Ur-Utu, the man

OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST-PROOF, 02/17/11, SPi

chapter 13

l e a r n ed, r ich, fa mous, a n d u n h a ppy: u r-u t u of sippa r michel tanret

What do we know about the life of Ur-Utu, chief dirge singer (or chief lamenter, galamāhum) of the goddess Annunitum and one of the most prominent citizens of Sippar Amnanum? What do we know about his education, his interests and aspirations?1 His house was excavated by the Belgian Archaeological Mission to Iraq under the direction of Leon De Meyer and Hermann Gasche (Gasche 1989). The archive it contained turned out to be particularly rich and important: comprising 2500 tablets, it is the largest private Old Babylonian archive ever found. It was excavated so meticulously that we not only know in which layers and rooms the tablets were found but also how they were grouped within these rooms. Such precision in excavating and reporting enabled us to reconstruct the circumstances in which the archive was abandoned by its last owner, Ur-Utu, as well as the processes by which it was formed. Perhaps paradoxically, although Ur-Utu’s rich and well documented archive provides unique insights in the social and economic life during the second half of the Old Babylonian period, it does not provide us with much direct information about Ur-Utu as a person. The archive contains contracts and administrative texts documenting his economic activities and those of his family, but this does not tell us much about him. The over two hundred letters of the same archive look more promising at first sight, but these

This article is the result of research undertaken within the framework of the Interuniversity Pole of Attraction Programme VI/34—Belgian State. Federal Office for Belgian Science Policy. Names of Old Babylonian kings will be abbreviated as follows: Sm = Sin-muballiṭ, Ha = Hammurabi, Si = Samsu-iluna, Ae = Abi-ešuh, Ad = Ammi-ditana, Aṣ = Ammi-ṣaduqa. Di (= Dêr inscriptions) numbers refer to unpublished texts form the Ur-Utu archive, unless otherwise stated. All Di letters cited are taken from Caroline Janssen’s unpublished PhD thesis (Janssen 1993) whom we thank for permission to cite. When a Di number is cited alone this refers to an unpublished document. 1

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were almost all sent to him by other people with only a few copies of letters he sent. And as they mostly concern economic matters, or allude to situations we do not otherwise know about, the letters are also little help to us. But although we have no direct access to the information we want, we will see there are some indirect and unexpected ways to lift some of the veil the time has spread over the person of Ur-Utu. We will proceed from an attempt at a simple biography and reach out on every possible occasion from there to his intellectual undertakings, his hopes, and his fears.

Yahrurum origins Ur-Utu was born into a family long involved with priestly prebends, or rights to temple income, involving a number of days of the dirge singer ( gala)-ship of the goddess Inanna of Sippar Yahrurum. His known ancestry goes back six generations, to the reign of Apil-Sin (1830–1813).2 The priestly functions also originate from that time. His family had always lived in Sippar Yahrurum but Ur-Utu’s father, Inanna-mansum, moved to Sippar-Amnanum, a sister town some five kilometres away, when he became a chief dirge singer—the first of his family—in the first year of king Ammi-ditana (1683).

Moving to Amnanum and moving in Amnanum Inanna-mansum stayed in his first house in Sippar-Amnanum for 28 years (1683–1655) and then bought a group of smaller houses, had them demolished, and built a completely new and much larger one in their place (Janssen et al. 1994). This was a typical but sizeable Old Babylonian house of 193.75 m2, with a central court of about 35 m2 surrounded by nine rooms (Gasche 1989). There probably was only a ground floor. After 27 years, in 1628, he rebuilt it. Some rooms received new floors and three rooms were added at the back, enlarging the house to 250 m2. This was not a small house, but the materials used for its construction, in particular the foundations and the brickwork, were of poor quality. We may have expected better for the dwelling of the highest priest in town. Although the rebuilding might have been necessary because of the poor quality of the building materials, the reason for adding the rooms was to create a larger space for the archive. This had been kept in one of the smaller rooms opening onto the courtyard, with a floor area of just under 10 m2. The newly created archive room was nearly double this size at just under 19 m2. The fact that there were two archive rooms in the house is important in relation to the place where the archival tablets were found. We will come back to this later, after a look at the family troubles between Inanna-mansum’s sons. Absolute dates conform to the Middle Chronology for reasons of uniformity throughout this volume. 2

