Writing, Sealing, and Managing. An approach to the documentary sources of the Third Dinasty of Ur from the Landscape Ephigraphy
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2177-4218.v13i1p219-250Keywords:
Landscape Epigraphy, Mesopotamia, Third Dynasty of Ur, administrative textsAbstract
In this article, we propose an approach to the administrative texts of the Third Dynasty of Ur in Mesopotamia (c. 2110-2003 BCE) – in particular, of the pisaĝ-dub-ba tablets – from a theoretical-methodological perspective that we will call Landscape Epigraphy. On the one hand, its importance lies in understanding documents in the same contexts of production, circulation, and storage, considering their semantic-internal and syntactic-structural components. On the other, it enables the understanding and recognition, based on a rigorous approach to administrative documentation, of (i) agents (human and non-human) along with their practices, (ii) objects/things (material culture), and (iii) places involved in shaping a social landscape. In the case of Lower Mesopotamia, the social landscape was composed of several provincial archives, which were subdivided into smaller and larger offices as regulators of different economic and political spheres of this period. Finally, the outlined theoretical-methodological perspective will contribute to the analysis of the Neo-Sumerian bureaucratic system, which would have been expressed through the messages contained in the documentary record and, in this way, it reinforced the legitimate voice of the center over local powers.
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