A 4,000-year-old empire left behind around 120,000 clay receipts
The Third Dynasty of Ur lasted roughly a century, yet it is among the best-documented states of the ancient world. Excavators have recovered around 120,000 of its clay tablets, and most are paperwork: receipts, inventories, staff lists and balance sheets from an administration so busy it has been called bureaucratic.
Ur III, as historians abbreviate it, flourished in the 21st century BC by the commonly used middle chronology, though other dating schemes shift it later by decades. Its founder, Ur-Namma, was governor of Ur and probably the brother of Utu-hegal of Uruk, the king who had defeated the Gutians after the fall of the Akkadian Empire; Ur-Namma and other courtiers deposed Utu-hegal after about eight years. Ur-Namma then called himself King of Sumer and Akkad, restored cities, temples and canals, and issued a law code to show himself a just ruler. He died in battle after around 18 years on the throne.
His son Shulgi reigned for about half the dynasty's lifespan. After two decades known mostly for religious works, he campaigned toward the upper Tigris, the Zagros and Elam, arranged marriage alliances with Iranian kingdoms, and built a northern wall against Amorite incursions. He also overhauled taxation, temple estates, scribal training and the calendar, and founded a vast administrative hub at Puzrish-Dagan. The paperwork boom that followed explains why so many tablets exist. Shulgi was deified in his lifetime, and a literature praising him flourished.
Kings and scholars wrote chiefly in Sumerian, which is why the era is sometimes called a Sumerian Renaissance, even though its imperial model was the Akkadian state two centuries earlier. Historians reconstruct its politics largely through year names: each year was titled after a notable royal deed of the previous year, such as building a stele or conquering a land, giving an official version of events.
The tablets surfaced in dramatic fashion. About thirty thousand came to light at Girsu in 1894, and clandestine diggers found some 30,000 at Umma in 1909 and around 15,000 at Drehem in 1911. By a 2016 count only 64,500 had been properly published. The empire eventually crumbled under Amorite pressure and breakaway cities, and an Elamite army destroyed Ur around 2004 BC.
Source: Third Dynasty of Ur