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The dead The house was not only a place for the living but it was also the last resting place for the deceased members of the family (Gasche 1989: 65–66). The number of graves under the house indicates that child mortality must have been relatively high, which is not surprising. The gender of the deceased is interesting: four of the five adults were women, a fact that fits in well with the high rate of newborn and infant deaths. It is tempting to identify the older man buried under the old archive room with Inanna-mansum, Ur-Utu’s father, who died in the house. However, as Hermann Gasche already noted, this poses a problem since we know that Inanna-mansum’s career lasted 42 years while anthropological study of the bones indicates that the remains are of a man of up to 50. We would tend to discount this estimate and consider this to be Inanna-mansum. The grave in itself is not of particularly high quality, although it is a vault tomb, but it has quite a number of grave gifts, including ox and sheep or goat meat (now only bones), some of which were even deposited in the pit outside the tomb. These features make it exceptional among the graves under the house. During the rebuilding and the rearrangement of the archive, the house burnt down, never to be rebuilt or revisited. This final occupation phase lasted only five months (Tanret 2001) and, surprisingly enough, in that short span of time no less than nine individuals were buried under the house. All of them are newborns or babies up to a year and a half, except for a boy of about 11. As Gasche (1989: 66) noted, this implies that three or four women reached the end of their pregnancies within a very short timespan. Epidemics or malnutrition, the causes of death proposed by Gasche (who reckoned on 16 months for this phase), seem all the more probable now that we know they took place in just five months. There must have been hardship towards the end. But let us first turn to happier times.

Ur-Utu is born Inanna-mansum had married a woman from Babylon, Ilša-hegalli, who was a qadištumpriestess. Their first son was probably Ur-Utu. As we will see further on, Ur-Utu may have been in his early teens around 1651. This would put his date of birth around 1661, in Ad 23, twenty-three years after his father moved to Sippar Yahrurum and six years before he had his new house built. He disappeared in Aṣ 18 (1629) at the age of 32. If we assume that his father Inanna-mansum was about 20 when he became chief dirge singer and moved to Amnanum in Ad 1 (1683) he would have been born in 1703, which corresponds to Ae 9. (His father Marduk-naṣir is attested under Samsu-iluna, 1749–1712). He would have had Ur-Utu at a rather late age, when he was 42. Ur-Utu had a sister, Lamassani, and three brothers, Kubburum, Huzalum, and Iliiqišam. This could have been a well-to-do and happy family, but it was not and there were reasons for that.

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Trouble in the family After a 41-year career, at the end of 1643 (Aṣ 4), Inanna-mansum handed over his role as chief dirge singer, head of the main temple of Sippar-Amnanum, to his son Ur-Utu and donated a number of fields and house plots to him (for a full account of this section, see Janssen 1992). The fact that Ur-Utu was already receiving (part of) his inheritance provoked the jealousy of his three brothers, who also claimed their shares. Inanna-mansum refused to give them anything during his lifetime, infuriating them even more. Then, as so often in those times, they tried to invoke the help of a higher authority. When an influential person visited Sippar Yahrurum he was offered golden earrings belonging to one of the brothers’ wives as a bribe in exchange for interceding with Inanna-mansum. The latter’s answer was most surprising, at least according to Ur-Utu (not the most objective witness in this matter but there is no other), who cites his father’s words in a letter. According to him Inanna-mansum said: To whom should I divide my inheritance? This Kubburum, he is the son of WaradMamu, a servant of Esangila-mansum, the [text broken] Ili-iqišam is the son of a sister of the daughter-in-law of Ku[…]ia and Huzalum is the son of a (female) tenant of the house of a slave of the sanga-priest of Zarpanitum. I will not leave my inheritance to them. Ur-Utu has received my sceptre [= he is my heir]. I will leave everything to him. (Janssen 1992: 24–25)

