Defining Collectives: Materialising and Recording the Sumerian Workforce in the Third Dynasty of Ur

Tür:

Kitap Bölümü

Yazar:

Agnès Garcia-Ventura

Yayın yılı:

2016

Yayıncı:

De Gruyter

Kinship is one of the main aspects that scholars have borne in mind in their attempts to characterise the workforce recorded in administrative texts of the Mesopotamian Third Dynasty of Ur (ca. 2112-2004 BCE). In my view, although some of the hypotheses proposed regarding marital status and filiation can improve our understanding of these texts, others risk distracting our attention from possible complementary or alternative readings. The twentieth-century scholars who first proposed the translations of Sumerian terms that are currently quoted and used1 began by considering the biological family and kinship as the main structuring institutions; only rather later did they begin to consider other ways of defining collectives and the workforce. In fact, their first translations may actually have been more a reflection of their own context than of the context they meant to describe. Aware of this possible bias, I propose to reassess some of these terms in an attempt to identify what they highlight, and consequently what they tell us about the ways in which work collectives were built and perceived.

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