The Umma messenger texts

Includes bibliographical references (pages 251-260).

This monograph contains a study of the Umma messenger texts category, the most abundant category of Neo-Sumerian tablets from the Umma province. Here, all the published and a few unpublished Umma messenger texts (in all, 2.028 tablets), subdivided into the 14 groups of R. McNeil's dissertation, are collected and discussed, and besides all the officials mentioned in these texts, with their respective titles, are listed. More than 2,000 published tablets must be assigned to the Umma messenger texts category. This makes this category of tablets the most numerous among all of the Neo-Sumerian documentation from Umma.

These messenger texts are dated from Šulgi 46 IV (MVN 21, 345) until Ibbi-Sîn 2 XII 30 (Nisaba 27, 26). Five necessities are regularly allotted in the Umma messenger texts; three are alimentary: beer (kaš; also as dida, an extract of malt and other ingredients, that is, the concentrated beer, in the tablets of Groups G-H), bread (ninda) and onions (sum) and two further products were aids to personal hygiene, namely oil and the herb-naga, but it is possible that the oil may have served as a food, at the least in the cases in which ì-giš and ì-šah are mentioned. In one group of tablets (G), fish (ku6, specified sometimes as ku6-kun-zi-da, fish reared in pond) appear as the sixth regular allotment. Much more rarely are barley (še), flour (dabin, zì-gu), bran (duh), sheep (udu-ú/niga) and kids (máš), fruit (zú-lum, dates, gišnu-úrma, pomegrate) and other non-alimentary items (wool and hides) distributed.

The subdivision of the Umma messenger texts has been established into twelve groups in the well-known and enduring dissertation of R. McNeil. This division was based primarily on the type and quantity of goods allotted. A reorganization of the texts into megagroups has been added to the work of R. McNeil by this writer in the article The Ur III Administration: Workers, Messengers, and Sons, in S. Garfinkle – M. Molina (eds.), From the 21st Century B.C. to the 21st Century A.D. Proceedings of the International Conference on Sumerian Studies Held in Madrid 22-24 July 2010, Winona Lake 2013, pp. 223-227, also based on the dates of the texts and the disposition of the five or six allotted goods upon the tablet. The author would like to reiterate his past suggestions with some updates in this volume.[Publisher's text]

F. Pomponio, professor at the University of Messina.