Even if we may suppose there is some exaggeration here, especially where Ur-Utu claims that his father wanted to make him sole heir, the remarks about the brothers not being Inanna-mansum’s children must be taken seriously. As Lucile Barberon (2005) has convincingly shown, since Inanna-mansum’s wife was a qadištum-priestess, it is probable that although she could marry she was not allowed to bear children, which means they were all adopted. Starting from the idea that none of these children were children of Inanna-mansum’s wife, Barberon hypothesizes that when Inanna-mansum refers to their father they are not his children either, but when he refers only to a mother he might well be the father himself, the mothers being secondary wives he may have had. This leads then to the conclusion that Kubburum was adopted by Inanna-mansum and his wife and that Ur-Utu, Huzalum and Ili-iqišam (probably in that order) were sons of Inanna-mansum with secondary wives. This confirms our earlier conclusion that Ur-Utu was Inanna-mansum’s eldest son and thus the heir to his title. This also fits well in with the fact that Kubburum (the only son who was completely adopted) was the most vehement concerning the inheritance, no doubt because he felt his position to be least assured. He managed to persuade his ‘brothers’ (since they had received nothing from their father either) to manipulate their father into giving them their shares and to litigate against Inana-mansum’s wife for the property she had received from him (Janssen 1992: 24–25, 35–36). However, we sadly note that, notwithstanding the fact that one brother was adopted and the three others had different mothers, all of them are simply referred to as ‘sons of Inanna-mansum and his wife’ in many texts of the archive, a historian’s nightmare.

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Inanna-mansum’s disinheritance threat was in fact only that, because further information shows that after Inanna-mansum’s death his property was divided among his sons. Indeed, a little further on in the same letter, Ur-Utu states that the brothers have divided the inheritance, except for a house in the sister town Sippar Yahrurum, where the family had lived until Inanna-mansum moved to Sippar-Amnanum. This house had been sealed but, still according to Ur-Utu, the brothers had broken into it and stolen goods that had been kept there: 1200 litres of oil, fine clothes, copper cauldrons. Altogether the haul was worth 10 minas of silver, about 5 kilos—quite a sum, the approximate price of 50 ha of fields or several houses in town. Again, in view of the fact that this information comes from a letter in which Ur-Utu complains about how he was wronged by his brothers, we may have to take it with a grain of salt. As if this were not enough, still according to Ur-Utu, his brothers broke into the house a second time and took everything that was left, down to the hairpins and pestles. Ur-Utu then asks his intercessor to speak to a very important person in the capital city, Babylon, and persuade him to have the brothers arrested and brought to the capital to be judged and condemned. As already mentioned, Inanna-mansum’s wife also had to suffer the attacks from three of her sons. Inanna-mansum had given her some property as a gift from husband to wife. When he died the three—Kubburum, Ili-iqišam, and Huzalum—started litigation against her. Again, they felt that a part of their rightful inheritance had been taken away. Again, a higher official was approached and bribed (Janssen 1992: 35–36). A supplementary difficulty for the mother was that she had lost the sealed document stipulating the gift. Officials came to Ur-Utu’s house, where his mother was living, examined the property deeds, and concluded that she had indeed rightfully received the gift from her husband. So finally, after years of dispute and lawsuits all was well that ended well: Ur-Utu became chief dirge singer and received a large part of his inheritance at the same time, while his father was still living. The brothers protested and lost but finally got their share of the inheritance after their father died. All seemed to be going well for Ur-Utu.

Ur-Utu, the man The chief dirge singer was a very important person in his local community of SipparAmnanum but it is clear that the sanga-priests of the Ebabbar, Šamaš’s temple in Sippar Yahrurum, were more important (Harris 1975: 187; Charpin 1988: 28–30 text HG 96). When the chief dirge singer was involved in a lawsuit with his brothers they referred to higher authorities who resided in Babylon or travelled around. They offered bribes and asked intermediaries to approach high officials in their favour (Janssen 1992: 24–26). Social networks were of the utmost importance. The chief dirge singer had relations in Babylon who interceded for them with the higher authorities there. They seem to have had relatively few dealings with their fellow-citizens; or at least, they are much more sparsely documented. As the future head of the local temple Ur-Utu was no doubt inducted orally by his father into the Annunitum cult and the meaning of its various rituals. In writing we only

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have the ‘bookeeping’ aspect of the cult, concerning the management of rations and the produce left over from the execution of the rites (Tanret & Van Lerberghe 1993). Ur-Utu had the authority to organize rites of Annunitum, which were performed by many individuals, mainly but not exclusively women. This performance was lucrative for the chief dirge singer because the remains of these cultic activities (silver, beer, bread, and flour) were due to him but it was also desirable from the performer’s point of view. In Ur-Utu’s archive we find a number of letters in which higher ranked persons ask or command the chief dirge singer to accept people of their entourage for the rites. The granting of these requests no doubt gave Ur-utu some leverage among the high and mighty.

