This book, Men of Ur by I. M. Diakonoff, is one in a series devoted to the different aspects of life in Old Babylonia and specifically in the Kingdom of Larsa which preceded Hammurapi's kingdom as the leading state of Mesopotamia in the 19th — 18th centuries В. C. The work, mainly based on Ur Excavation Texts V by H. H. Figulla and A. J. Martin, aims at drawing a picture of Old Babylonian everyday life. The city of Ur was one of the three or four important cities in the Kingdom of Larsa, a seaport and the centre of the cult of the great Moon-God Nanna, or Sin. Ur was selected for our book as one of the very few ancient Mesopotamian cities where considerable residential areas have been excavated, with tablet archives and household objects found in situ.
The present book is not the first devoted to Old Babylonian Ur. It was preceded by Foreign Trade in the Old Babylonian Period by W. F. Leemans (1960), and by Le clerge d'Ur au siecle d'Hammurabi by D. Charpin 1986). However, Leemans' book is concerned only with foreign traders and specifically with only one household in Ur, and Charpin's, mainly with priests, and not so much in their daily life as in their priestly activities. The present book was finished in 1983, and while it was with the publishers, the author could gratefully make use of some of Charpin's findings: but the three books do not actually overlap in any important degree. On the contrary, all] three are mutually complementary and draw a more comprehensive picture of Ur in the Old Babylonian period than any one of them.
A more detailed history of the Kingdom of Larsa can be found in another book in this series, Ancient Larsa. Sketches of Economic Life, by Nelly Kozyreva (Puss., 1988). Therefore, the text of the present book contains only a short Historical Introduction (Chapter I), and then the following chapters:
Chapter II. The People in the of Mesopotamia: their appearance. It treats of the clothes and fashions, furniture, utensils, food, mores and manners of the people; the archaeological material from Ur and Larsa itself being not always sufficient, the chapter is also based on texts and objects found not only on Larsa territory but likewise on material 424 from other neighbouring Mesopotamian kingdoms.
III. The City of Ur under the Sons of Kudurmabug. Kudurmabug was a half- Amorite, half-Elamite nomad chieftain who managed to overthrow the ruling dynasty of Larsa. He did not, however, assume royal power but enthroned in Larsa his son WaradSin (1826–1823) and, after the latter's death, his second son, RimSin (1822–1763) who proved to be a successful and energetic ruler. The chapter is devoted to a hypothetic reconstructive description of the city of Ur, its streets and buildings, under WaradSin and RimSin, based on the results of L. Woolley's excavations and some relevant texts. The reconstruction differs in several respects from that of the excavator who was influenced by the image of modern commercial cities, on the one hand, and modern Iraqi cities, on the other. Thus, certain isolated rooms found along the narrow streets of Ur were interpreted by Woolley as shops, in spite of the fact that they lacked places for storing wares and privies for the salesmen. From texts we know, however, that city dwellers owned sheep, and that they had to be driven into the city before the city-gates were shut at sunset. Woolley's «shops» are actually sheep-cots. We have been able to establish that some blocks of buildings at Ur housed extended families; also other important corrections to the existing archaeological interpretations are suggested.
To this chapter is appended the excursus IIIa: Identification of houses where the documents were found. It contains a list of the houses on the AH site, with corresponding find and publication numbers of tablets and some other objects, and the names of the probable inhabitants. The compiling of this list was fraught with serious difficulties. The find numbers were often inscribed by archaeologists at a date later than the find itself, many objects (including tablets) had lost their provenance, a considerable number of tablets of no longer known but different provenance were listed under a single number (U. 17249), although in some cases their real origin can still be established by prosopographic means; some numbers were given twice to different tablets. The number of tablets mentioned in L. Woolley's text as found at a given place of the excavation site is often greater then that which can be inferred from the catalogue of the finds; also the place of the find as mentioned by the author is often suspect. Information in the earlier publications does not tally with that in the final one.
Objects different from tablets were not numbered together with the tablets but in separate series unconnected with the houses where they were found, and thus in many, perhaps in most cases can no longer be connected with definite loci, families and individual inhabitants of the city; the catalogue of terracottas includes mainly objects not from Ur but from neighbouring Diqdiqqah (presumably a village of professional ceramists) and includes, without any warning, objects both earlier and later than the OB period; the published catalogue of burials hardly includes so much as a half of the burials actually found; no measurements were made, so that baby burials, burials of adolescents and burials of grown-ups cannot be distinguished. Of the several types of published larnax burials apparently only type В belongs to the period under investigation. Many implements and other objects in L. Woolley's text do not appear in the catalogues. All bones, both animal and human, which could have given important information on the diet, anthropology, and life expectancy of the population, were simply thrown out. The list of archaeological errors and misdeeds could be continued ad infinitum. Were it not for the selfless labour of the editor, T. L. Mitchell, who was able to create some order out of the original chaos, no further scientific investigation of the city of Ur would be possible.
However, we hope that, thanks to Mitchell's efforts, our present list of tablet finds on the AH site given in this excursus will still be a help for students of the city of Ur in the OB period.
Inter alia, it is established that the so-called «Hendursang Chapel» or the adjoining house seems to have been the residence of the kakikku, a priest / official whose presence was apparently essential when agreements involving important property were made; such deeds were often kept at the chapel.
Chapter IV. A Merchant, Seafarer, and Copper Founder. It is devoted to the household of Eianasir, earlier studied by W. F. Leemans, and adds a few new aspects to the latter's results.
Chapter V. School and Scholarship, is partly based on the finds made in Ur itself (7, Quiet Street; 1, Broad Street) and partly on other known cuneiform school-texts of different types. In distinction from Charpin, the author does not believe that the OB school was a family affair connected with the priesthood, and develops the more traditional ideas of S. N. Kramer and B. Landsberger who regarded the OB schools as institutions more or less open to children of freemen and royal-and-temple functionaries; this of course does not mean that literacy and priestly offices were not apt to be hereditary in certain families. The author makes an attempt to draw a picture of the OB education curriculum as a system and a tradition.
The author agrees with Charpin that the house 1, Broad street was not a school, but he believes the house was built on the site of a former school.
Chapter VI. Extended Family Communes in the Countryside and in the City. Businessmen and Merchants, Priests and Priestesses.
In the beginning of this chapter it is shown, on the basis of documents of sale and rent of land, that extended family ownership of land was typical for the rural population not connected with the palace-and-temple
