopotamian Houses his brother work at Ur on a local scale in order to procure export items such as grain, sesame oil, baskets, wool and cloths for the son’s international trade (UET V, 307, 587).32 Ea-nāṣir’s daughter Geme-Eštar is attested in 1812 BC (UET V, 722) in the management of the local production of textiles and wool, and, like the Assyrian women from Ashur, in the furnishing of textiles to her male relatives engaged in international trade.33 The graph of the double court house is still deeper and more articulated, with a more complex set of sensorial inputs. The moderate integration of Ea-nāṣir’s main living room 5 within the chart and its stronger connection to the long series of north entrances VII-7 indicate that his control is more directed towards external affairs than internal family relations. Conversely, Sîn-magir’s family branch living in the south sector (No. 3 Straight Street) displays more control on internal movements, especially through the chapel suite 6-7-10 which is set up at the hub of the network (it connects the two houses), and less dominance over external relations. More complex regulation of movements are associated here to manipulation of light and shadow, sounds, smell and fields of view. In the north house of Ea-nāṣir (No. 1 Old Street), sight line from the main living room 5 emphasises his supervision (isovist) over the entrance area VII-7.34 Further, a variation of soundscape (a floor surface change) and light, besides matching the basic needs for light and drainage,35 might also impress important visitors such as the wakil tamkāri (‘chief of the merchants’) Šumi-abum mentioned in the letter UET V, 40336 and the investors Imgur-Sin, Iliidinnam, Appa and Nigga-Nanna (UET V, 5–7, 20, 23, 54, 81):37 the clay floor of the long dark passageway VII-7, with its limited reverberation of footsteps, would have created a sharp contrast to the amplification of sounds and light generated by the brick pavement of the open yard 2 (Figure 9). Indeed, texts show that the court is an important space where ‘copper ingots are chosen one by one’ by Ea-nāṣir’s investors (UET V, 81). With a circulation route of about 37 m from the north unit to the south house, the 9.14-meter smell zone may split the all building in at least two distinct smell sectors centred on the two courtyards (Figure 8, see yellow circles). The hearing co-presence zone of 30.17 m defines also two separate areas (green circles): sounds/noise produced catalogue and field notes. Cf. also Oppnheim 1954: 10–11. 32   These texts were recovered in chapel 10 and passage 7 of No. 3 Straight Street; Brusasco 1999/2000: 165–167. 33   Brusasco 2007: 100. 34   The same applies to the south house No. 3 Straight Street in which the sight line from the main living room 6 stresses Sîn-magir’s visual control on the entrance area III. 35   See Stone 2015: 443, for rightly stressing the importance of ‘common place solutions to the need of light’ and for criticising my emphasis on deliberate design. 36   Cf. Leemans 1960: 51; Brusasco 2007: 101. 37   They lend trading capital to Ea-nāṣir and instruct him for importing vast amounts of copper ingots, approx. 5553 kg (UET 5, 796); Van De Mieroop 1992: 136–137; also the palace is among the investors (UET V, 4, 123, 667, 805); Brusasco 1999/2000: 133; 2007: 101.

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Working at Home in the Ancient Near East by conversations and movements occurring in proximity of the entrance spaces of both sectors, spaces reserved for business, may be out of hearing reach for residents living in the inner part of the building. Conclusions Although textual sources have a pivotal importance in illustrating different kinds of business activities undertaken by individual actors, I have argued that it is sensorial maps which allow understanding of the habitual routine and daily actions carried out in the ‘lived space’. The integration of theories of social space, access analysis and environmental psychology provide useful ideas for the study of work and life in ancient residential quarters. Activity area analysis associated with examinations of circulation patterns, soundscapes, olfactory and visual isovists have a strong potential in capturing the spatial dimension of social relations and working activities. While specialised workshops and shops are spread across the main

Figure 8: Double court house No. 1 Old Street/ 3 Straight Street, AH, Ur: family genealogy and sensorial map 66

Brusasco: Reconstructing the Flow of Life and Work in Mesopotamian Houses neighbourhoods analysed, and every dwelling investigated is provided with working facilities, there is also no clear-cut division between state-temple (public) mansions and private trade since most of the families work on both private and public levels. I have also argued that increasing degrees of articulation of sensorial inputs correlate with corresponding levels of hierarchical relations and business activities at progressively larger scales, from the local level of simple linear houses such as H, TA, Nippur to the more articulated trade of the square house No. 2 Church Lane at Ur, ending with the international enterprise of the double court house No. 1 Old Street/ 3 Straight Street (Figure 10). In tune with strategies to avoid property fragmentation, social practices and work are mainly focused on the power and control of the head of household in structured settings. However, an ideal template and deliberate design must come to terms with negotiation and adjustments, determining individual variation and compromise. For example, phenomenological approaches cannot

Figure 9: Different soundscapes in No. 1 Old Street/ 3 Straight Street, AH, Ur

2,5 2 1,5

SMELL SIGHT

1

HEARING

0,5 0

Linear Houses

Square Houses

Double Court Houses

Figure 10: Increasing degrees of articulation of sensorial inputs from linear houses to square houses to double court houses 67

Working at Home in the Ancient Near East detect the presence of multiple actors and family members cohabiting with the main family and/or residing in upper floor rooms, nor is it possible through material data alone to infer the presence of slaves, their activities and allocation of special sectors of the house. This suggests once again the need for social models based both on literary and nonverbal sources, inclusive of micro-archaeology, and these may be beneficial to contexts which lack the unique combination of texts and architecture. Acknowledgements: I wish to thank the organizers of this workshop Juliette Mas and Palmiro Notizia. Bibliography Baker, H.D. 2015. Family Structure, Household Cycle, and the Social Use of Domestic Space in Urban Babylonia, in M. Müller (ed.) Household Studies in Complex Societies. (Micro) Archaeological and Textual Approaches, Papers from the Oriental Institute Seminar held at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 15–16 March 2013 (Oriental Institute Seminars Number 10): 371–407. Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice, Translated by Richard Nice (Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology 16). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brusasco, P. 1999/2000. Family Archives and the Social Use of Space in Old Babylonian Houses at Ur. Mesopotamia 34–35: 1–173. Brusasco, P. 2004. Theory and Practice in the Study of Mesopotamian Domestic Space. Antiquity 78: 142–157. Brusasco, P. 2007. The Archaeology of Verbal and Nonverbal Meaning. Mesopotamian Domestic Architecture and Its Textual Dimension (British Archaeological Reports, International Series 1631). Oxford: Archaeopress. Brusasco, P. 2015. Interaction between Texts and Social Space in Mesopotamian Houses: A Movement and Sensory Approach, in M. Müller (ed.) Household Studies in Complex Societies. (Micro) Archaeological and Textual Approaches, Papers from the Oriental Institute Seminar held at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 15–16 March 2013 (Oriental Institute Seminars Number 10): 117–149. Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Charpin, D. 1986. Le clergé d’Ur au siècle d’Hammurabi (XIX–XVIII siècles av. J.-C.) (Hautes Études Orientales 22). Paris/Geneva: Droz. Ciolek, T.M. 1982. Zones of Co-presence in Face-to-face Interaction: Some Observational Data. Man-Environment Systems 12: 223–242. Diakonoff, I.M.1996. Extended Family Households in Mesopotamia (III-II millennia B.C.), in K.R. Veenhof (ed.) Houses and Households in Ancient Mesopotamia. Papers Read at the 40e Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Leiden July 5–8 1993 (Publications de l’Institut Historique-archéologique néerlandais de Stamboul 78): 55–60. Leiden/ Istanbul: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten. Figulla, H.H. and W.J. Martin 1953. Letters and Documents of the Old-Babylonian Period (Ur Excavations Texts 5). London/Philadelphia: The British Museum/University Museum of Pennsylvania. 68

Brusasco: Reconstructing the Flow of Life and Work in Mesopotamian Houses Giddens, A. 1979. Central Problems in Social Theory. Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press. Kalla, G. 1996. Das altbabylonische Wohnhaus und seine Struktur nach philologischen Quellen, in K.R. Veenhof (ed.) Houses and Households in Ancient Mesopotamia. Papers Read at the 40e Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Leiden July 5–8 1993 (Publications de l’Institut Historique-archéologique néerlandais de Stamboul 78): 247–256. Leiden/Istanbul: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten. Leemans, W.F. 1960. Foreign Trade in the Old Babylonian Period (Studia et documenta ad iura Orientis Antiqui pertinentia 6). Leiden: Brill. Matthews, R. 2003. The Archaeology of Mesopotamia. Theories and Approaches. London/ New York: Routledge. McCown, D.E. and R.C. Haines 1967. Nippur 1. Temple of Enlil, Scribal Quarter, and Soundings. Excavations of the Joint Expedition to Nippur of the University Museum of Philadelphia and the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (Oriental Institute Publications 78). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Oppenheim, A.L. 1954. The Seafaring Merchants of Ur. Journal of the American Oriental Society 74: 6–17. Pfälzner, P. 1996. Activity Areas and the Social Organisation of 3rd Millennium B.C. Households, in K.R. Veenhof (ed.) Houses and Households in Ancient Mesopotamia. Papers Read at the 40e Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Leiden July 5–8 1993 (Publications de l’Institut Historique-archéologique néerlandais de Stamboul 78): 117–127. Leiden/Istanbul: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten. Stone, E.C. 1987. Nippur Neighborhoods (Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization 44). Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Stone, E.C. 2015. Social Conditions in the Ancient Near East. Houses and Households in Perspective, in M. Müller (ed.) Household Studies in Complex Societies. (Micro) Archaeological and Textual Approaches, Papers from the Oriental Institute Seminar held at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 15–16 March 2013 (Oriental Institute Seminars Number 10). Chicago: 437–446. The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Van De Mieroop, M. 1992. Society and Enterprise in Old Babylonian Ur (Berliner Beiträge zum Vorderen Orient 12). Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag. Woolley, C.L. and M.E.L. Mallowan 1976. The Old Babylonian Period. Ur Excavations 7, Publications of the Joint Expedition of the British Museum and of the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania to Mesopotamia. New York/London: Carnegie Corporation and The British Museum.

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The House of Ur-saga: Ur III Merchants in Their Non-Institutional Context Steven J. Garfinkle1 The activities of merchants were especially significant as managers of exchange on behalf of the large institutions of southern Mesopotamia. Some debate continues as to whether the merchants were under the direct control of the institutions or whether they were engaged in entrepreneurial activities on behalf of their own households. This paper focuses on the evidence for one very active family of merchants at Ĝirsu/ Lagaš in order to reinforce my conclusion that the merchants worked independently of institutional authority. Using comparative evidence from other late 3rd and early 2nd millennia sites, I will establish the ways in which the families of merchants often served the interests of the crown while benefiting their own households. I will also highlight the ways in which this work was centered on families and on the homes in which they lived. Introduction One of the enduring questions about economic organization in early Mesopotamia is whether commercial actors were agents employed directly by the crown and other significant institutions, or whether they operated with some degree of independence and often on behalf of their own non-institutional households. This question is especially problematic when we investigate the Third Dynasty of Ur at the end of the 3rd millennium BC. This period includes some of the richest documentation from all of antiquity. The surviving texts provide a wealth of detail about the operation of institutions, workshops, households, and administrators for much of the 21st century BC. The fact that the great majority of these texts have come from provincial institutions in places like Umma, Ĝirsu, and Drehem weights our understanding of the era heavily in favor of an institutional view of society. The problem of the origin of most of our texts is compounded by the fact that even when we know very broadly where our texts come from, we lack a precise archaeological provenience for all but a small percentage of these texts. This, of course, makes it harder to determine a locus for where much of the work was being done during this era. This question takes on added significance because this period also coincides with major steps in secondary state formation—this was a moment when the royal household was experimenting with combining city-states into a larger territorial kingdom encompassing much of southern Mesopotamia. 1

  Western Washington University, [email protected]

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Working at Home in the Ancient Near East My focus in this contribution is on one of the critical professional groups that occupied a liminal position in the economic space between households great and small. Observers of the early Mesopotamian economy have long recognized the important role played by merchants (Sumerian dam-gar3) as facilitators of commerce. The era of the Third Dynasty of Ur provides a wealth of surviving documentary evidence for merchant activity. These documents also routinely highlight the responsibilities of the institutional administrators with whom the merchants interacted; and for whom the role played by the merchants was crucial for the performance of their administrative duties. Though the rigid view of early Mesopotamia as dominated by the temple state has subsided, debate continues about the precise nature of the economy and its actors. In particular, questions persist as to whether individual households, like those of the merchants, could engage independently in entrepreneurial activity on their own behalf. The workshop at which this contribution was first presented focused on the related topics of non-institutional households, work at home, and economic agency. In order to examine these matters, I will briefly survey the following topics: what does evidence for merchant activity look like; how did the merchants serve the interests of the institutional administrators with whom they dealt; how was their work organized and what were the interests of their own households; and finally, what comparative evidence from late 3rd and early 2nd millennia sites can we use to better establish the location of their work. Using this data, and the example of the house of Ur-saga mentioned in my title, I illustrate the ways in which the families of merchants often served the interests of the crown while benefiting their own households. I will also highlight the ways in which this work was centered on families and on the homes in which they lived. The Activities of Merchants and Their Documentation Merchants in early Mesopotamia were critical to facilitating the expansion of economic activity in an environment of growing institutional wealth. The palaces and temples of early Mesopotamia maintained control over significant amounts of arable land and enormous herds of sheep, goat, and cattle. Quite often they turned to merchants to handle the surplus that this wealth created in terms of bulk commodities. Merchants also managed long distance trade on behalf of the institutions, especially in strategic resources such as copper. One of the continuities in early Mesopotamia across our traditional chronological and dynastic boundaries was the reliance of institutions on the expertise of professional groups like merchants, and this was a factor in preserving their economic independence from the state. Indeed, the rise in state power was aided by this professional independence. The various activities in which merchants engaged encouraged the documentation of their work in the cuneiform record. Loans and sales accounted for a significant

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Steven J. Garfinkle: Ur III Merchants in Their Non-Institutional Context percentage of their transactions, and these required recording on clay tablets.2 Moreover, the place of merchants at the intersection between the great institutions and the broader commercial economy meant that many of their transactions were preserved in the administrative archives of the state. Therefore, even though we often lack a precise archaeological provenience for the texts documenting merchants in the late 3rd millennium BC, we can immediately recognize from the surviving material that their texts appear in two very different contexts: their own archives and those of the large institutions. The tablets from Nippur, many of which come from domestic locations, include a great number of texts, especially loans, from the merchants’ own archives. The texts from Umma and Ĝirsu on the other hand come from the great administrative households and show the evidence for merchant interaction with provincial and royal authorities. These texts also demonstrate how important it is to think of the early state in Mesopotamia as consisting of an interlocking network of households under the patrimonial authority of the king’s own household.3 Each household was an actor in the local economy and the evidence shows the ways in which these households competed for economic and social advantage. Wealthy households, and this included institutional households as well as those of prominent professionals and members of the elite, needed to record their transactions on texts. I have argued elsewhere that textuality was also a way of creating and preserving wealth.4 The possession and storage of texts was a sign of wealth and status. The evidence that I discuss below makes clear that the non-institutional households, like those of merchants and other elites, stored their tablets in their homes. This was true in Nippur and Susa in the late 3rd millennium BC, and it was true for the merchants at Ur in the early 2nd millennium BC. What Did the Merchants Do for the State? At this point, let us examine the work that the merchants performed on behalf of their institutional clients (and on which I will expand in subsequent sections below). In a predominantly agrarian economy in which a small elite oversaw an extensive population of largely dependent laborers, merchants performed a great variety of services. They collected and sold surplus goods, they acquired necessary materials for agricultural production and for royal and temple workshops, and they arranged for credit.