Wealth As an indication of Ur-Utu’s wealth we take the example of his ownership of fields. We have to look behind the data to get a more accurate picture. Ur-Utu owned quite a number of fields in many agricultural districts in the Sippar region. Some of these he had inherited from his father. According to one text from the archive his father had bequeathed 8.28 ha (1 bur and 5 iku) to him during his lifetime (Di 932, Janssen 1992: 37). We know he owned much more than that. We can calculate the area he must have owned or managed on the basis that he paid an annual tax of 82.3.4.0 gur or nearly 25,000 litres of barley. One text from the archive gives the equivalence 6 gín (54 g) of silver = 6 gur (1,800 litres) of barley, the biltum-tax on 1 bur (6.48 ha) of field (Di 837).3 This allows us to calculate that the 24,820 litres he paid every year was the tax on nearly 14 bur, or almost 90 ha of land. There is no document in the archive showing that Ur-Utu owned or managed any fields other than his own, and there is no indication that he managed the fields of the Annunitum temple (if these existed at all). That leaves us with a bit of a mystery as to where all these fields came from. It is true that the archive contains a sizeable real estate section but it certainly does not document the acquisition of a total of more than 80 ha of land. We also must take into account that what we have calculated so far is just the tax he had to pay on these fields. The real yield must have been higher. Some texts also show that even on the taxes he had to pay Ur-Utu made a profit: he lent the barley to a third party before it went to its destination. In Di 946, for instance, silver and barley owed by him are lent to another person who will, at the time of the harvest, pay the taxes due. Whatever the case, Ur-Utu, must have been a wealthy man.

Education Not only was Ur-Utu a wealthy and respected citizen of Sippar-Amnanum, he was also an educated person. In the open courtyard of his house there was an installation typical for the teaching of cuneiform writing. This was a so-called tablet bin made of large bricks 3

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laid flat, surrounded by standing ones, to make a more or less waterproof container filled with exercise tablets and purified clay. New tablets could be made out of the old ones or with the clay reserve as required by the teaching process. Since previous exercises were thrown away and not all reused, examples of all stages of the learning process could be retrieved archaeologically. As we have shown elsewhere, we can formulate a hypothesis as to the identity of the teacher and the student (Tanret 2002). The bin and its contents belong to the stratigraphical level IIId. This is the first occupational phase of the house, to be dated from Ad 29 (1655) to Aṣ 18 (1629), a period of 26 years. These are the last twelve years of Inannamansum’s chief dirge singership and almost the entire career of his son, who continued to live in the same house after him. The presence of the bin shows that, somewhere within this timespan, someone learned to write. After IIId no further training took place; the whole courtyard and bin were covered by a new floor. The exercise tablets that were found allow us to conclude that this was no general or repeated training but the education of one single person. It must be stressed that this training took not place in what could be called a ‘school’, nor even the house of a scribe. This was the house of a chief dirge singer. We can conclude that the person who was educated here was someone who lived in the house. A further important point is that the exercises still present in the bin or around it represent most of the phases of the elementary curriculum. The most obvious candidate for this one person receiving an elementary scribal training is Ur-Utu. Is this chronologically possible? The archaeological data provide us with a 26-year timespan as we saw above: the last 12 years of Inanna-mansum (1655–1643), and then 14 years (1643–1629) of chief dirge singership for his son Ur-Utu. We can safely assume that when Ur-Utu inherited his father’s title at the very end of Aṣ 4 (1643) his learning days were over. He had mastered what he needed to know of writing and reading and had no doubt also received the necessary chief dirge singer training from his father. Our time frame for his scribal education is thus shortened to 12 years (1655–1643), which is still much too long. We have a way of reducing it further by reflecting on who the teacher might have been. This must have been a professional scribe and one of these, Šumum-liṣi, worked for Inanna-mansum and later for Ur-Utu himself quite often. His name was found on many of the tablets from their archive, which implies he was frequently in the house and could have undertaken the scribal education of Inannamansum’s son and successor. Šumum-liṣi is mentioned for the first time in the archive in Ad 33 (1651) so we suppose that his teaching started after this, narrowing the time frame to eight years, between Ad 33 (1651) and Aṣ 4 (1643). If we suppose that Ur-Utu was in his early teens when he learned to read and write, he would have been born in Ad 23 (1661). What precisely did Ur-Utu learn? The first exercises consisted of familiarizing oneself with the clay, which had been purified to eliminate all intrusive elements like small pebbles, splinters of reed or wood. This clay had then to be kneaded and shaped into a tablet. Different shapes of tablets prepared in such a way, but without any writing, attest to this stage (Tanret 2002: 125–127). Then the apprentice had to be trained in the manipulation of the stylus, in all probability held between the thumb and the index finger, within the

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palm of the hand. The only interesting archaeological objects found in the same layer of Ur-Utu’s house as the exercise tablets is a collection of small bone objects that have been identified as writing styli. First impressions were made in the clay, always in threes according to the tablets found: a vertical, a horizontal and a wedge, corresponding to the three basic positions of the stylus for writing any cuneiform sign. From there on a list of simple signs was copied, traditionally called ‘Syllable Alphabet A’ by Assyriologists. This list of about 126 lines was no doubt learned by heart and copied over and over. In the examples of Ur-Utu’s first attempts at this excerise, it becomes clear how difficult it is to impress the basic lines in such a way that they form a single sign. Often the signs have an ‘exploded’ look, not achieving the required unity. Some transitional tablets were also found, combining Syllable Alphabet A either with the very first stylus manipulations or the subsequent exercise: the first syllabary. This was a much longer list, of over 400 lines, now called Syllabary A. The aim was now not only to learn how to form more and more signs but also to learn their phonetic values by heart, sometimes with more than one value for the same sign. The teaching was based on repetition and learning by heart. In the tablet bin only one clear example is attested of the next stage, which was the combination of several signs to make personal names. This must have been very useful for Ur-Utu when searching through his archive but also for reasons of family tradition, as we shall see further on. The next documented step is the copying of lexical lists. These were very long lists with thematically grouped nouns referring to real-world objects. The exercises that were found were extracts of the list of reeds, pots, skins and metal objects; of the list of stones, plants, fish, birds and clothes; of the list of geographical names and terminology and stars; of the list of foods and drinks. With these exercises Ur-Utu learnt to write and read words, often including logograms, and learnt their meaning. He was taught that certain words should be written in a certain way. Within this phase the first exercises consisted in copying on the right half of a large tablet the lines written by the teacher on the left half. Later, the apprentice could write parts of the list in several columns, under dictation or all by himself. Mathematics was an important part of the curriculum (Robson 2008). Metrological lists, enumerating the different units from small to large, and tables incorporating a conversion into the sexagesimal positional system in order to facilitate calculations were taught. No examples of actual calculations were found although Ur-Utu must have learnt the basic mathematical operations. More advanced mathematics was probably not included in his training. One fragment was found of a list including Sumerian formulas used in the writing of contracts. This too would have doubtless come in handy for the chief dirge singer. How does this all fit in the larger scribal curriculum? Niek Veldhuis (1997: 63) distinguished four phases of the elementary scribal study curriculum in the Old Babylonian city of Nippur. The first comprises the acquisition of writing techniques such as the handling of stylus and clay, the writing of simple signs and the writing of personal names. The second consists of the writing and learning by heart of the so-called thematic lists, list of nouns designating trees, wooden objects, reeds, vessels, leather, metal objects, animals, meats, stones, plants, fish, birds, garments, geographical names, stars, and foodstuffs. The third is represented by metrological lists and tables, advanced lists, Sumerian

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readings of signs, thematic-acrographic, compound signs. The fourth is introductory Sumerian with model contracts and proverbs. The advanced curriculum consists of literary texts. In the chief dirge singer’s house the surviving scribal exercises all belong to this elementary curriculum, within which the first three phases are particularly well represented (cf. Robson 2001). An important question for our investigation is what this elementary education meant for Ur-Utu’s intellectual development. A first and evident point is that it made him stand out among his contemporaries. During the Old Babylonian period knowledge of reading and writing seems to have been limited to a small number of people. Dominique Charpin (2008, 31–51) has convincingly shown that it was not exclusively the domain of the professional scribes but that the elite, higher temple office holders, palace administrators, and even higher military officers could at least read and in many cases also write simple texts and letters. As he shows, fewer than 100 cuneiform signs sufficed for this. The archive of the chief dirge singers adds weight to Charpin’s point that an elementary form of literacy could have been dispensed to non-scribes. A slight problem seems to be that although a limited curriculum could be sufficient there is no trace of an adapted curriculum for this ‘light’ form of cuneiform teaching. As is clear from Ur-Utu’s apprenticeship, the traditional scribal training had to be painstakingly worked through even to retain only these hundred signs. Whichever way we look at it, scribal training was heavy. It is certain that there were practical reasons for this non-professional scribal education. These were the people who exercised control over society and it would not have been wise for them to leave all of the written aspect of this to specialists. There could also have been another dimension, in the sense of Bourdieu and Passeron’s notion of ‘cultural capital’ (1970; cited in Veldhuis 1997: 143): the idea that a number of intellectual qualifications are generated by the family and the school. These tend to fix and perpetuate social elites and in doing so are a source of power. This is certainly pertinent for a traditional society like Mesopotamia. In Ur-Utu’s case this means that, apart from the practical benefits, his even elementary knowledge of reading and writing reinforced his élite social standing. The archive itself illuminates another and quite unexpected value of the written record for the chief dirge singers. First and foremost it is a collection of economic, administrative and juridical documents, written proofs which had to be kept and produced in case of legal claims against the family. A certain group of documents, however, shows that there was another reason to keep old deeds. To find out more about this we will now take a look at Ur-Utu’s archive.

The archive The archive was preserved in situ because a catastrophe struck the house of the chief dirge singer in Aṣ 18 (1629): a fire, which made the inhabitants flee with their possessions including some tablets. Some were dropped on their way out, leaving a trail of tablets in the courtyard (Figure 13.2).

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New archive room

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fig. 13.2 When Ur-Utu’s house was on fire: the way out (Gasche 1989: pl. 12.1; reproduced with the author’s permission).

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This catastrophe happened while the archive rooms were in the middle of being rearranged. The original archive room, locus 22, had become a temporary storage room and a number of tablets had already been moved to the new and much larger room, locus 17. The archive contains a number of older tablets, dating from before the family’s move from Yahrurum to Amnanum. This can only mean that Inanna-mansum moved them from the one town to the other. As far as they are preserved, none of these tablets bear his name. This is a first (sub)archive. While Inanna-mansum lived in his first house in Amnanum his archive was enriched with new tablets. This is a second (sub)archive. When he moved to his new house in Ad 29 (1655) he took with him the tablets that he had brought from Sippar Yahrurum and, no doubt after filtering and discarding, some of those that had entered his archive when he lived in his first house, from Ad 1 to Ad 28. The third (sub)archive comprises tablets that were written in the family’s third and final house before the fire struck: Inanna-mansum’s tablets from Ad 29 to Aṣ 4 and tablets of Ur-Utu from Aṣ 4 to 18. In all, we can conclude, there are three layers in this archive, which can be chronologically distinguished.

A very special group of tablets Among the different heaps of tablets in the old archive room 22 there is one which stands out (for a detailed discussion see Tanret 2008). This is group L, still stacked in such a way that it must have originally been contained in a (reed) box, whereas in all the other groups the tablets were just heaped up (Figure 13.1). The implication is that this group was special. It soon turned out that these were no property deeds or otherwise economically important tablets. A small group of 63 tablets from this special box were brought by Inanna-mansum from Sippar Yahrurum, from his father’s archive, to Sippar-Amnanum, to his first house. Quite surprisingly, these documents never mention Inana-mansum’s name, they do not relate to any property he inherited, and most of them—if not all—were many years out of date. What then could have prompted him to take precisely these documents ? The oldest document in the box is a tablet dated to Hammurabi 3 (1790) concerning silver to be returned to two members of the family, four generations before Inannamansum (Di 1911). It is the oldest tablet of the archive mentioning members of the family. This tablet must have entered the archive at the time it was written. For the last of the archive’s owners, Ur-Utu, this tablet went back five generations. Each generation had carefully kept and transmitted this document that in the meantime had become economically useless. When the archive was brutally terminated by fire in Aṣ 18 it still contained this tablet, which by then had reached the venerable age of 161. Thirty tablets of this group are dated to Hammurabi’s successor, Samsu-iluna, and all share two characteristics. The first is that all of them mention one or more members of the previous generations of Inanna-mansum’s family. The second is that by the time Inannamansum took them to Amnanum, they too had lost their economic value. To be sure, there are other Samsu-iluna documents in the archive but whereas all the others concern the transfer of real estate, none of the ones in the box do. This is a very clear cut distinction, but

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fig. 13.1 The tablets from the special box in Ur-Utu’s house (Gasche 1989: pl. 14.2; reproduced with the author’s permission).

how to explain the conservation of non real estate documents over such a long period of time? The real estate documents were of course kept as proofs of ownership. As for those in the box, we can see no other reason for their presence in the archive until its end under Ammi-ṣaduqa than that they preserve the names and family relations of the members of Inanna-mansum’s family. They allow him (and us) to reconstruct (a sizeable part of) his family tree, reaching further back than human memory and being destined to be kept and transmitted to further generations until fire put an untimely stop to this process. Among the documents in the box dated to the period of Inanna-mansum’s first house in Sippar-Amnanum, there are five written for Inanna-mansum which entered his archive on the date they were written: Ad 1, 3 and 20. Not only were they kept until Ad 29 when Inanna-mansum left his first house but they were transported, no doubt in this box, together with the older family mementoes, to his new house. Why were precisely these documents chosen to be kept in this group, more precisely selected to be in this box, while many others were doubtless thrown away? The answer is that all of them had some special meaning. One is the oldest consignment document in the archive. It concerns 2 shekels (c. 16.6 g) of silver handed over to a woman who has to transmit it to someone else (the text is damaged in several places). Another is Inanna’s mansum’s oldest purchase of an ox. A third and fourth one form a couple: the last payment of the igi.sÁ tax due by the dirge singers and the first in which Inanna-mansum pays his due to the storehouse of Sippar-Amnanum as a chief dirge

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singer. In other words, this couple marks the important promotion the family had been hoping for. The last one confirms this. It is a very normal, run-of-the-mill loan, one of the four hundred loans in the archive. What makes it stand out is that it is the very first written mention of Inanna-mansum and adds his title ‘chief dirge singer’. His promotion to head of Annunitum’s temple in Sippar-Amnanum had not been marked by a royal edict or any other written proclamation, so if he wanted a memento of his nomination he had to preserve a simple loan (which he may have taken out for this very purpose) on the first day of the first year of the reign of king Ammi-ditana. If the foregoing might have left some doubt as to the cogency of our hypothesis, we can add another document from the same group, undated but obviously early Ammi-ditana. The obverse has four lines of writing, the reverse is anepigraphic. The text runs as follows: Inanna-ma[nsum] chief dirge singer [of the goddess Annunitum] son of Mar[duk-naṣir] servant of Ammi-[ditana]

This cannot be anything but the four-line inscription which had to be written on Inannamansum’s seal, a model for the seal cutter.4 Another completely useless document once his seal had been cut, preserved among his personal mementoes in his very special box. Our reconstruction of a box full of mementoes shows that even day-to-day economic texts could be reinvested with a new meaning, could be recontextualized and rise above the economic level to the emotional one. This is a journey of historical discovery that could not have been undertaken in any other place than a well-excavated archive and these are findings that cannot be duplicated (or disproved) in any other setting than another such archive. This box must have been very precious for the family, with a value extending above the purely economic. No doubt, on certain very special occasions Inanna-mansum must have taken his son to the archive room just like his own father, and before him his father’s father, to show him the special box, giving the family tradition a concrete framework in the form of this collection of memorabilia. And here the arduous acquisition of reading cuneiform, especially the proper names, was rewarded with the ability to trace back the family line over the generations.

Concern for the future Unfortunately, the office of chief dirge singer, prestigious as it was, also had less positive and even life-threatening aspects to it. A number of documents allow us a glimpse of Ur-Utu’s metaphysical concerns. An impression of this seal was published by Charpin (1988: seal G. p. 30 and plate p. 28). The first line is not rolled on HG 96 but can now safely be restored with Inanna-mansum’s name, as proposed by Charpin. 4

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First there is a group of eleven diviner’s reports. These texts are technical resumes of the observation of the internal organs, in particular a description of the parts of the liver, without further comments. The diviner must have communicated his interpretation of these ominous signs orally to Ur-Utu and handed him his technical report as evidence. Unfortunately the dates of only a few of these documents are preserved. Two are dated to the fifth year of Ammi-ṣaduqa (1641), in months 8 and 11; two other ones are dated to the tenth year (1636), months 4 and 5. We may suppose there were many more of these documents, and that Ur-Utu frequently consulted the diviners. This might indicate a great concern for knowledge about his (and his family’s) well-being in the future and even in the immediate future, since he had consultations in months four and five, eight and eleven. We have evidence to suggest that Ur-Utu had good reasons for doing this, other than a general curiosity about things to come. A remarkable fact is that all of these reports were found in room 17 of the house, which means they were sorted out and meant to be kept, even though some of them were thirteen years old by the time of the archive’s rearrangement and fire.

Singing dirges for a reason In no fewer than 46 letters out of 200 in the archive reference is made to a ‘binding’ (e’iltum) of the chief dirge singer. This word is often included in the opening lines of the letter, such as this one: Speak to my father, Thus Muti-ilum: May Šamaš and Marduk release your e’iltum. The Queen of Sippar, whose word Finds grace with her beloved Šamaš: May she release you from your sins, May she intercede for you with her beloved Marduk. May one who has seen your sorrow (now) see your revival. (Di 614)

The frequency of these references indicates that the chief dirge singer must have been regularly subject to this phenomenon, interpreted by Caroline Janssen (1991: 96) as a binding by liability. That this circumstance was not theoretical or abstract but could lead to disease and fear for one’s life as a consequence, is illustrated by another letter from the archive about someone else: ‘(…) an e’iltum which cannot be bound has turned his face pale…and he died’ (Di 662). In order to escape this danger the chief dirge singer had to be released (paṭār e’iltim). This release could only be effectuated by the gods, probably by means of a ritual as described in Di 604: I just heard the release of your e’iltum before Šamaš and Marduk: in the gate the chief musician (ugula nar), at the moment of the raising(?) of the taqribtum-prayer, lined up the sanga-priest of Šamaš, the sanga-priest of Aya, the gudapsû-priests (…) and the

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erib bı̄tim-priest, (…). I heard the words of the sanga of Šamaš: a shudder caught him (…).

The binding itself was associated with darkness and silence. The letter Di 1672 (Janssen 1989: 100–101) reads: The god […]: May he show the light to your darkness, May he release your e’iltum.

Ur-Utu wrote to high officials in Babylon, who were are able to predict that he would soon be released (Janssen 1989: 89). They told him not to worry in the meantime. Eventually he was always released. We have no indication of the origin or reason for this ‘binding’. In some cases other persons were also ‘bound’, mostly prisoners. In such contexts the chief dirge singer could and did take over their ‘binding’, freeing them but putting himself in danger and having to wait to be released by the gods. Whatever the particulars may be, as Caroline Janssen (1991: 98) writes, ‘The e’iltum-pattern being part of his function, the chief dirge singer is regularly subjected to a cycle of opposites of darkness and light, distress and joy, e’iltum and release.’ In this light, the life of a chief dirge singer does not seem to have been a very enviable one. The regular fear that he would not be released by the gods may have prompted him on the one hand to ask people in Babylon to intervene on his behalf and at the same time to try and find out what the gods had in store for him by consulting diviners on a regular basis. He must have been a dirge singer with good reason. Indeed, we know that dirges were sung to placate the gods…

Praying to the gods, writing to the goddess Six ikribu prayers were found in Ur-Utu’s archive. They formed part of the diviner’s ritual, as one of them mentions: ‘In the extispicy (têrtum) that I perform…by an extispicy of good health…’ (De Meyer 1982: 274–5). In fact two of our prayers were found together with four diviners’ reports in lot U in the new archive room, which confirms the link between them. Ur-Utu prayed to the gods requesting the well-being of his family and household. The questions asked in two of the prayers are very suggestive of Ur-Utu’s anxiety over the ‘binding’ (although this is not mentioned explicitly). The first ends with: ