Let’s continue the “Locker Room History of Mesopotamia” with this bit of prose from The Babylonians, a somewhat-misleadingly titled book that has become my bedtime reading this month. The book actually tells the entire story of the region, from prehistoric times to the onset of the Persian Empire.
The so-called “Third Dynasty of Ur” began in 2113 BCE — several hundreds years after the tax revolt I wrote about recently — with the restoration of Sumerian-speaking kings after the rule of Sargon (a Semite) and a period of outside invasion. Apparently, the new rulers were highly bureaucratic, as evidenced by the fact that archaeologists have found hundreds of thousands of tables of cuneiform (the Mesopotamian writing system that had a reed stylus making wedge shapes in clay). Most of the tablets have governmental decrees, business transactions, or economic data on them. There are so many that the contents of few have yet been published.
When I say “bureaucratic,” I mean it:
Documentation became obsessive. Everything had to be documented, such as, on one tablet, an exact count of a certain kind of fish (2,740 of them) delivered as food for the temple dogs. Two sheep, dead from natural causes, were regarded as a matter requiring record. There was even documents recording that there was nothing to record.
Much as this sounds like it should be read in the voice of John Cleese.
