Observations on Diplomatics, Tablet Layout and Cultural Evolution of the Early Third Millennium: The Archaic Texts from Ur

Lecompte, Camille; Balke, Thomas E.; Tsouparopoulou, Christina

doi:10.1515/9783110459630-007

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“…For the Ur sealings, it is likelier that they are concerned with sets of offerings, over a period of years or decades, made by individual cities or groups of cities, to a major deity at Ur, doubtless the moon god Nanna (or Nanna-Sîn) (Black and Green 1992, 135;Charvát 2017). This attribution is underlined by the fact that some 140 of the 330 Early Dynastic I Sumerian texts from Ur, found in the same Seal Impression Strata as almost all the city sealings, constitute an archive from the Nanna temple at Ur, which includes mention of both a king (lugal) of Lagaš and a palace (E 2 .GAL), the earliest textual references in Mesopotamia for both king and palace (Sallaberger 2010;Lecompte 2013Lecompte , 2016. Also commonly cited in the Ur texts is the sign AB, understood by Sallaberger (2010, 33) to refer to a 'royal precinct' where the king resided and held office.…”

Section: The Early Dynastic I Phasementioning

confidence: 99%

Cultic resilience and inter-city engagement at the dawn of urban history: protohistoric Mesopotamia and the ‘city seals’, 3200–2750 BC

Matthews

Richardson

2018

World Archaeology

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Within the context of early urbanism, elite groups developed the world's earliest writing in Mesopotamia, 3200-2750 BC, comprising administrative documents in the form of inscribed clay tablets. How did these proto-literate urban communities engage with each other and what strategies did they employ to address major challenges to their survival? The 'city seal' evidence survives as seal impressions on clay bureaucratic artefacts, both inscribed tablets and impressed sealings. These impressions feature signs representing the names of Mesopotamian cities, many of them identifiable with known sites. The documents stand at the threshold of history, as the earliest evidence for inter-city engagement. Using an innovative methodology and interpretive framework of cultic resilience, the authors integrate archaeometric, iconographic and functional analyses of the earliest stages of writing and sealing, to argue that the city seal evidence provides unique insights into inter-city cooperation by Mesopotamian cities during a critical episode of early urban development.

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Section: The Early Dynastic I Phasementioning

confidence: 99%