2   For discussions of the conventions governing the documentation of economic transactions in the cuneiform record, see Van De Mieroop 1997; Steinkeller 2004; Garfinkle 2015a. 3   On patrimonialism in the ancient Near East, see Schloen 1999; Garfinkle 2008a; Renger 2016. 4   Garfinkle 2015a.

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Working at Home in the Ancient Near East This range of work is reflected most clearly in the well-known balanced accounts from this era, which show the many ways in which the merchants both sold and acquired goods on behalf of the temples and the state.5 Again, the view of some observers of the early economy has seen the merchants as employees working directly for the institutions.6 Instead, they worked with and on behalf of their clients, but not for them. This is clear even in the management of the balanced accounts. One of the most notable aspects of these accounts is the manner in which the merchants used the funds put at their disposal in order to further their activities as lenders, and to benefit their own households.7 The control of specialized knowledge and the maintenance of that control within local and regional hierarchies based on families were critical to the socio-economic landscape of early Mesopotamia. How Was Merchant Work Organized—The House of Ur-saga? Ĝirsu was the largest province of the Ur III state, and we can examine the archives of merchant households there in order to show how merchant work was organized and to demonstrate the manner in which non-institutional actors were crucial to the development of commerce in early Mesopotamia. As I have outlined elsewhere, merchants, like other professional groups in the 3rd millennium BC, operated as family collectives based within regions that corresponded to the earlier city-states.8 The title of dam-gar3 was passed down from fathers to sons, and this concentrated their activities within extended family groups. Within the cities, this meant that the control of work was in the hands of more senior family members who were able to allocate accounts and resources throughout the network. These groups cooperated with one another across the nascent Ur III kingdom, and their activities, documented in the archives at Drehem, were closely connected to the kingdom’s state building activities.9 In Ĝirsu the best attested family of merchants was headed by Ur-saga, who, as a dam-gar3 10, was one of the senior merchants in the city. He was the son of a merchant, and several of his sons were also merchants.10 The texts that document this family of merchants cover a period of more than 20 years from late in the reign of Šulgi until early in the reign of Ibbi-Suen. This distribution of texts mirrors the overall survival of texts 5   On merchants and balanced accounts, see Snell 1982; Neumann 1992, 1993, 1999; Steinkeller 2002, 2004; Garfinkle 2004, 2012. 6   For views that stress the continued control of the economy by the institutional sector, see, for example, Renger 1990, 1994, 2016; Englund 1990, 1991. Renger, in particular, sees the Ur III period as the last stage in a long era of complete institutional domination of the economy that was undermined in the early 2nd millennium by the growth of a tributary economy. In my view, aspects of this tributary economy were already well established in the 3rd millennium and characteristic of the activities of the royal household and its relationship with non-institutional households. 7   See Garfinkle 2004 and 2012. 8   See Garfinkle 2015b. 9   See Garfinkle 2008b. 10   For a lengthier discussion of Ur-saga and his activities, see Garfinkle 2010, 188–194.

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Steven J. Garfinkle: Ur III Merchants in Their Non-Institutional Context from the Ur III period, and this correlates with the era of greatest dynastic success, especially in military raids.11 Two texts from the British Museum highlight the patterns of work within the households of these merchant families.12 UNT 69 (= BM 13000) BM 13000 Amar-Suen 6 VI 1) 1 gu2 15 ma-na siki-gen 2) nig2-šam2 gu4-še3 3) ki Lu2-dNin-gir2-su-ta 4) Ur-gu2en-na 5) šu ba-ti 6) mu Ur-gu2-en-na dam-gar3-še3 7) kišib A-gi4 dam-gar3 8) iti ezen d Dumu-zi 9) mu Ša-aš-ru-umki ba-hul Seal) Ur-ni9-[gar] dumu Ur-sa6-[ga] dam-[gar3] Ur-guenna received from Lu-Ningirsu 1 talent and 
15 mana of medium quality wool
 in order to purchase cattle. Agi the merchant sealed (received)
 it on behalf of Urguenna the merchant. Month: the festival of Dumuzi.
 Year: Šašrum was defeated. Seal: Ur-nigar, son of Ur-saga, the merchant. UNT 70 (= BM 13687) Amar-Suen 6 VI 1) 1 gu2 15 ma-na siki-gen 2) nig2-šam2 gu4-še3 
3) ki Lu2-dNin-gir2-su-ta 4) dBa-u2-lu2a-sa6 5) dam Arad2 dam-gar3 
6) šu ba-ti
 7) mu dBa-u2-lu2-a-sa6 dam Arad2-še3 7) kišib Du11-ga-zi-da dam-gar3 
8) iti ezen dDumu-zi
 9) mu Ša-aš-ru-umki ba-hul Ba’u-lusa, the wife of Arad the merchant, received from Lu-Ningirsu 1 talent and 15 mana of medium quality wool in order to purchase cattle. Dugazida the merchant sealed (received) it on behalf of Ba’u-lusa, the wife of Arad. Month: the festival of Dumuzi. Year: Šašrum was defeated. All three merchants who appeared in the first text above were sons of Ur-saga. The wool in the text was almost certainly allocated to Ur-guenna by an institutional household in order to acquire cattle. Ur-guenna was apparently unavailable to take receipt of the wool personally and the text specified that his brother Agi would seal the text indicating possession of the wool. The actual seal on the tablet belonged to a third brother, Ur-nigar. The listing of the first recipient, Ur-guenna, makes it clear that his household had the primary responsibility for the wool. The fact that his brothers   For the chronological distribution of texts in the Ur III period, see Molina 2008. For the military adventures of the Ur III kings, see Michalowski 2011. The current disposition of the texts from Ur-saga’s family highlights some of the challenges we face when dealing with material that was not excavated under controlled circumstances. The texts are now widely dispersed across the globe. They can be found in the following collections, not including the many texts that must still be in Iraq: the Istanbul Archaeological Museum, the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Geneva, the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin, the British Museum in London, the Free Library of Philadelphia, the Yale Babylonian Collection in New Haven, and the Oriental Institute in Chicago. 12   BM 13000 is discussed in Garfinkle 2010 and 2015b, BM 13687 was first published in Waetzoldt 1972. 11

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Working at Home in the Ancient Near East could take on this responsibility on his behalf shows the way in which the families controlled the operation and organization of their profession. In the second text, the wife of one of Ur-saga’s sons received wool for the purchase of cattle on behalf of her husband. In this case again, yet another merchant sealed the text and acknowledged receipt on behalf of the individual household to which the wool had been allocated. We do not know why the primary recipients were unavailable. They may have been away from Ĝirsu on other business, or they may have had business elsewhere in the city. The timing of these transactions was tied to the cycles for shearing sheep and likely had to proceed in the absence of some of the principals. These two texts are dated to the same month and year and document the transfer of identical amounts of wool. In addition to the other information that these texts provide, this likely shows the equal status of these brothers in their family firm. These activities provide yet another example of the carrying out of institutional assignments by the professionals whose expert knowledge allowed them to facilitate state business, in this case the exchange of surplus wool for cattle. The merchants operated at the intersections of various institutional economies, handling local exchange on behalf of temples, governors, and local elites, while also collecting provincial obligations on behalf of the crown.13 The critical observation here is that the merchants themselves exercised agency over their own professional organizations and the decision making within those groups. Ur-saga’s family was active in another significant area: procuring and delivering copper. PPAC 5 650 (BM 27028 + envelope) Amar-Suen 3 1) 30 ma-na uruda
 2) 3 1/3 ma-na la2 1 gin2 igi-4-gal2 nagga
 3) ki A-gi4-ta 4) 30 ma-na uruda
 5) 3 1/3 ma-na la2 1 gin2 igi-4-gal2 nagga 
6) ki Ur-e2-gal-ta 7) 30 ma-na uruda
 8) 3 1/3 ma-na la2 1 gin2 igi-4-gal2 nagga 9) ki Nig2-gur11-ta
 10) 3 1/3 ma-na la2 1 gin2 igi-4-gal2 nagga 11) ki Ur-gu2-en-na-ta
 12) Ur-dNin-giš-zi-da 13) šu ba-ti 14) mu giš gu-za dEn-lil2-la2/ ba-dim2 Envelope (only the obverse is preserved)
 1) 1 gu2 30 ma-na uruda 2) 13 ma-na 15 gin2 nagga 3) ki dam-gar3-ne-ta
 4) Ur-dNingiš-zi-da
 5) šu ba-ti   BM 25082, a text dated three years earlier than the texts listed above, documented the other side of these transactions: the delivery of cattle purchased by the merchants of Ĝirsu. This text illustrates the ways in which these merchant families cooperated and organized their work (see Garfinkle 2010). Many of the merchants listed on BM 25082 were members of Ur-saga’s family, and the cattle that they delivered were assigned to the bala, the central taxation scheme of the Ur III state.

13

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Steven J. Garfinkle: Ur III Merchants in Their Non-Institutional Context Ur-Ningišzida received 30 mana of copper (and) 3 1/3 mana less 1 1⁄4 gin of tin from Agi; 30 mana of copper (and) 3 1/3 mana less 1 1⁄4 gin of tin from Ur-egal; 30 mana of copper (and) 3 1/3 mana less 1 1⁄4 gin of tin from Niggur; 3 1/3 mana less 1 1⁄4 gin of tin from Ur-guenna. Year: the king made the throne for divine Enlil. Envelope:
 Ur-Ningišzida received 1 talent and 30 mana of copper (and) 13 mana and 15 gin of tin from the merchants. In this text we see a group of men, including two of Ur-saga’s sons along with two of their frequent partners, all identified on the envelope as merchants, delivering a substantial amount of copper and tin. These commodities were of vital strategic importance, especially in such quantities, and this makes clear that family firms handled some of the most important business in the state. Ur-saga and his sons were also responsible for delivering silver for the bala.14 The bala was the most prominent means through which the state centralized the collection and distribution of resources. These activities directly connected the merchant families to the state building enterprise of the Ur III kings. The growth of the state brought merchant groups together across great distances and gave them access to enormous resources, but the crown was not in a position to displace these individuals and their expertise. Where Do Merchant Texts Come from—The Question of Provenience? We have seen that the work of the merchants was organized into professional groups most often based on kinship ties; and we have also seen the extent to which the institutions turned to these non-institutional groups to manage commercial activity. We still have to address the question of where this work took place. This topic is harder to approach because the great majority of the abundance of texts that survive from the era of the Third Dynasty of Ur have no precise archaeological provenience; however, for some answers we can look to the evidence from excavations at Ur III Nippur and Susa, along with those of Old Babylonian Ur. The texts from Nippur that document merchant activity show that these urban professionals ran their operations from residential locations in the city.15 Ur-Nusku was a prominent Ur III merchant whose texts were excavated at Nippur by the University of Pennsylvania in the late 19th century. Like Ur-saga, he was given the title of dam-gar3 10. His archive was composed of the records of his own household and likely was stored in that domestic environment as well. We have direct contemporary evidence from Susa for the storage of texts like these in residences. Katrien De Graef studied the archive of Igibuni, who lived in Susa during

14 15

   

See Garfinkle 2010, 188–194. See Zettler 1996; Garfinkle 2012, 100–112.

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Working at Home in the Ancient Near East the Ur III period.16 Thirty-eight texts survive to document his work, and they constitute the only Ur III archive for which we have precise stratigraphic evidence from their original excavation.17 The texts indicate that Igibuni had access to large amounts of barley and many of the texts document his lending of that barley at interest. De Graef described one of Igibuni’s texts as a list of household expenses.18 The first, and largest, item on the list was a distribution of a massive amount of barley (214 gur) to a merchant. It is tempting to imagine that this is an example of a merchant acting on behalf of a non-institutional household, that of Igibuni, in the same manner in which merchants acted on behalf of their institutional clients. Igibuni’s tablets were found in two groups forming the foundation for two different levels of floor construction in Igibuni’s house. As De Graef has demonstrated, the texts provide a great deal of information for the conventions surrounding the creation and preservation of texts during this period.19 For our purposes, the significance lies in the fact that the ‘used’ tablets were buried inside Igibuni’s house itself. The buried tablets were no longer active because the transactions they recorded had been completed. Thus the tablets were used by the owner of the house as part of the foundation for renovations to the floors of the room in which they were buried. The active texts remained stored in the house but not buried. Igibuni not only worked at home, but the records of his work became part of that home. For a final comparative example, I will return to the theme of copper and merchants and talk briefly about one of the houses excavated by Woolley at Old Babylonian Ur. Ea-nāṣir was a copper trader who has been much discussed in the scholarly literature as he was one of Oppenheim’s sea-faring merchants of Ur.20 His archive consists of 29 tablets discovered by Woolley in the house at No. 1 Old Street. The archive dates to the second decade of the reign of Rim-Sin of Larsa at the end of the 19th century BC, roughly two hundred years after the Ur III texts discussed above. Ea-nāṣir owned property, but his primary business was as a merchant involved in longdistance trade. He was an ālik Telmun, a trader who traveled to Dilmun to purchase copper that was mined on the Arabian Peninsula. He bought copper on behalf of the palace at Larsa, and on behalf of merchants in southern Mesopotamia. He imported thousands of kilos of copper from the Persian Gulf. The organization of the Dilmun trade was the responsibility of entrepreneurs unaffiliated with the palace, who even arranged for the royal supply of copper and this shows strong continuity with the preceding Ur III period. Ea-nāṣir and his associates also arranged themselves in   On the Igibuni archive, see De Graef 2005 and 2008.   The resumed excavations at Ur under the direction of Elizabeth Stone will hopefully improve this situation. 18   De Graef 2008: 230–231. 19   De Graef 2008: 229–230. 20   Oppenheim 1954; Leemans 1960; Mallowan and Woolley 1976. 16 17

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Steven J. Garfinkle: Ur III Merchants in Their Non-Institutional Context partnerships that frequently operated along family lines, and Ea-nāṣir’s father was one of his most frequent partners.21 Although Ea-nāṣir was a resident of Ur, Dilmun was the center of the copper trade for southern Mesopotamia at this time, and Ea-nāṣir’s archive amply attests to his travels there. Moreover, many of his business associates lived elsewhere in southern Mesopotamia, perhaps in the capital at Larsa. At the same time, the texts that document his participation in this trade, were found in his home at No. 1 Old Street. Conclusion Working at home—or at least managing their enterprises from a home office—was common for merchants in the late 3rd and early 2nd millennia BC. My examination of the house of Ur-saga and related archives shows that the merchants of early Mesopotamia were active representatives of their institutional clients, but also that they were engaged in numerous ventures on their own behalf. Individual households in the Ur III period were able to exercise agency in the economy that was not directed by the crown; however, the royal household and other regional institutions controlled significant resources in southern Mesopotamia, and professional groups like merchants sought out those households as patrons. The Ur III state in turn relied upon non-institutional actors to organize exchange on its behalf, and to maintain the availability of a variety of necessary commodities, with copper being a primary example explored here. The merchants certainly derived great benefit from their relationship with state institutions, but the state in turn relied on the merchants for their knowledge of both local and foreign markets, and significantly, this work was undertaken by real families of professionals operating on their own behalf and out of their own homes. Bibliography De Graef, K. 2005. Les Archives d’Igibuni: Les Documents Ur III du Chantier B à Suse (Mémoires de la Délégation Archéologique en Iran 54). Ghent: University of Ghent. De Graef, K. 2008. Rest in Pieces. The Archive of Igibuni, in S.J. Garfinkle and J.C. Johnson (eds) The Growth of an Early State in Mesopotamia: Studies in Ur III Administration (Biblioteca del Próximo Oriente Antiguo 5): 225–234. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas. Englund, R.K. 1990. Organisation und Verwaltung der Ur III-Fischerei (Berliner Beiträge zum Vorderen Orient 10). Berlin: Reimer Verlag. Englund, R.K. 1991. Hard Work—Where Will It Get You? Labor Management in Ur III Mesopotamia. Journal of Near Eastern Studies 50: 255–280. 21   The capital collected for Ea-nāṣir’s journeys to Dilmun came from many sources including most notably the palace and merchants, but it also came from extensive partnerships in which numerous individuals provided small investments that spread out the risks associated with overseas ventures; see UET 5, 519, 520, 554, 643, 661, 673.

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Working at Home in the Ancient Near East Garfinkle, S.J. 2004. Shepherds, Merchants, and Credit: Some Observations on Lending Practices in Ur III Mesopotamia. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 47: 1–30. Garfinkle, S.J. 2008a. Was the Ur III State Bureaucratic? Patrimonialism and Bureaucracy in the Ur III Period, in S.J.Garfinkle and J.C. Johnson (eds) The Growth of an Early State in Mesopotamia: Studies in Ur III Administration (Biblioteca del Próximo Oriente Antiguo 5): 55–62. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas. Garfinkle, S.J. 2008b. Silver and Gold: Merchants and the Economy of the Ur III State, in P. Michalowki (ed.) On Ur III Times. Studies in Honor of Marcel Sigrist (Journal of Cuneiform Studies Supplementary Studies 1): 63–70. Boston: American Schools of Oriental Studies. Garfinkle, S.J. 2010. Merchants and State Formation in Early Mesopotamia, in A. Slotsky and S. Melville (eds) Opening the Tablet Box. Near Eastern Studies in Honor of Benjamin R. Foster (Culture and History of the Ancient near East 42): 185–202. Leiden: Brill. Garfinkle, S.J. 2012. Entrepreneurs and Enterprise in Early Mesopotamia: A Study of Three Archives from the Third Dynasty of Ur (2112–2004 BC) (Cornell University Studies in Assyriology and Sumerology Volume 22). Bethesda: CDL Press. Garfinkle, S.J. 2015a. Ur III Administrative Texts: Building Blocks of State Community, in P. Delnero and J. Lauinger (eds) Texts and Contexts. The Circulation and Transmission of Cuneiform in Social Space: 143–165. Berlin: de Gruyter. Garfinkle, S.J. 2015b. Family Firms in the Ur III Period, in A. Archi (ed.) Tradition and Innovation in the Ancient Near East, Proceedings of the 57e Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale at Rome 4–8 July 2011: 517–524. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns. Leemans, W.F. 1960. Foreign Trade in the Old Babylonian Period as revealed by Southern Mesopotamian Texts (Studia et Documenta ad Iura Orientis Antiqui pertinentia 6). Leiden: Brill. Michalowski, P. 2011. The Correspondence of the Kings of Ur, An Epistolary History of an Ancient Mesopotamian Kingdom (Mesopotamian Civilizations 15). Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns. Molina, M. 2008. The Corpus of Neo-Sumerian Tablets: An Overview in S.J.Garfinkle and J.C. Johnson (eds) The Growth of an Early State in Mesopotamia: Studies in Ur III Administration (Biblioteca del Próximo Oriente Antiguo 5): 19–53. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas. Neumann, H. 1992. Zur privaten Geschäftstätigkeit in Nippur in der Ur III-Zeit, in M. de Jong Ellis (ed.) Nippur at the Centennial. Papers Read at the 35e Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Philadelphia, 1988 (Occasional Publications of the Samuel Noah Kramer Fund 14): 161–176. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Antropology. Neumann, H. 1993. Zu den Geschäften des Kaufmanns Ur-Dumuzida aus Umma. Altorientalische Forschungen 20: 69–86. Neumann, H. 1999. Ur-Dumuzida and Ur-DUN: Reflections on the Relationship between State-Initiated Foreign Trade and Private Economic Activity in Mesopotamia towards the End of the Third Millennium BC, in J. G. Dercksen (ed.) Trade and Finance in Ancient Mesopotamia. Proceedings of the 1st MOS Symposium, Leiden December 19–20 1997 (Publications de l’Institut Historique-archéologique néerlandais de Stamboul 84): 43–53. Leiden/Istanbul: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten. 80

Steven J. Garfinkle: Ur III Merchants in Their Non-Institutional Context Oppenheim, A.L. 1954. The Seafaring Merchants of Ur. Journal of the American Oriental Society 74: 6–17. Renger, J. 1990. Different Economic Spheres in the Urban Economy of Ancient Mesopotamia, in E. Aerts and H. Klengel (eds) The Town as Regional Economic Centre in the Ancient Near East. Tenth International Economic History Congress, Session B-16 (Studies in the Social and Economic History 20): 20–28. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Renger, J. 1994. On Economic Structures in Ancient Mesopotamia. Orientalia 63: 157– 208. Renger, J. 2016. Weber – Polanyi – Sraffa: A Consideration of Modes of Production, in G. Bartoloni and M. G. Biga (eds) Not Only History. Proceedings of the Conference in Honor of Maria Liverani Held in Sapienza-Università di Roma, Dipartimento di Scienze dell’Antichità, 20-21 April 2009: 15–33. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns. Snell, D.C. 1982. Ledgers and Prices: Early Mesopotamian Balanced Accounts (Yale Near Eastern Researches 8). New Haven/London: Yale University Press. Steinkeller, P. 2002. Money Lending Practices in Ur III Babylonia: The Issue of Economic Motivation, in M. Hudson and M. Van De Mieroop (eds) Debt and Economic Renewal in the Ancient Near East (International Scholars Conference on Ancient Near Eastern Economies 3): 109–137. Bethesda: CDL Press. Steinkeller, P. 2003. Archival Practices at Babylonia in the Third Millennium, in M. Brosius (ed.) Ancient Archives and Archival Traditions: Concepts of Record-Keeping in the Ancient World: 37–58. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Steinkeller, P. 2004. Toward a Definition of Private Economic Activity in Third Millennium Babylonia, in R. Rollinger and C. Ulf (eds) Commerce and Monetary Systems in the Ancient World: Means of Transmission and Cultural Interaction. Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Symposium of the Assyrian and Babylonian Intellectual Heritage Project Held in Innsbruck, Austria, October 3rd–8th 2002 (Melammu Symposia V): 91–111. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Van De Mieroop, M. 1997. Why Did They Write on Clay? Klio 79: 7–18. Waetzoldt, H. 1972. Untersuchungen zur neusumerischen Textilindustrie (Studi Economici e Tecnologici 1). Rome: Centro per le antichità e la storia dell’arte del Vicino Oriente. Mallowan, M.E.L. and C.L. Woolley 1976. The Old Babylonian Period (Ur Excavations Vol. 7). London: British Museum. Zettler, R. 1996. Written Documents as Excavated Artifacts and the Holistic Interpretation of the Mesopotamian Archaeological Record, in J. S. Cooper and G. M. Schwartz (eds) The Study of the Ancient Near East in the Twenty-First Century: 81– 102. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns.

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Wealth and Status in 3rd Millennium Babylonia: The Household Inventory RTC 304 and the Career of Lugal-irida, Superintendent of Weavers Palmiro Notizia1 Introduction In this article I offer a detailed reconstruction of the career and personal asset portfolio of Lugal-irida, a high-ranking administrator, who, for almost two decades, was in charge of the most important center for textile production of the entire Ur III state, located in the Guabba district of the Ĝirsu/Lagaš province. The purpose of this investigation is twofold: first, it aims at defining the economic well-being of a specific functionary by measuring his wealth in terms of real estate and movable goods; secondly, this research has to be regarded as a first attempt at ‘materializing’ elite and non-elite households through textual analysis, when contemporary archaeological evidence from administrative areas and residential neighborhoods is limited, incomplete, or even entirely lacking. In order to do so, I have relied on a selection of institutional administrative documents connected to Lugal-irida’s activity as a state official, and, in particular, on RTC 304,2 an extremely informative inspection record which enumerates his personal possessions. All these cuneiform tablets were part of the huge provincial archive found by Ernest de Sarzec at Ĝirsu (Tellō), the capital of the largest province of the Ur III state.3 As partial as this and similar philological and historical analyses may be, and certainly are, they nevertheless contribute to our understanding of household wealth in 3rd millennium Babylonia. It is hoped that in the near future the integration of further epigraphic evidence and new archaeological data sets (e.g. household artifact assemblages, house-size measures, burial goods, etc.) will improve our knowledge of the prosperity level and wealth investment strategies of the palatial and administrative elites, as well as that of the independent entrepreneurs, who operated in the era of the Third Dynasty of Ur.4   Università di Pisa, [email protected]   Text abbreviations follow those of the Database of Neo-Sumerian Texts project (http://bdtns.filol.csic.es). 3   On the findspots of the Ur III tablets from Tellō, see Sallaberger 1999: 201–202; Verderame 2008. 4   For a combined use of housing and mortuary data, and textual sources for analyzing the issue of social inequality in ancient Mesopotamia, see Stone 2018. 1 2

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Working at Home in the Ancient Near East The Career of Lugal-irida, Superintendent of Weavers Lugal-irida started his career sometime around Šulgi 30 as one of the overseers of weavers (ugula uš-bar) of the Guabba weaving establishment (Gomi, ASJ 2, 17 50; Š.30.08.00). By the year Šulgi 32 (Gomi, ASJ 2, 19 56; Š.32.00.00), he was appointed as superintendent of the entire textile production center (nu-banda3 uš-bar) and held this office for 21 years until the end of Amar-Suen 5 (TUT 164-19; AS.05.11.00). In this capacity as head of the Guabba weaving factory (e2-uš-bar), Lugal-irida operated in concert with two members of his family: his brother Ur-Iškur5 and his son Lu-melam.6 According to his seal legend (Durand, RA 73, 28 15; Š.46.10.00-Š.47.02.15),7 Lugal-irida was a scribe (dub-sar) and a son of Namhani, whose title or professional designation are unknown.8 Differently from Lu-Bau (UNT 57; Š.48.11.00), the mounted courier (ra2-gaba) who owned a seal dedicated to Šulgi and served as nu-banda3 uš-bar of the Kinunir weaving mill,9 Lugal-irida’s seal was not of the royal servant type; this fact demonstrates that he was not a crown official and that during his tenure the textile industry at Guabba was not under direct royal control. In both Lugal-irida and LuBau’s seals, however, the title ‘superintendent of weavers’ was not explicitly indicated, whereas, at Irisaĝrig, a certain Aya-ilišu was clearly identified as dub-sar nu-banda3 uš-bar lugal, ‘scribe (and) superintendent of royal weavers’, on his seal dedicated to king Šu-Suen (Nisaba 15/2 404a+b; ŠS.07.03.00).10 The position of head of the Guabba weaving establishment did not remain within the family, as Ur-Iškur and Lu-melam did not take over the office after the retirement or death of Lugal-irida. Lu-melam held his father’s position only temporarily during Amar-Suen 6 (CT 7, 37 BM 18424; AS.06.00.00)11 and was eventually replaced by a certain Lugal-sukkal at the end of that very same year (UNT 55; AS.06.11diri.00). Lugal-sukkal, a scribe and a son of an overseer of weavers (ugula uš-bar) named Lugal-... (CTPSM 1 67; AS.07.00.00), had already operated in the Guabba textile mill since at least Amar-Suen 5   Cf. Gomi, Orient 16, 87 130 (Š.46.01-02.00), HSS 4 3 (AS.01.01-12.00), MVN 9 67 (AS.04.07.00), Gomi, Orient 16, 77 112 (date not preserved). 6   Cf. BPOA 2 1956 (Š.48.00.00), Scheil, RT 17, 28 (AS.03.11.00- AS04.12.00). 7   The seal of Lugal-irida rolled on UDT 12 (AS.03.04.00) is illegible (Nies 1920: 11; Sigrist 2001: 5). 8   Cf. the seal of Ur-Iškur in Gomi, Orient 16, 87 130 (Š.46.01-02.00): ur-diškur dub-sar dumu nam-ha-ni. Unfortunately, Scheil did not copy the seal of Lu-melam in RT 17, 28 (AS.03.11.00-AS04.12.00). 9   Waetzoldt 1972: 96. 10   Cf. the seal of Apilī, son of Ubārum nu-banda3 uš-bar-e-ne (BPOA 6 539; Puzriš-Dagān(?)). At Ĝirsu/ Lagaš several officials employed in the textile industry—always qualified as scribes (dub-sar)—are said to be sons of overseers of weavers (ugula uš-bar) in their seals: e.g. BPOA 1 1553 (ŠS.05.02.00) (lu2-hu-rim3ki dub-sar dumu ur-dhendur-saĝ ugula uš-bar); TCTI 2 3868 (ŠS.05.10.00) (ur-dnin-ĝiš-zi-da dub-sar dumu ur-dšul-pa-e3 ugula uš-bar); WMAH 75 (ŠS.09.00.00) (ur-dab-hi-nun dub-sar dumu lugal-ab-ba ugula ušbar). 11   Cf. HLC 3 254 (date not preserved).

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Palmiro Notizia: Wealth and Status in 3rd Millennium Babylonia 4.12 Around Šu-Suen’s third regnal year, the office of superintendent of weavers was divided into two distinct units/departments, when a second nu-banda3 uš-bar named Ur-amana was appointed.13 As for the hierarchical organization of the weaving industry at Guabba, the available sources indicate that the number of overseers of weavers (ugula uš-bar) under the responsibility of the superintendent of weavers (nu-banda3 uš-bar) was between 17 and 27.14 This figure agrees with the data drawn from PPAC 5 301 (undated), an extremely informative document that records all the managerial personnel and the skilled and unskilled workers employed in the textile factory at Guabba, from high-ranking administrators and their assistants to menials. Among the more than 600 individuals enumerated in this ‘staff list’,15 one can identify 21 named overseers of weavers, plus 28 assistants and menial workers.16 Their number increased under Lugal-sukkal and Ur-amana, when the two units/departments counted 13 and 14 ugula uš-bar, respectively.17 With few exceptions, the names of the overseers of weavers occurring in the records related to Lugal-sukkal and Ur-amana’s tenure are the same as those that appear in PPAC 5 301, which in turn probably dates back to the years when Lugal-irida was in charge of the Guabba weaving establishment. Evidence suggests that, in the textile organization, close cooperation existed between the office of superintendent of weavers, the ugula uš-bar, and their sons. They worked side by side and shared similar functions and responsibilities. As far as the overseers of weavers are concerned, they can be considered middle-ranking managers, and their tasks were by no means limited to the control of the female workforce.18 Interestingly, their sons, whose seals always identify them as scribes (dub-sar), could operate on behalf of the superintendent of weavers, as shown, for example, by WMAH 75 (ŠS.09.00.00). In this document, Ayaduga received a large amount of barley (680 gur = 204,000 liters) for the allotments of the weavers (še-ba geme2 uš-bar-ra) on behalf of Lu-ušgena, one of the nu-banda3 uš-bar of the Guabba textile mill between ŠuSuen 6 and Ibbi-Suen 3.19 But, it was Ayaduga’s brother, Ur-Abhinun, who sealed the   Such-Gutiérrez, CDLN 2015: 3 §2.23 rev. vi 6: ša3 ĝurum2!(IGI.) lugal-sukkal.   MVN 13 322 (ŠS.03.00.03), TCTI 2 3545 (ŠS.04.01.00), UNT 88 (ŠS.04.01-12.00), UNT 19 (ŠS.04.12.00), PPAC 5 1639 (00.02.03/6), CT 5, 50 BM 19817 (undated), TÉL 205 (undated), TÉL 294 (date not preserved). The sequence of the nu-banda3 uš-bar of the Guabba weaving establishment proposed by Waetzoldt (1972: 95–96) needs revision. 14   Cf. Maekawa, Priests and Officials, 101 App. 4a-b rev. i 30-31 (16 ugula uš-bar 0.2.0-ta, 0.3.0 ugula ušbar) and Maekawa, ASJ 20, 104 5 le.ed. ii 1 (20 ugula uš-bar 0.2.0-ta). Unfortunately, both documents are undated. 15   For the ‘staff lists’ of Ĝirsu/Lagaš institutional households, see Molina in press, with previous literature. 16   Cf. Laursen and Steinkeller 2017: 76 where an higher number of ugula uš-bar (29) is given. Note that two names of overseers of weavers are lost in a break in the tablet. 17   TCTI 2 3545 (ŠS.04.01.00), UNT 88 (ŠS.04.01-12.00), UNT 19 (ŠS.04.12.00). 18   For the role of the overseers of weavers in pre-Sargonic Ĝirsu/Lagaš, see Karahashi and GarciaVentura 2016. 19   Waetzoldt 1972: 94–95. 12 13

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Working at Home in the Ancient Near East corresponding receipt; they were both sons of the overseer of weavers Lugal-abba, who is also known from PPAC 5 301.20 On a smaller scale, a single overseer of weavers could be in charge of an entire textile mill, as demonstrated by the examples of two female ugula uš-bar: Aštaqqar, the head of the weaving establishment at the Garšana estate,21 and Ummi-ṭābat, who managed a workshop belonging to the princess Šāt-Suen, daughter of Šulgi, located at Nippur.22 PPAC 5 301 also demonstrates that the superintendents of weavers were entitled to receive a certain number of personal guards (aga3-us2), as was also the case with other high officials and administrators in the Ur III period.23 The first entry of PPAC 5 301 reads 16 aga3-us2 nu-banda3 ‘16 guards of the superintendent (of weavers)’, i.e. Lugalirida. Unless this line has to be interpreted differently,24 a comparison with other known ‘staff lists’ (Table 1) reveals that this was the third largest group of guards assigned to a single official/institutional household after the temple (administrator) of Ninmar.ki and, of course, the provincial governor.25 The relatively high number of security personnel engaged in providing protection for this specific production unit and for the temple of the goddess Ninmar.ki undoubtedly reflected the scale and economic importance of both the Guabba weaving establishment and the household of Ninmar.ki, two institutions largely independent of one another and both located in the southern district of the Ĝirsu/Lagaš province. The major commercial hub for trade with the Gulf region and southeastern Iran was situated in the same area, and included a seaport, where the Ur III fleet was stationed, a shipyard (mar-sa), and a rest house (e2-kas4) for travelling officials, messengers, merchants, and soldiers.26 The weaving establishment located at the town of Guabba was the largest and most important center for textile production of the entire Ur III state, and it was primarily oriented towards the export of textiles to the Gulf and neighboring regions. The total number of people involved in the manufacturing process at Guabba and its nearby satellites Niĝin and Kinunir can be estimated at approximately 10,000 individuals,

  Cf. MVN 5 210 (ŠS.09.11.00). PPAC 5 301 obv. ii 18: ugula lugal-ab-ba!(ZU).   Kleinerman 2011; Waetzoldt 2011. 22   Hattori 2002: 201–222. 23   Lafont 2009: §4.7. 24   ‘16 (persons): the superintendent (of weavers and his) guards’, or, ‘One(!) superintendent (of weavers and) six guards’. PPAC 5 301 is published in transliteration only and requires collation. 25   Cf. e.g. Maekawa, ASJ 17, 226 115 (undated) rev. 8 (50 aga3-us2 ensi2 0.2.3-ta), HLC 1 65 (pl. 23) (Š.48.09.00) (19 ĝuruš/aga3-us2 ensi2-me), HLC 2 55 (pl. 73) (AS.02.00.00) obv. i 4 (30 aga3-us2 ensi2), and MVN 12 300 (Š.48.10.00) (30 ĝuruš/aga3-us2 ensi2). 26   Laursen and Steinkeller: 57–60, 71–74. 20 21

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Palmiro Notizia: Wealth and Status in 3rd Millennium Babylonia Table 1: Guards (aga3-us2) assigned to officials and institutional households in Ĝirsu/Lagaš documents

Text

Temple household

Maekawa, Priests and Officials, 99 App. 3a-b (Š.37.00.00)

d

nin-dar-a

7 aga3-us2 saĝĝa

ITT 3 5270 ([AS.08?].00.00)

d

nin-ĝiš-zi-da

5 aga3-us2

ITT 2 865 (AS.08.04.00)

d

hendur-saĝ

1 aga3-us2 saĝĝa

ITT 2 907 (AS.08.04.00)

d

ba-gara2

1 aga3-us2

ITT 2 4192 (AS.08.07.00)

d

ig-alim

1 aga3-us2

ITT 2 3536 (ŠS.01.04.00)

(dlugal-)urubxki

2 aga3-us2

Maekawa, ASJ 20, 103 4 (date not preserved/possibly undated)

d lugal-urubxki u3 e2 [...]

[x] ⸢aga3?⸣ -[us2 (saĝĝa)]

Maekawa, ASJ 20, 101 3 (undated)

nin-ĝir2-su ĝiš-bar-e3 d pa-bil3-saĝ

2 aga3-us2 2 aga3-us2 1 aga3-us2

Maekawa, Priests and Officials, 101 App. 4a-b (undated)

d

nin-mar.ki

28 aga3-us2 (agricultural organization) 2 aga3-us2 (religious organization)27

TÉL 034a (undated)

d

nin-ĝiš-zi-da

4 aga3-us2 gal

Maekawa, Priests and Officials, 98 App. 2 (date not preserved)

(broken context)

d d

Number of guards

[x] 7 aga3-us2 1 aga3-us2

a figure that included more than 6200 female weavers and their children employed only at the Guabba production unit.28 As superintendent of weavers, Lugal-irida provisioned the permanent personnel of the weaving mill and supervised all stages of textile production. He received barley, dates, sesame oil, wool/textiles, and sheep carcasses from the central administration and was responsible for issuing these commodities as monthly allotments or occasional distributions to female weavers, fullers, and other workers employed at the Guabba establishment.29 Substantial amounts of raw materials (different types of wool,   Maekawa 1999: 89–92.   Steinkeller 2013: 421; Laursen and Steinkeller 2017: 75–77. 29   Barley: Gomi, ASJ 2, 19 56 (Š.32.00.00) rev. 3-4, Nisaba 7 19 (Š.39.00.00), Gomi, Orient 16, 87 130 (Š.46.0102.00). Sesame oil: BPOA 2 1956 (Š.48.00.00). Wool/textiles: STA 6 (AS.04.00.00), Such-Gutiérrez, CDLN 2015: 3 §2.23 (AS.04?.00.00). Barley and wool/textiles: HLC 3 238 (Š.45?.12.00), MVN 22 17 (Š.47.01.00), TUT 162 (AS.01.01.00). Dates and oil: TUT 164-19 (AS.05.11.00). Sheep carcasses: ABTR 3 (AS.03.00.00), CUSAS 16 154 (AS.03.00.00). 27 28

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Working at Home in the Ancient Near East goat hair, sesame oil and lard) for producing and processing (i3 tug2-ge ak) textiles were delivered to him by the provincial authorities from institutional depots.30 On occasion, large numbers of female workers and their sons—originally ‘donated’ (a-ru-a) to the institutional economy—as well as other kinds of unskilled laborers, were transferred to Lugal-irida to be employed in the weaving house (e2-uš-bar).31 At the same time, he regularly operated as a supplier of labor by temporarily relocating work-teams of female weavers and fullers under his control to other settlements and towns of the Ĝirsu/Lagaš province, recruiting them for the annual plucking of sheep and probably also for inspecting and sorting the wool.32 Evidence shows that Lugalirida organized, directed and monitored the manufacturing process and checked the quality of finished products.33 An examination of the functions performed by Lugalirida, and the title dub-sar on his seal make it abundantly clear that the nu-banda3 ušbar was first and foremost a professional manager. Working out of an administrative building, located within a larger complex that included various facilities, subsidiary structures, and most likely also residential units, the superintendent of weavers and his accountants prepared and stored documents concerning the daily management of the Guabba weaving factory. As stated above, an important administrative role was also played by two members of Lugal-irida’s family: his brother, Ur-Iškur, and his son, Lugal-melam, who were actively involved in every aspect of textile production. By serving as head of the main center of the Ur III textile manufacture for more than 20 years, Lugal-irida must certainly have reached a high social status within the provincial administrative elite.34 He must have accumulated considerable wealth and owned significant property. But when it comes to quantifying status and wealth, what did it mean to belong to the richest echelons of the Ur III society in material terms? In order to answer to this question, considering the scarcity of relevant archaeological information, we will have to rely solely on the available textual evidence. First, we know that Lugal-irida was granted a conspicuous amount of arable land under barley cultivation in the Guabba district in return for his services as a superintendent of weavers. According to Maekawa, Zinbun 21, pl. 10 43 (date not preserved), a fragmentary account of allotments of institutional land to high-ranking managers (šuku ab-ba ab-ba-ne), personnel of the agricultural organization (eren2 gu4-me), and shipyard workers (lu2 mar-sa-me), under the supervision of the chief administrator of the Ninmar.ki temple household (ugula saĝĝa dnin-mar.ki), Lugal  Wool: CT 10, 40 BM 17747 (Š.35.00.00), RTC 301 (Š.46.00.00), PPAC 5 1150 (AS.04?.08.00). Goat hair: UDT 12 (AS.03.00.00). Sesame oil/Lard: HSS 4 3 (AS.01.01-12.00), MVN 9 67 (AS.04.07.00), MVN 12 416 (AS.05.00.00), Gomi, Orient 16, 77 112 (date not preserved). 31   Durand, RA 73, 28 15 (Š.46.10.00-Š.47.02.15), Scheil, RT 17, 28 (AS.03.11.00-AS04.12.00), Maekawa, Zinbun 18, 102 7 (00.06.00). 32   MVN 22 39 (Š.47.00.02), SAT 1 431 (AS.01.00.1), PPAC 5 696 (AS.01.00.xx), PPAC 5 633 (AS.01.00.01), SAT 1 430 (AS.02.00.01), AUCT 2 22 (AS.02.00.04), TUT 164-19 (AS.05.11.00), TUT 174 (date not preserved), MVN 15 387 (date non preserved). 33   Cf. PPAC 5 327 (Š.48.00.00), CT 5, 39 BM 17753 (AS.02.00.00), HSS 4 50 (AS.05.00.06). 34   For a discussion of the concept of ‘elite’ in Early Bronze Age Syro-Mesopotamia, see Sallaberger 2019. 30

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Palmiro Notizia: Wealth and Status in 3rd Millennium Babylonia irida held 12 bur3 (c. 77.76 ha) of land located in the gi-dah-ha-field. This figure, which is much larger than the area of any other šuku-plot recorded in the text, may perhaps correspond to the total amount of land destined to the holders of sustenance plots who were employed at the Guabba weaving establishment. Another document, Maekawa, Priests and Officials, 101 App. 4a-b (undated), indicates that the zi3-ka-contribution35 owed by the Guabba nu-banda3 uš-bar as a holder of institutional land was of 720 sila of flour (rev. i 24: 2.2.0 nu-[banda3 uš-bar]). As the zi3-ka-contribution was calculated at a rate of 120 sila of flour per bur3 of land (rev. v 4ʹ: 1.0.0 gana2 0.2.0 zi3 lugalta), it follows that the superintendent of weavers held šuku-plots for as much as 6 bur3 of area (c. 38.88 ha). Only the šita-ab-ba-priest, who was in charge of the cultic organization of the Ninmar.ki temple household, was assigned a comparable amount of land.36 The tablet Maekawa, ASJ 20, 104 5 (undated), written sometime during ŠuSuen’s reign,37 is an account of emmer flour (zi3 sig15) disbursed by high administrators and cultic personnel of the main institutional households of the Ĝirsu/Lagaš province. Although a clear administrative label is missing within the document, its general structure and the volumes of emmer flour associated with individuals and professions suggest that Maekawa, ASJ 20, 104 5 recorded a type of land-tax similar to the zi3-kacontribution. In this text the nu-banda3 uš-bar of the Guabba textile mill delivered the same quantity of emmer flour (3 gur = 900 l) as the chief temple officials of the largest institutional households of the province, the temples of Ninĝirsu and Ninmar. ki, implying that they all held the same amount of allotment land.38 If we take the lower number for the size of institutional land assigned to the Guabba superintendent of weavers (6 bur3 = c. 38.88 ha), and apply the standard 30 gur per bur3 ratio, we can calculate a barley yield of 54,000 liters, worth 3 mana (c. 1.5 kg) of silver (1 gur of barley = 1 shekel of silver). Apart from arable land, we also know that Lugal-irida owned an orchard of unspecified size, which probably included also a tract of forest land. According to WMAH 3 (Š.46.00.00-AS.01.00.00), a large account of construction materials (timber and bitumen) for the shipyard and sailors of the household of the high priestess of Bau (niĝ2-kas7-aka mar-sa ma2-lah5-e-ne e2 ereš-diĝir dba-u2), 60 ‘punting poles’ (ĝišmi-ri2-za) were delivered from the ‘orchard of Lugal-irida, superintendent of weavers’ (ĝiškiri6 lugal-iri-da nubanda3 uš-bar) in the year Šulgi 47, in all likelihood as an obligation deriving from the possession of garden plot(s).

  For this contribution/tax, see Such-Gutiérrez 2003.   240 sila (obv. iii 19) + 720 sila (obv. v 2) = 960 sila ÷ 120 sila = 8 bur3 (c. 51.84 ha). Note that the size of the zi3-ka-contribution of the saĝĝa is not recorded in Maekawa, Priests and Officials, 101 App. 4a-b. In Maekawa, Zinbun 21, pl. 10 43, the šita-ab-ba-priest received 2 bur3 of land in the gi-dah-ha-field (obv. i 10) and 2 bur3 in a field whose name is lost (rev. i 9ʹ). In the same text, the saĝĝa-administrator was allotted 6 bur3 of land (rev. ii 2ʹ), while Adda, the šabra-administrator, received 2 bur3 (rev. i 4ʹ). 37   Rev. iii 8 reads: e2 dšu-dsuen. 38   In the same document the šita-ab-ba-priest provided 2 gur (600 l) of flour, while the nu-banda3 uš-bar of the Niĝin establishment disbursed only 1 gur (300 l). 35 36

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Working at Home in the Ancient Near East A unique insight into the formation and composition of Lugal-irida’s patrimony is offered by BPOA 1 280 (AS.01.01-12.00), an annual balanced account of copper of the smith Niĝiršakuš.39 In the capital section of this record (obv. i 3ʹ-5ʹ), 25 mana (c. 12.5 kg) of copper and 1/2 mana (c. 250 g) of borax (su3-gan), an additive for copper refining,40 are said to have been supplied to Niĝiršakuš’s craft workshop by Lugal-irida. This fact, coupled with the considerable amount of material involved in the transaction—and its value in silver41—, is admittedly unusual and calls for further investigation. In Ur III times, the agents of the merchant organization were in charge of procuring a wide variety of commodities, including precious metals and other native and imported products, on the behalf of institutional clients. More specifically, at Ĝirsu/Lagaš, the trade in copper, borax, and tin bronze was in the hand of the family firm headed by the prominent merchant Ursaga, who provided the local economy with these strategic resources.42 A large portion of the copper circulating in southern Mesopotamia was acquired from Makkan (the Oman peninsula)—one of the major players in the Gulf trade—in exchange for various types of merchandise (silver, cereals, wool, finished textiles, and scented oils),43 with the crucial support of the Babylonian fleet of seafaring ships based in the port of Guabba. Since borax is a substance that, to the best of my knowledge, was not used in any stage of the manufacturing process of textiles (weaving, dyeing, bleaching, and fulling), and the large quantity of copper available to Lugal-irida in BPOA 1 280 can hardly be considered as material recovered from old or broken weaving tools, the only reasonable explanation is to assume that he was somehow involved in trading copper and borax and that this commercial activity represented for him an additional source of income. In my view, Lugal-irida took personal advantage of his position as head of the Guabba weaving establishment—an export-oriented production center—and of his ties with the central administration to engage in entrepreneurial activity and participate, even on a small scale, in long distance trade. I will return to this matter below. The Household Inventory RTC 304 An invaluable source of information concerning Lugal-irida’s household is AO 3106, a six-column cuneiform tablet—baked in antiquity—excavated at Tellō by de Sarzec in 1894.44 A copy of this document was first published by Thureau-Dangin as no. 304 in his 1903 book Recueil de tablettes chaldéennes. Since 2015, a high-quality photograph of AO 3106, which allows a better reading of the tablet, has been available in the CDLI online database (CDLI no. P128457). Hereby, I offer a new transliteration and translation for   For the Ĝirsu/Lagaš smiths, see Neumann 2000.   Reiter 1997: 327–332. Piotr Steinkeller (personal communication) suggests a meaning ‘arsenic’. Cf. Steinkeller 2016: 136. 41   25 mana of copper were worth c. 17 shekels of silver (1 shekel of silver = 90 shekels of copper); 1/2 mana was worth 90–45 grains of silver (1 shekel of silver = 60–120 shekels of borax). See Englund 2012 for the silver equivalences of the major products recorded in the Ur III merchant accounts. 42   See Garfinkle’s contribution in this volume. 43   Laursen and Steinkeller 2017: 22, 58–59. For the commodities exchanged for copper in pre-Sargonic sources from Lagaš, see Prentice 2010: 106–114. 44   Thureau-Dangin 1903: vii; Huh 2008: 386. 39 40

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Palmiro Notizia: Wealth and Status in 3rd Millennium Babylonia this important record based on the CDLI digital image (see Appendix). As indicated by its subscript, RTC 304 is an inventory of Lugal-irida’s belongings (niĝ2-gur11 lugal-iri-da nu-banda3 uš-bar). It enumerates his movable assets (Table 2), from household tools and utensils to clothing, textiles and various foodstuffs, and from different aromatics, wool and leather objects to containers, household personnel, and domestic animals. The only notable omission of the listing is the wooden furniture (e.g. beds, chairs, tables, stools), which usually appears in similar Ur III personal inventories and may well have been recorded on another tablet, while wagons and boats may or may not have been part of Lugal-irida’s possessions. The nature and function of this type of administrative documents and the comparable material from Old Babylonian Mari were studied in great detail by Maekawa (1996, 1997), Heimpel (1997), Lafont (2001), and van Koppen (2002), to which the reader is referred to for a more exhaustive discussion. As far as the Ĝirsu/Lagaš sources are concerned, we are lucky enough to have a conspicuous number of inspection records and related documentation concerning the institutional and private assets of several high-ranking officials, including the three sons of the local governor Ur-Lamma (Ur-Bau, Lugalzuluhu, and Dudu), who also served as administrators of the major temple households of the province between the last years of Šulgi and the beginning of Amar-Suen’s reign. Table 2: Summary description of RTC 304 Commodities/Personnel/Farm animals Bronze ware

obv. i 1-9

Silver

obv. i 10

Bowl of frit-like material

obv. i 11-12

Copper ware

obv. i 13-16

Stone ware

obv. i 18-19

Textiles

obv. i 20-ii 10

Oil and fat

obv. ii 11-15

Aromatics

obv. ii 16-23

Wool

obv. ii 24-28

Assorted goods #1 (glue, pulses, ovoid beads, barley, dates, emmer)

obv. iii 1-6

Grinding tools

obv. iii 7-8

Baskets

obv. iii 9-19

Leather objects

obv. iii 20-21

Assorted goods #2 (alkali, flasks)

obv. iii 22-rev. i 1

Personnel

rev. i 2-ii 7

Farm animals

rev. iii 1-2 91

Working at Home in the Ancient Near East The abbreviated formula mu ša-aš-ru-umki in RTC 304 most likely refers to AmarSuen’s sixth regnal year, that is, the year after Lugal-irida was attested for the last time as an active party in a transaction (TUT 164-19; AS.05.11.00). Taking into account all the collected data regarding Lugal-irida’s career and the inventory RTC 304, the following scenario can be outlined. After almost 25 years of service, first as overseers of weavers and then as superintendent of the entire Guabba textile production center, Lugal-irida may have either been dismissed from his office, or perhaps died of natural causes. Upon his retirement or death, Lugal-irida’s household was meticulously surveyed by officials of the central administration in order to assess the amount and condition of the institutional resources that were at his disposal. RTC 304 and possibly other inspection records containing relevant information on his movable property—including house servants and other personnel—were prepared, while the size of the arable land and garden plot(s) allotted to him were already known from other types of administrative documents. The proposed reconstruction explains why RTC 304 was found in the provincial archive at Ĝirsu (Tellō) among thousands of other cuneiform texts and, more importantly, suggests that this tablet was intentionally baked for long-term preservation and, in all probability, filed together with records of an analogous nature. As I have argued above, Lugal-irida’s official residence was part of the administrative building from which he operated as superintendent of weavers. It was in this large mansion, which functioned as both a home and office, and in its storerooms, as well as in a warehouse or storage facility attached to it, that the state surveyors found the great majority of the objects and valuables inventoried in RTC 304.45 In addition, the building must have included also a courtyard or an open area large enough to accommodate a few domestic animals. As a rule, with the sole exception of garden plots, real property (i.e. houses and house lots, and arable land) was not mentioned in the Ur III household inventories, and RTC 304 is not different in this respect. This of course does not mean that Lugal-irida did not own one or more houses within the Ĝirsu/Lagaš province or elsewhere, as other officials and wealthy individuals undoubtedly did,46 but simply that the central administration was not interested in the goods and assets he owned that were not associated with the state production center. Textual evidence indicates that inspections of state property in the hands of office-holders were routinely performed after the death of the beneficiaries. While the assets that legitimately belonged to the deceased officials could be returned to   Cf. the Umma household inventory of Šeškala, son of Duga, Maekawa, ASJ 18, 166 8 (undated), in which the first section of the account concerning servants, animals, and a large array of objects and commodities is labeled niĝ2-gur11 e2-a ĝal2-la, ‘property available within the house’. In the e2-du6-la inspection record Maekawa, ASJ 18, 164 7 (Š.45.01.00), also from Umma, some of the movable assets of a certain Gubani were found stored in three different containers (ša3 pisaĝ n-kam). 46   Cf. Maekawa, ASJ 18, 167 9 (undated), from Ĝirsu/Lagaš, which attests to the division of the estate of a certain Allamu among his heirs and servants. Allamu owned a house in the city of Ur, as well as in Ursaĝ-pae and Sugan, two settlements of the Ĝirsu/Lagaš province. 45

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Palmiro Notizia: Wealth and Status in 3rd Millennium Babylonia their heirs,47 the institutional goods (personnel, animals, tools, raw materials, etc.) were recovered and relocated to other workshops and households. In principle, the personal possessions of state dependents, including their private houses, wives, and sons, could be seized by the central administration only as a punitive measure, compensating for unfulfilled obligations.48 RTC 304 does not make a clear-cut terminological distinction between Lugal-irida’s household and family property, and the resources temporarily entrusted to him as head of the Guabba weaving factory. Nevertheless, certain commodities can be more or less easily connected to his activity as a state official and to the diverse private enterprises in which he was involved, while other goods are more likely to be assigned to his personal possessions. I assume that metal and stone vessels and other domestic utensils and tools, as well as leather bags and baskets, all fell into the latter category. To this group also belonged the few pieces of clothing and textiles, most of which of ordinary quality, old, or even in poor condition; they can hardly be considered as products of the textile mill temporarily stored at Lugal-irida’s official residence. The same holds true, among the raw materials, for the only 68 kg of unprocessed wool and warp thread, mostly of average quality. With a few exceptions, also the remaining foodstuffs and other goods recorded in RTC 304 can be attributed to Lugal-irida’s personal belongings. The large quantity of dates certainly derived from his orchard, whereas the over 50 gur of barley could either have come from his šuku-plots or have been part of the allotments for the personnel of the Guabba establishment. Either way, the barley was most likely returned to the provincial authorities. The modest amount of physical silver readily available to Lugal-irida (10 shekels = 83.3 g) may seem odd at first glance, but it is perfectly in line with the data retrieved from other known Ur III household inventories. According to these documents, liquid capital in the hands of well-to-do individuals was in fact very limited.49 This is further confirmed by the documentation concerning the assets of the sons of Ur-Lamma, the Ĝirsu/Lagaš governor who held the office for eighteen years until Amar-Suen 3:50 save for a small model boat of silver whose weight is not specified, they do not include any silver, but a great variety of bronze and copper ware and valuable furniture.51 The collected evidence also suggests that finished metal and stone objects were preferred to silver as a means of hoarding wealth, and this information invites us to seriously rethink previous assumptions on silver usage in elite circles and, more generally, on the degree of monetization of the Babylonian economy during the 3rd millennium BC.52   Cf. Molina 2014 for the court cases concerning the estate of the merchant Abī-ati.   Waetzoldt and Sigrist 1993; Wilcke 2005. 49   For some considerations on the cash component of the Old Babylonian dowry lists and inheritance divisions, see Jursa 2010: 810. 50   For the governor Ur-Lamma and his family, see Molina 2014. 51   Maekawa 1996: 114–115: table 2. 52   For the monetary role of silver in the Ur III economy, see Cripps 2014, 2017, 2019. 47 48

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Working at Home in the Ancient Near East The household personnel, numbering 27 named individuals, and farm animals—eight ewes, two rams, and one duck—are recorded in the last two sections of RTC 304, separated from the other movable goods. Lugal-irida’s servants included one male singer, who provided entertainment for his master, 15 people among water drawers and gardeners, who operated in his orchard plot(s), and 11 male and female laborers, whose occupation was not explicitly indicated, but most probably comprised skilled and unskilled workers. It is perhaps worth noting that, assuming a monthly food allowance of 60 liters of barley per person, the stored barley available to Lugal-irida would not have been enough to feed all his slaves and servants for an entire year. The bookkeeping of the entire household is illustrated by the 18 tablet baskets that were inventoried in RTC 304. They contained the numerous institutional administrative records and the private economic documents which together constituted Lugalirida’s personal ‘archive’. Aside from the commodities, personnel, and animals that can be attributed to his property, RTC 304 also enumerates a variety of stored resources that greatly exceeded domestic needs. No doubt, the large amount of refined and regular quality sesame oil (412 sila), as well as the far more modest quantities of lard (45 sila) and alkali (120 sila), can be regarded as raw materials intended for the weaving factory, since we know that these substances were commonly used for bleaching and fulling.53 The same perhaps applies to the c. 3.6 kg of glue (še-gin2), the second largest documented amount of this commodity in the Ĝirsu/Lagaš sources after the 10 mana (c. 5 kg) recorded in HSS 4 5, the household inventory of Lugal-zuluhu, son of the local governor and chief administrator of the temple household of the divine Šulgi. This product, which is attested rather infrequently in Ĝirsu/Lagaš texts and more often in the Umma documentation, was employed primarily as an adhesive by different types of craftsmen.54 Since the aforementioned ‘staff list’ PPAC 5 301 included also five carpenters (nagar), two felters (tug2-du8), and 13 reed workers (ad-kid) working at the Guabba textile factory, it seems safe to assume that the glue kept by Lugal-irida was destined for them. The presence of 12 mana (c. 6 kg) of ovoid beads (na4nunuz-ze2-ze2) in his personal inventory, however, requires a different explanation. These extremely rare objects are documented in only a handful of cuneiform tablets: three texts from Irisaĝrig that describe the rich ‘treasures’ belonging to various divinities, and RTC 304, which records the largest attested amount from the entire Ur III corpus.55 Whether or not   Waetzlodt 1972: 168–174. Note however that sesame oil and lard were also part of the merchandise usually exported from Babylonia to the Gulf region in the 3rd millennium BC and in the post-Ur III period. 54   Neumann 1993: 128, 133–134. Cf. also Van de Mieroop 1987: 151–152. 55   Nisaba 15/2 340 (1 na4nunuz-ze2-ze2; ŠS.05.12.00), Nisaba 15/2 345 (na4nunuz-ze2-bi 46; ŠS.05.12.00), Owen, RA 113, 51 (5 na4nunuz-ze2-ze2; ŠS.05.12.00); cf. also YOS 4 296 (1 na4za-gin3 nunuz-ze2-ze2; Š.37.03.00). For Ur III temples and shrines as places where luxury items were kept, see Owen 2013, 2019 and SuchGutiérrez 2018. 53

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Palmiro Notizia: Wealth and Status in 3rd Millennium Babylonia ovoid beads were also used as dress ornaments, as one could certainly speculate,56 such a concentration of semi-precious stones in the hands of a single individual can only be seen as the result of direct importation, which further corroborates the hypothesis that Lugal-irida was involved in long distance trade. In this respect, additional confirmation is provided by the 13 mana (c. 6.5 kg) of cedar (ĝišeren)— perhaps ‘wooden incense’57—and other wooden/vegetable products, measured both by weight and capacity, mentioned in the aromatics section of RTC 304. The cedar tree did not grow in southern Mesopotamia and several Ĝirsu/Lagaš documents testify to the role of trading agents in the acquisition and delivery of wooden incense and other kinds of spices, resins, and gums to the workshops of perfume makers (i3-ra2-ra2), as well as to other offices and departments of the institutional economy.58 According to the evidence, only the inspection records Maekawa, ASJ 18, 161 4 and TUT 126, both concerning the possessions of Ur-Bau, the chief admnistrator of the Ninmar.ki temple household and son of the provincial governor Ur-Lamma, account for a comparable and even larger amount of imported commodities of this sort: c. 55 kg of sundry wooden/vegetable products measured by weight and 470 sila of various oils, seeds and berries measured by capacity, which evidently required containers to be stored and transported. It is hardly a coincidence, then, that the two economic agents for whom we have proof of a possible involvement in independent trading activity were also the heads of the two most important institutional households and establishments of the Guabba district, the area where the major commercial hub of the entire Ur III state was located. Conclusions Lugal-irida was trained as an accountant and manager (dub-sar). In the early stage of his career he acted as an overseer of weavers in the main center of the Ur III textile manufacture located in the southern district of the Ĝirsu/Lagaš province. By the year Šulgi 32, he was appointed as head of the entire Guabba weaving establishment, a position he was able to keep for more than 20 years in all probability thanks to his organizational ability and managerial skills. Differently from the sons of the governor Ur-Lamma, who also served as administrators of the major temple households of the province, he had no kinship ties with the local ruling family, nor it can be demonstrated that he was a crown official appointed by the king. As a member of the   Cf. Gaspa 2018: 171–172 for the decoration of garments with golden appliqués and stone beads in Neo-Assyrian context. 57   For this aromatic in the Ur III and Old Babylonian periods, see Brunke and Sallaberger 2010: 49; Middeke-Conlin 2014: 40. 58   Cf., e.g. MVN 3 160 (Š.38.00.00), PPAC 5 339 (Š.38.12.00), Limet, RA 62, 3 1 (Š.46.09.00), TUT 131 ([Š.47?].00.00). Puzriš-Dagān (royal treasure archive): NYPL 45 (Š.44.02.00). Of particular interest is the text BE 3/1 55 (AS.1.02.00) where the Nippur merchant Ur-Nuska appears as the provider of wheat, borax, honey, aromatics, and vegetables for the weaving bureau headed by the overseers of weavers Addakala (Garfinkle 2012: 221). The procurement of foreign goods by trade agents is also described in the literary letter UdŠ1 (Michalowski 2011: 344–347): here, the merchant Ur-dun was sent on a royal mission to purchase cedar resin (šim ĝišeren-na). 56

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Working at Home in the Ancient Near East restricted group of high-ranking functionaries in charge of temple households and production units—saĝĝa and šabra-administrators, archivists, land surveyors, chiefs of the granary, scribes of domain land, who were commonly designated as ‘elders’ (ab-ba ab-ba) in the sources—Lugal-irida’s main source of revenue was granted to him directly by the institutional economy, along with an official residence from which he operated in concert with his brother, Ur-Iškur, and his son, Lugal-melam. At the same time, office-holding allowed him to enhance his social standing within the community and to augment his income. The active role he played in the administrative machinery and the access to state resources and facilities were crucial to acquire substantial wealth outside the institutional sphere and to engage in independent economic activity, especially in the trade of precious metals, luxury items, and exotic articles. Even though the inspection tablet RTC 304 lists a combination of institutional goods and private movable assets, which are hardly distinguishable from one another,59 and it does not record the entirety of the property owned by Lugal-irida, nevertheless, the various utensils, furnishings, clothing, foodstuffs, slave and servants, domestic animals, silver and other valuables in this account bear witness to the relatively high degree of prosperity achieved by Lugal-irida’s family and are clearly indicative of his overall socio-economic status. The case here illustrated of the career and fortunes of a successful state functionary and entrepreneur is certainly paradigmatic, but by no means exceptional. Maekawa (1996, 1997) and Heimpel (1997) collected and discussed several examples of rich inventories, almost all of which can be associated with wellknown Ur III state officials and administrators. Yet, when compared with the holdings of the sons of the Ĝirsu/Lagaš governor, which comprised thousands of farm animals, hundreds of servants, large amounts of commodities, numerous pieces of furniture,60 the assets of these individuals may appear to be of modest size.61 In this essay I have shown that, despite all the interpretive difficulties that Ur III personal inventories may present due to the peculiar nature and function of this type of administrative records, they nevertheless offer a great deal of unique information on the materiality of wealthy households of 3rd millennium Babylonia. These long lists of goods, animals, and personnel tell us much about the composition and size of the patrimony of their owners. The combined analysis of these and other pertinent documents allow us to study elite and non-elite households as measurable socioeconomic units and to uncover the non-institutional activities and economic strategies adopted by their heads. More importantly, they help us visualize these households as loci of production and consumption, providing a broader, new perspective on domestic life in ancient Mesopotamia. Cf. the use of the terms niĝ2-gur11 lugal, ‘royal property’, and niĝ2-gur11 ad-da, ‘paternal estate’, in the court record Durand, RA 71, 126 (IS.02.04.00), from Nippur (Lafont 2001: 303-304). 60   Maekawa 1996: 114–115, table 2. 61   Further investigation of these documents will appear in an article in preparation by the author. The inspection records form Old Babylonian Mari studied by van Koppen (2002) also deal with the belongings of high-ranking officials and members of the royal family. 59 

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Palmiro Notizia: Wealth and Status in 3rd Millennium Babylonia Appendix: The Household Inventory RTC 304 1. Transliteration RTC 304 (AO 3106) BDTNS no. 000744 CDLI no. P128457 AS.06.00.00 obv. i 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 ii 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 gal zabar 1 šen-da-la2 zabar 1 ⸢an⸣-za-am zabar ka-tab-ba! 2 šu-ša-la2 zabar 2 gal tur zabar 3 za-hum zabar 2 ma-ša-lum zabar 1 ĝir2-udu-šum zabar ki-la2-bi 14 2/3 ma-na 10 gin2 ku3-babbar 1 ma-al-tum an-zah ki-la2-bi 5/6 ma-na 4 gin2 1 urudakin 1 uruda-zi-in 2 urudaa2-gam ki-la2-bi 5 1/3 ma-na (erased line) 6 na4bur saman4 [x]+1 na4bur ma-al-tum 1 tug2bar-dul5 du 3 tug2bar-dul5 du a-gi4-um 2 tug2guz-za 4-kam us2 (erased line) [x]+1 [tug2]niĝ2-bara3(KWU844) du [x tug2]guz-[za] du 3 tug2niĝ2-lam2 sumun 2 tug2guz-za sumun 2 tug2uš-bar 2 tug2ša3-ga-du3 du 1 tug2gu2-la2 du 5 tug2saĝ.la2.sal du sumun 1 tug2guz-za du ša3-ha 1 tug2niĝ2-bara3(KWU844) niĝ2-dara2 1 tug2guz-za niĝ2-dara2 97

Working at Home in the Ancient Near East 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 iii 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

2 tug2bar-si niĝ2-la2 0.0.1 1 sila3 i3-nun du10-ga 0.0.5 5 sila3 i3-ĝiš du10-ga 1.0.5 7 sila3 i3-ĝiš 9 1/2 sila3 i3-nun 0.0.4 5 sila3 i3-šah2 13 ma-na ĝišeren 1 /2 ma-na gi 1 ma-na šim 2 ma-na šimhi 0.0.5 2 sila3 šimhirinx!(KWU318) 5 sila3 šimgam-gam-ma 0.0.1 šimgig 10 la2 1 ma-na siki tug2 3-kam us2 2 1/2 ma-na siki gagariĝ2 ak tug2 3-kam us2 2 ma-na 10 gin2 šid 1 gu2 4 2/3 ma-na siki tug2 du 54 ma-na siki udu ug7 3 1/2 ma-na siki mug 7 ma-na 10 gin2 še-gin2 0.0.1 4 sila3 gu2 hi-a 12 ma-na na4nunuz-ze2-ze2 50.3.0 še gur 4.3.0 zu2-lum gur 0.1.1 5 sila3 ziz2 (blank line) 2 naĝa4 esir2 5 na4kinkin šu se3-ga 18 pisaĝ im sar ĝal2-la 7 pisaĝ tab-ba sumun 6 pisaĝ ninda sumun 2 pisaĝ ĝišsi-ig sumun 8 pisaĝ šu-niĝin2 sumun 15 kišib u2gamun2 sumun 13 pisaĝ zi3-da sumun 8 pisaĝ gid2-da tur sumun 1 pisaĝ ma2-di3-li2-um (erased line) 3 pisaĝ gid2-da tug2 13 kuš⸢du10⸣-gan sumun 1 kušdabašin sumun 0.2.0 naĝa (erased line) 98

Palmiro Notizia: Wealth and Status in 3rd Millennium Babylonia rev. i 1 12 dug⸢saman4⸣ ⸢hi-a⸣ BLANK SPACE 2 ašc ur-dba-u2 nar 3 ašc ur-zikum-ma-ni!? 4 ašc puzur4-eš4-tar2 5 ašc lugal-ha-ma-ti 6 ašc i3-li2-bi2-la-ni 7 ašc la-an-gu2 8 ašc ur-diškur 9 ašc be-li2-du10 10 nu ur-ku3-nun 11 si12-a-me 12 (erased line) 13 nu lugal-lu2-ni 14 nu me-diškur geme2 15 nu nam-iri-na 16 nu lu2-diĝir-ra 17 ašc a-ni-uru-ni 18 diš ti-ba-gara2-ta 19 diš lugal-igi-sa6 20 dumu-ni-me (blank line) 21 ĝiri3-se3-ga ĝiškiri6-me 22 ašc ⸢nin⸣-di-ku5 23 aš niĝ2-nin-mu-mu-tum3 24 diš lugal-šeš 25 diš dmes-lam-ma 26 ⸢dumu⸣-ni-me ii 1 ašc nin-gaba-ri-nu-tuku 2 ašc nin-sukkal 3 ašc ša3-zum-ba 4 ašc a-ba-dlamma-gen7 5 diš lugal-mu-ma-gi4 dumu-ni 6 ašc nin-mu-sisilim:mu 7 ašc nin-mu-da-kuš2 8 (erased line) BLANK SPACE iii BLANK SPACE 1 3 u8 2 udu-nita2 2 1 uz-tur BLANK SPACE 3 niĝ2-gur11 lugal-iri-da nu-banda3 uš-bar BLANK SPACE 4 mu ša-aš-ru-umki 99

Working at Home in the Ancient Near East 2. Translation Bronze ware (obv. i 1-9) 10 bronze cups 1 bronze kettle 1 bronze goblet with lid 2 bronze šu-ša-la2-bowls 2 small bronze cups 3 bronze canes 2 bronze ma-ša-lum-cups 1 bronze knife for sheep slaughtering Total weight: c. 7.3 kg Silver (obv. i 10) 10 shekels of silver Total weight: c. 83.3 g Bowl of frit-like material (obv. i 11-12) 1 ma-al-tum-bowl made of an-zah Total weight: c. 450 g Copper ware (obv. i 13-16) 1 copper sickle 1 copper ax 2 a2-gam-vessels Total weight: c. 2.7 kg Stone ware (obv. i 18-19) 6 oil flasks made of stone [x]+1 ma-al-tum-bowls made of stone Textiles (obv. i 20-ii 10) 1 bar-dul5-garment of ordinary quality 3 dyed bar-dul5-garments of ordinary quality 2 4th quality guz-za-garments [x]+1 bedspread of ordinary quality [1(+x)] guz-za-garment(s) of ordinary quality 3 old niĝ2-lam2-garments 2 old guz-za-garments 2 uš-bar-cloths 2 loincloths of ordinary quality 1 neck wrapper of ordinary quality 5 old headbands of ordinary quality 1 restored guz-za-garment of ordinary quality 100

Palmiro Notizia: Wealth and Status in 3rd Millennium Babylonia 1 bedspread in poor condition 1 guz-za-cloth in poor condition 2 belts Number of textiles: [x]+28 Oil and fat (obv. ii 11-15) 11 sila of refined (aromatic) ghee 55 sila of refined (aromatic) sesame oil 357 sila of sesame oil 9 1/2 sila of ghee 45 sila of lard Total: 477 1/2 sila Aromatics (obv. ii 16-23) 13 mana (= c. 6.5 kg) of cedar resin 1 /2 mana (= c. 250 g) of sweet reed 1 mana (= c. 500 g) of šim-aromatic 2 mana (= c. 1 kg) of šimhi-aromatic 52 sila šimhirinx-aromatic 5 sila of terebinthe 10 sila šimgig-resin Total: 8.25 kg / 67 sila Wool (obv. ii 24-28) 9 mana (= c. 4.5 kg) of wool for 3rd quality fabrics 2 1/2 mana (= c. 1.25 kg) of combed wool for 3rd quality fabrics 2 mana 10 shekels (= c. 1.1 kg) of warp thread 64 2/3 mana (= c. 32.3 kg) of wool for ordinary quality fabrics 54 mana (= c. 27 kg) of wool of dead sheep 3 1/2 mana (= c. 1.75 kg) of poor quality wool Total weight: c. 68 kg Assorted goods #1 (obv. iii 1-6) 7 mana 10 shekels (= c. 3.6 kg) of glue 14 sila of assorted pulses 12 mana (= c. 6 kg) of ovoid beads 15,180 sila of barley 1380 sila of dates 75 sila of emmer Grinding tools (obv. iii 7-8) 2 mortars coated with bitumen 5 millstones provided with a muller 101

Working at Home in the Ancient Near East Baskets (obv. iii 9-19) 18 tablet baskets 7 old double baskets 6 old baskets for bread 2 old basket with wooden lock 8 old ‘all-purpose’ basket 15 old sealed containing(?) cumin 13 old baskets for flour 8 old small elongated baskets 1 bucket shaped basket 3 elongated baskets for textiles Leather objects (obv. iii 20-21) 13 old leather bags 1 old leather tarpaulin Assorted goods #2 (obv. iii 22-rev. i 1) 120 sila of alkali 12 assorted flasks Personnel (rev. i 2-ii 7) 1 ♂ singer 8 ♂ water drawers 7 garden personnel (1 ♀ + 4 ♂ + 2 ♂ children) 11 other laborers (8 ♀ + 3 ♂ children) Farm animals (rev. iii 1-2) 8 ewes 2 rams 1 duck Property of Lugal-irida, superintendent of weavers (rev. iii 3) Date (rev. iii 4) Bibliography Brunke, H. and W. Sallaberger 2010. Aromata für Duftöl, in A. Kleinerman and J.M. Sasson (eds) Why Should Someone Who Knows Something Conceal It? Cuneiform Studies in Honor of David I. Owen on his 70th Birthday: 41–74. Bethesda: CDL Press. Cripps, E.L. 2014. Money and Prices in the Ur III Economy of Umma. Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 104: 205–232. Englund, R.K. 2012. Equivalency Values and the Command Economy of the Ur III Period in Mesopotamia, in J.K. Papadopoulos and G. Urton (eds) The Construction of Value in the Ancient World (Cotsen Advanced Seminar 5): 427–458. Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press at UCLA. 102

Palmiro Notizia: Wealth and Status in 3rd Millennium Babylonia Garfinkle, S.J. 2012. Entrepreneurs and Enterprise in Early Mesopotamia. A Study of Three Archives from the Third Dynasty of Ur (Cornell University Studies in Assyriology and Sumerology 22). Bethesda: CDL Press. Gaspa, S. 2018. Textiles in the Neo-Assyrian Empire. A Study of Terminology (Studies in Ancient Near Eastern Records 19). Boston/Berlin: de Gruyter. Hattori, A. 2002. Texts and Impressions. A Holistic Approach to Ur III Cuneiform Tablets from the University of Pennsylvania Expeditions to Nippur. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania. Heimpel, W. 1997. Disposition of Households of Officials in Ur III and Mari. Acta Sumerologica 19: 63–82. Huh, S.K. 2008. Studien zur Region Lagaš. Von der Ubaid- bis zur altbabylonischen Zeit (Alter Orient und Altes Testament 345). Münster: Ugarit-Verlag. Jursa, M. 2010. Aspects of the Economic History of Babylonia in the First Millennium BC. Economic Geography, Economic Mentalities, Agriculture, the Use of Money and the Problem of Economic Growth (Veröffentlichungen zur Wirtschaftsgeschichte Babyloniens im 1. Jahrtausend v. Chr., Band 4; Alter Orient und Altes Testament 377). Münster: Ugarit-Verlag. Karahashi, F. and A. Garcia-Ventura 2016. Overseers of Textile Workers in Presargonic Lagash. Kaskal. Rivista di storia, ambienti e culture del Vicino Oriente Antico 13: 1–19. Kleinerman, A. 2011. Craft Production at Garšana. The Leather and Textile Workshops, in D.I. Owen (ed.) Garšana Studies (Cornell University Studies in Assyriology and Sumerology 6): 183–207. Bethesda: CDL Press. van Koppen, F. 2002. Seized by Royal Order. The Households of Sammêtar and Other Magnates at Mari, in D. Charpin and J.-M. Durand (eds) Recueil d’études à la mémoire d’André Parrot (Florilegium marianum 6, Mémoires de NABU 7): 289–372. Paris: SEPOA. Lafont, B. 2001. Fortunes, héritages et patrimoines dans la haute histoire Mésopotamienne. À propos de quelques inventaires de biens mobiliers, in C. Breniquet and C. Kepinski (eds) Études mésopotamiennes. Recueil de textes offert à JeanLouis Huot (Bibliothèque de la délégation archéologique française en Iraq 10): 295313. Paris: Editions recherches sur les civilisations. Lafont, B. 2009. The Army of the Kings of Ur. The Textual Evidence. Cuneiform Digital Library Journal 2009:5. Laursen, S. and P. Steinkeller 2017. Babylonia, the Gulf Region and the Indus. Archaeological and Textual Evidence for Contact in the Third and Early Second Millennia B.C. (Mesopotamian Civilizations 21). Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns. Maekawa, K. 1996. Confiscation of Private Properties in the Ur III Period. A Study of é-dul-la and níg-GA. Acta Sumerologica 18: 103–168. Maekawa, K. 1997. Confiscation of Private Properties in the Ur III Period. A Study of é-dul-la and níg-GA (2). Supplement 1. Acta Sumerologica 19: 273–291. Maekawa, K. 1999. The ‘Temples’ and the ‘Temple Personnel’ of Ur III Girsu-Lagash, in K. Watanabe (ed.) Priests and Officials in the Ancient Near East. Papers of the Second Colloquium on the Ancient Near East – The City and its Life, held at the Middle Eastern Culture Center in Japan (Mitaka, Tokyo. March 22–24, 1996): 61–102. Heidelberg: Winter. Michalowski, P. 2011. The Correspondence of the Kings of Ur. An Epistolary History of an Ancient Mesopotamian Kingdom (Mesopotamian Civilizations 15). Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns.

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Working at Home in the Ancient Near East Middeke-Conlin, R. 2014. The Scents of Larsa. A Study of the Aromatics Industry in an Old Babylonian Kingdom. Cuneiform Digital Library Journal 2014:1. Molina, M. 2014. From Court Records to Sammelurkunden. A New Tablet from Umma and TCL 5, 6047, in N. Koslova, E. Vizirova and G. Zólyomi (eds) Studies in Sumerian Language and Literature. Festschrift für Joachim Krecher (Babel und Bibel 8): 399–421. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns. Molina, M. in press. Who Watches the Watchers? New Evidence on the Role of Foremen in the Ur III Administration, in A. Jördens and U. Yiftach (eds) Accounts and Bookkeeping in the Ancient World: Question of Structure. Legal Documents in Ancient Societies VIII (Philippika. Marburger altertumskundliche Abhandlungen 55). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Neumann, H. 1993. Handwerk in Mesopotamien. Untersuchungen zu seiner Organisation in der Zeit der III. Dynastie von Ur. 2., erweiterte Auflage. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag. Neumann, H. 2000. Staatliche Verwaltung und privates Handwerk in der Ur IIIZeit. Die Auftragstätigkeit der Schmiede von Girsu, in A.C.V.M. Bongenaar (ed.) Interdependency of Institutions and Private Entrepreneurs (MOS Studies 2). Proceedings of the Second MOS Symposium (Leiden 1998) (Publications de l’Institut historiquearchéologique néerlandais de Stamboul 87): 119–133. Leiden: NINO. Nies, J.B. 1920. Ur Dynasty Tablets. Texts Chiefly from Tello and Drehem Written during the Reigns of Dungi, Bur-Sin, Gimil-Sin and Ibi-Sin. Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs’sche Buchhandlung. Owen, D.I. 2013. Treasures of the Sacristy. Revue d’assyriologie et d’archéologie orientale 107: 29–42. Owen, D.I. 2019. A New Iri-Saĝrig ‘Sacristy’ Inventory Text in the Lanier Theological Library, Revue d’assyriologie et d’archéologie orientale 113: 39–44. Prentice, R. 2010. The Exchange of Goods and Services in Pre-Sargonic Lagash (Alter Orient und Altes Testament 368). Münster: Ugarit-Verlag. Reiter, R. 1997. Die Metalle im Alten Orient unter besonderer Berücksichtigung altbabylonischer Quellen (Alter Orient und Altes Testament 249). Münster: Ugarit-Verlag. Sallaberger, W. 1999. Ur III-Zeit, in P. Attinger and M. Wäfler (eds) Mesopotamien. Akkade-Zeit und Ur III-Zeit (Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 160/3): 121–390. Freiburg/ Göttingen: Universitätsverlag Freiburg Schweiz/Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Sallaberger, W. 2019, Who is Elite? Two Exemplary Cases from Early Bronze Age SyroMesopotamia, in G. Chambon, M. Guichard and A.-I. Langlois (eds) De l’argile au numérique. Mélanges assyriologiques en l’honneur de Dominique Charpin (Publications de l’Institut du Proche-Orient Ancien du Collège de France 3): 893–921. Leuven/ Paris/Bristol (CT): Peeters. Sigrist, M. 2001. Neo-Sumerian Archival Texts in the Nies Babylonian Collection (Catalogue of the Babylonian Collections 3). Bethesda: CDL Press. Such-Gutiérrez, M. 2003. Überlegungen zu der sumerischen Zeichen-Gruppe ŠÈ.KA. Sefarad 63: 393–410. Such-Gutiérrez, M. 2018. The Sumerian Term gi16-sa, ‘Treasure’, and the Location of Treasure in the Ur III Period (c. 2100–2000 BC), in E.F. Albelda and Á. Pereira Delgado (eds) Los negocios de Plutón. La economía de los santuarios y templos en la Antigüedad (Spal Monografías Arqueología XXVIII): 15–43. Seville: Editorial Universidad de Sevilla. Steinkeller, P. 2013. Trade Routes and Commercial Networks in the Persian Gulf during the Third Millennium BC, in C. Faizee (ed.) Collection of Papers Presented at the Third 104

Palmiro Notizia: Wealth and Status in 3rd Millennium Babylonia International Biennial Conference of the Persian Gulf (History, Culture, and Civilization): 413–431. Tehran: University of Tehran Press. Steinkeller, P. 2016. The Role of Iran in the Inter-Regional Exchange of Metals: Tin, Copper, Silver and Gold in the Second Half of the Third Millennium BC, in K. Maekawa (ed.) Ancient Iran: New Perspectives from Archaeology and Cuneiform Studies. Proceedings of the International Colloquium Held at the Center for Eurasian Cultural Studies, Kyoto University, December 6-7, 2014 (Ancient Text Studies in the National Museum vol. 2): 127-150. Kyoto: Center for Eurasian Cultural Studies, Kyoto University. Stone, E.C. 2018. The Trajectory of Social Inequality in Ancient Mesopotamia, in T.A. Kohler and M.E. Smith (eds) Ten Thousand Years of Inequality. The Archaeology of Wealth Differences (Amerind Studies in Anthropology): 230–261. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. Thureau-Dangin, F. 1903. Recueil de tablettes chaldéennes. Paris: Ernest Leroux. Van de Mieroop, M. 1987. Crafts in the Early Isin Period. A Study of the Isin Craft Archive from the Reigns of Išbi- Erra and Šū-ilišu (Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 24). Leuven: Department Oriëntalistiek. Verderame, L. 2008. Rassam’s Activities at Tello (1879) and the Earliest Acquisition of Neo-Sumerian Tablets in the British Museum, in P. Michalowski (ed.) On the Third Dynasty of Ur. Studies in Honor of Marcel Sigrist (Journal of Cuneiform Studies, Supplemental Series 1): 231–244. Boston: American Schools of Oriental Research. Waetzoldt, H. 1972. Untersuchungen zur neusumerischen Textilindustrie (Studi economici e tecnologici 1). Rome: Istituto per l’Oriente. Waetzoldt, H. 2011. Die Textilproduktion von Garšana, in D.I. Owen (ed.) Garšana Studies (Cornell University Studies in Assyriology and Sumerology 6): 405–454. Bethesda: CDL Press. Waetzoldt, H. and M. Sigrist 1993. Haftung mit Privatvermögen bei Nichterfüllung von Dienstverpflichtungen, in M.E. Cohen, D.C. Snell and D.B. Weisberg (eds) The Tablet and the Scroll. Near Eastern Studies in Honor of William W. Hallo: 271–280. Bethesda: CDL Press. Wilcke, C. 2005. The Liability of Superiors for Deficits of Their Subordinates, Nouvelles Assyriologiques Brèves et Utilitaires 2005/74: 79–81.

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Working at Home, Traveling Abroad: Old Assyrian Trade and Archaeological Theory Gojko Barjamovic1 and Norman Yoffee2 For the workshop at the 10th ICAANE in Vienna, April 2016, on ‘working at home’, ‘non-institutional economic agents’, and how ‘private groups’ organize ‘production and trade’, a contribution on Old Assyrian mercantile activities is obviously relevant. Gojko Barjamovic, in the first part of this paper, briefly reviews new research on this trading system and offers historical comparisons. Norman Yoffee reflects on the history of trade studies in archaeology and on current, global research on prehistoric trade. Together we focus on the distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ economies, questioning its utility.3 The Old Assyrian commercial system is probably the best-documented example of a long-distance trade network in the ancient world. We know it through the exceptional survival of some 23,000 merchant records written on clay tablets from the private archives of about 500 Assyrian traders living at the site of Kültepe (ancient Kaneš) in Central Turkey.4 Their closest structural parallels are found in the medieval town archives of North Italian city-states and in the Cairo Genizah.5 The basic principles governing the Assyrian exchange have been known for more than 50 years, but only recently have the two important parameters of chronology and volume become sufficiently well established to help anchor the analysis.6 A conservative estimate of the trade during the best-attested period 1895−1865 BC is now at least 200 annual donkey-loads from Aššur to Anatolia.7 This corresponds to several tons of tin and thousands of high-value fabrics. A fine fabric could buy a house. Trade in such volumes by what were effectively private enterprises raises important questions of production, financing, and institutional organization. It challenges previous notions of centralized palace economies controlling production, distribution, and consumption.

1  Harvard University, [email protected] 2  University of Michigan, [email protected] 3  A version of this paper appears in the Hans Neumann Festschrift for which it was originally intended, cf. Yoffee and Barjamovic 2018. 4  Larsen 2015; Veenhof 2008. 5  Larsen 1976. 6  Barjamovic 2011; Barjamovic, Hertel and Larsen 2012. 7  Barjamovic 2018: 137–139.

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Working at Home in the Ancient Near East In the thousands of texts known to us there is only a single mention of a ‘palace’ at Assur, yet the privately organized and financed trade required a significant level of state intervention and support. This type of support, however, was not one that required direct control of trade. Instead, a complex of legal and political institutions of collective government provided the necessary institutional backing. The state facilitated transport through the building and maintenance of roads, bridges, canals, harbors, defensive lines, and systems of communication.8 Drafts of political and commercial treaties show that trade was based on mercantilist principles of protectionism like the later Hanseatic League and medieval and Renaissance Northern Italian commercial activities. As in those two later examples, the Assyrian trade went over land and was based on permanently stationed agents. In some territories, the city assembly was successful in setting up treaties of transit and trade. In other areas local princes denied access to Assyrian merchants because they were attached to other political and mercantile systems. The advantage of such arrangements is that it minimizes risk and replaces insurance. The system reflected in the Assyrian sources of the 19th century BC depended on the fragmented nature of the political scene during this period. It built on ‘technologies’ of shared government, legal institutions, literacy, diplomacy, communication, and financing. The small size of a polity like Assur effectively meant that the same group of individuals shared the roles of agents, financers, and legislators. All actors were closely related in terms of kinship, which means that a system could be built on mutual trust instead of competition. This is an important observation for the present context, since this allows us to define the entire city-state of Assur as a single corporate entity in external competition with a number of similarly organized political units. But the overall pattern of mobility and the traded volume was by no means unique to the Assyrian corporation. There are traces of other commercial networks active in Anatolia at this same time that can ultimately be linked up with Syria, the Aegean, Egypt, the Caucasus, and the Balkans.9 The Assyrian trading system was based on communities of private agents who maintained legal and financial institutions independent from the society in which they settled. The political scene in Anatolia and Northern Syria around 1850 BC was one of power struggles, warfare and changing alliances between leagues of micropolities and the merchants frequently refer to the disruption of trade owing to conflict. The Assyrians, who were a (mostly) neutral party in these conflicts, could, with permission, settle down abroad and gain extra-territorial rights and the protection

8  Barjamovic 2011; forthcoming. 9  Barjamovic 2008; 2018.

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Barjamovic and Yoffee: Working at home, traveling abroad for passing caravans. In return, they offered revenues for the Anatolian rulers and the right of acquisition of their merchandise at favorable prices.10 A recurring feature in the socio-political organization of polities that specialized in long-distance trade is the dominance of multiple, interlocking institutions of political and executive power.11 In the case of Assur, the oligarchic nature of its political organization has been linked to the city’s specialization in trade. The character of royal mandate at Assur was reflected in the way rulers styled themselves as ‘stewards’ of the state deity or ‘chairman’ of the Assembly, but never as ‘kings’.12 Other cities also specialized in overland trade and had ‘republican’ constitutions. Examples include Emar and Tuttul in Syria,13 and perhaps also Sippar in Babylonia. In all three cases, forms of collective governance were in place, and all three cities were located on the peripheries of densely populated regions of production and consumption. It is tempting to suggest that some of the same processes that structured social and political power in medieval Europe and allowed some cities to raise the necessary capital to establish long-distance trading networks took place also in the politically fragmented landscape of Western Asia during the first centuries of the 2nd millennium BC. A connection between the distinctive political configuration we observe and specialization in trade suggests that state support and regulation of a particular kind was needed for the success of the system. Commerce could be stimulated by abolishing taxation on the import of trade goods, through negotiation with foreign powers, and by the operation of a legal system. We have evidence for all this from the Assyrian case. At the same time, the governing institutions—whose members, it has to be emphasized would for a large part be involved in the trade—left the actual running of the business to private enterprise. Social organization in Kaneš is reflected in the lack of spatial segregation of the local population from the trading communities. In some historical and comparable cases, traders were settled in quarters that were physically detached from the rest of the city. Examples of such dual cities include Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco, Cairo and Fustat, Westminster and the City. The first member of each pair served as the theatre of political and religious power, and was typically settled by individuals whose wealth and status was tied to titles and the ownership of land. The latter were communities dedicated to craftsmen and trade, and populated by foreigners and those locals whose wealth was tied to the fickle and socially volatile proceeds of commerce. This was not

10  11  12  13 

Barjamovic 2019, forthcoming. Barjamovic 2018: 146–149. Larsen 1976. Fleming 2004.

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Working at Home in the Ancient Near East the case at Kaneš, where the two populations lived side by side14 and little physical distinction is visible in the (admittedly poorly excavated) material culture.15 Cases in which state policy was directed against trade are few and far between. Fear of political opposition led Ming emperors to worry about promoting undesirable groups like merchants. Attempts by the state to supplant existing private networks through a merger of trade fleets and diplomacy failed,16 as did the subsequent ban on private maritime trade. In fact, archaeology reveals a boom in commercial export of Chinese porcelain in the 1480s while the ban was still in place.17 But overt examples of such attitudes against trade are missing from the Mesopotamian world. Specialization led to the formation of communities dedicated to trade, such as Assur, Venice, Carthage and Novgorod, which made no clear distinction between traders and rulers, and where political power tended to be highly institutionalized and accessible to a substantial part of the population. When such trading cities came under imperial rule, local power structures were usually left intact, suggesting that the way they were organized politically was crucial for their function as ports of trade, and that their survival was seen as an economic bonus. The main point of this summary of new research at Kültepe is clear: the Assyrian texts draw a picture of free stock enterprise based on private initiative, risk-based and profit-seeking behavior, free-floating capital, bearer’s checks, and similar ‘modern’ features within a world that is otherwise thought to have been characterized by centralized or communal ownership of land, water, and storage, fixed prices and state merchants.18 The lower town at Kültepe was not composed solely of Assyrian merchants;19 the kārum was an institution, not the physical settlement of the lower town;20 as many as 20,000 people lived in greater Kaneš,21 which is indeed larger than the home city of the Assyrian merchants, Assur; roads, bridges, guard posts and inns were part of the physical infrastructure through which traders moved tons of rich textiles and tin. There are new sets of questions that arise from this picture of Old Assyrian trade: is Old Assyrian trade ‘anomalous’ in Mesopotamia and elsewhere; if so why, or if not, how do we know? Does the distinction between ‘public’ (that is, the interests of the state/government) and ‘private’ (that is, the interests and behavior of entrepreneurial

14  15  16  17  18  19  20  21 

Hertel 2014. Özgüç 2003. Levathes 1994. Li 2013. Barjamovic 2018. Hertel 2014. Michel 2014. Barjamovic 2014.

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Barjamovic and Yoffee: Working at home, traveling abroad merchants) need to be interrogated (which is polite way of saying: put aside as a relic of past economic and social history)? The Old Assyrian data at first glance show that the ‘substantivist’ views of Karl Polanyi about Old Assyrian trade no longer hold.22 Old Assyrian merchants were not employees of the state, profit-and-loss characterize the ‘spreadsheets’ of the merchants. But, if Polanyi has been dismissed by ancient historians and archaeologists, modern economists are quite happy to build-in ‘substantivist’ elements in economic models. Modern governments subsidize ‘private’ ventures in a variety of ways, from outright grants to tax abatements. Kin-groups, which can be artificial, corporate groups, or real agnatic groups, establish networks in which trade flourishes and profits can be made. Old Assyrianists securely refute M. I. Finley’s dictum that ‘imports alone motivated trade, never exports’;23 perhaps one doesn’t need to rehearse these criticisms of Polanyi and Finley, except that many economic history textbooks that devote a few pages to the ancient world are a half-century or more out-of-date. In the late 1960s and 1970s, trade was a big deal in social evolutionary theory, and for good reasons. Trade was important to anthropological archaeologists because it provided a mechanism for the creation of wealth and status apart from kinship. Long-distance trade provided the key for some theorists, because trading relations broke down reciprocity and wealth-leveling mechanisms and also redistribution and its various forms of kin-relations (such as in conical clans in which distance from common ancestors determined wealth and status). Long-distance trade required traders to establish ties with non-kinsmen and forced traders (the nature of whom were mostly unspecified) to rely on their abilities to disembed goods from local social and economic systems. Further, distant goods, especially preciosities, that the traders brought back to their home societies, provided new means through which leaders could enrich and distinguish themselves, especially symbolically, and so could themselves achieve new status and wealth outside their local kinship systems. Such studies, of course, challenged the Finley-esque notions that exports were not motivating factors in trade. William Rathje thought that the manufacture of highprestige symbols locally allowed Maya leaders to trade for necessities such as salt and obsidian as well as luxury items.24 Phillip Kohl (and others) argued that textiles produced in factories of female slaves and surplus grain was shipped abroad for luxury goods and copper.25 In the mid-1970s the ‘world system theory’ of Immanuel Wallerstein also led to studies on trade.26 22  23  24  25  26 

Larsen 2015; Warburton 2016. Finley 1954: 65. Rathje 1971. Kohl 1978. Wallerstein 1974.

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Working at Home in the Ancient Near East In the 1980s and following there seems to have been a considerable lessening of interest in trade, at least in world archaeology. We are not sure why this is so. Perhaps New Archaeology’s emphasis on cultural adaptation and environmental change as a cause for culture change played a role. Diffusion, migration, and trade were of little importance or interest to many archaeologists. Another possible cause may have been a neo-marxist emphasis on internal social conflict, and still another cause, especially within anthropology, may have been the embrace of views that exchange was not motivated by market mechanisms. Archaeologists like John Murra, for example, wrote that there was no trade in the Andes, only exchange within a ‘vertical archipelago’.27 All that has changed in the last decade. Consider the following titles: Merchants, Markets, and Exchange in the Precolumbian World;28 Archaeological Approaches to Market Exchange in Ancient Societies;29 Tying the Threads of Eurasia;30 Interweaving Worlds;31 Trade and Civilization in the Pre-Modern World;32 The Ancient Maya Marketplace;33 The Real Business of Ancient Maya Economies: From Farmers’ Fields to Rulers’ Realms.34 The geographic range of trade in these studies is astonishing, in part due to new techniques of identifying goods and their distant origins, and in part due to new appreciation of the importance of distant goods and ideas from abroad in ancient societies. If the map of interlocking spheres of interaction35 from Egypt and the Balkans to the borders of China isn’t impressive enough, new research in China itself shows that zones of interaction, the East, North, and Middle Asian spheres, as Li Min calls them,36 converged from the Oxus to the Ordos during the late 3rd millennium BC. Within these zones new forms of metallurgy, psychoactive substances used in ceremonies, new systems of value, and wheeled transport were introduced to China through the 2nd millennium BC. These goods and ideas were critical to the development of cities and states. New research on vessels and their residues found in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico (by Patty Crown)37 shows that cacao from southern Mexico used in ceremonies was exported to the American SW and used in the earliest stages of new social hierarchies in Pueblo Bonito in Chaco, c. AD 800. But who brought cacao over 3000 km to New Mexico, and who circulated goods in the interlocking spheres illustrated in Barjamovic’s map38 of 27  28  29  30  31  32  33  34  35  36  37  38 

Murra 1956. Hirth and Pillsbury 2013. Garraty and Stark 2010. Wilkinson 2014. Wilkinson, Sherratt and Bennet (eds) 2011. Kristiansen, Lindkvist and Myrdal (eds) 2018. King 2015. Masson, Freidel and Demarest (eds) 2020. Barjamovic 2018. Li 2018. Crown 2012. Barjamovic 2018.

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Barjamovic and Yoffee: Working at home, traveling abroad the interlocking circuits? Does the Old Assyrian evidence offer any insight into these questions? Let’s look briefly at Mesopotamian trade before the Old Assyrian period. Piotr Steinkeller has recently written about Mesopotamian trade in the Gulf region, Iran, and to the Asian subcontinent.39 He notes that captains of big ships transported large quantities of barley and textiles to the southern reaches of the Gulf in the Ur III period. The main seaport, Gu’abba, employed thousands of textile workers whose products were a significant part of the trade. In the Old Akkadian period gold, lapis, chlorite and other goods were acquired from Iran and Afghanistan, as is well known. We know, too, about Jamdat Nasr ceramics in Oman and in the southern Gulf region, and the Uruk traits in the so-called expansion period in Syria, Anatolia, and Iran. A new study by Giacomo Benati analyzes the movement of wine in the late 4th millennium from North Mesopotamia and Anatolia in containers holding as much as 20 liters.40 Grapevines themselves came to be planted in the 3rd millennium BC far from their natural habitat zone. Feasting and ceremonies in new states required wine, and the so-called peripheral zones were able to organize the mass production and export of comestibles to markets as far away as Egypt in the late 4th and early 3rd millenniums. We also know that southern Mesopotamian goods appeared in Anatolia and Iran before the Uruk period. Steinkeller argues that the state expanded to control trade in bulk and certain strategic commodities in the mid- and late 3rd millennium. But who traded before these times, when no territorial state existed in Mesopotamia, or in some early periods when there was no powerful state? Viewing Steinkeller’s collection of data from another perspective may suggest some answers. If one is not constrained to choose either public or private control of trade, then one might consider that nascent mercantile elites in some contexts became part of the late 3rd millennium governments, contracted with governments, as Garfinkle also argues, profited from their skills in moving goods from where they were plentiful to where they scarce.41 Treaties and state support of trade does not mean that the state controlled trade, but that it taxed trade goods, and leaders received critical symbolic resources as well as practical ones. Traders moved goods for centuries before centralized states appeared in Mesopotamia, and traders adapted and accommodated to these new regimes and survived their demises. (Markets existed in Pre-Classic Maya communities, the earliest cities in the region, c. 500 BC, as we’ve recently learned. Long-standing patterns of trade in Maya city-states not only survived their collapse but flourished in Post-Classic Mesoamerica). Cross-cultural evidence underscores the existence and importance of traders, perhaps from the time of early settled communities. 39  Steinkeller 2013. 40  Benati 2016. 41  Garfinkle 2012.

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Working at Home in the Ancient Near East Our questions now do not ask ‘was there trade and markets in Mesopotamia?’ (or in other prehistoric and early historic states) but what role did traders play in Mesopotamia (and elsewhere), how did people view traders and trade, and how did societies change in part as trade flourished and/or diminished as the very large geographical and political horizons themselves shape-shifted and changed? Bibliography Barjamovic, G. 2008. The Geography of Trade. Assyrian Colonies in Anatolia c. 1975 – 1725 B.C. and the Study of Early Interregional Networks of Exchange, in J.G. Dercksen (ed.) Anatolia and the Jazira during the Old Assyrian Period (Publications de l’Institut Historique-archéologique néerlandais de Stamboul 111. Old Assyrian Archives, Studies 3): 87–100. Leiden/Istanbul: Nederlands Insituut voor het Nabije Osten. Barjamovic, G. 2011. A Historical Geography of Anatolia in the Old Assyrian Colony Period (Carsten Niebuhr Institute Publications 38). Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Barjamovic, G. 2014. The Size of Kanesh and the Demography of Early Middle Bronze Age Anatolia, in L. Atıcı, F. Kulakoğlu, G. Barjamovic and A. Fairbairn (eds) Current Research in Kültepe/Kanesh: An Interdisciplinary and Integrative Approach to Trade Networks, Internationalism, and Identity during the Middle Bronze Age (Journal of Cuneiform Studies, Supplemental Series 4): 55–68. Bristol (CT): The American Schools of Oriental Research. Barjamovic, G., Th. Hertel and M.T. Larsen. 2012. Ups and Downs at Kanesh – Observations on Chronology, History and Society in the Old Assyrian period (Publications de l’Institut Historique-archéologique néerlandais de Stamboul 120, Old Assyrian Archives, Studies 5). Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten. Barjamovic, G. 2018. Interlocking Commercial Networks and the Infrastructure of Trade in West Asia during the Bronze Age, in K. Kristiansen, T. Lindkvist and J. Myrdal (eds) Trade and Civilisation in the Pre-modern World: 113–142. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barjamovic, G. 2019. Hrozný’s Excavations at Kültepe and the Resurrection of a Bronze Age Palace, in R.I. Kim, J. Mynářová and P. Pavúk (eds) Hrozný and Hittite: The First Hundred Years: 5–31. Leiden: Brill. Barjamovic, G. forthcoming. Anatolia in the Middle Bronze Age, in N. Moeller, D. Potts and K. Radner (eds) The Oxford History of the Ancient Near East. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Benati, G. 2016. Have Empire, Will Travel: The Long-distance Exchange of Consumables in the Late Uruk Period. Unpublished paper. Crown, P. 2012. Chocolate: Consumption and Cuisine from Chaco to Colonial New Mexico. El Palacio 117/4: 36–42. Finley, M.I. 1954. The World of Odysseus. New York: Viking Press. Fleming, D.E. 2004. Democracy’s Ancient Ancestors. Mari and Early Collective Governance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Garfinkle, S. 2012. Entrepreneurs and Enterprise in Early Mesopotamia: A Study of Three Archives from the Third Dynasty of Ur. Bethesda: CDL Press. 114

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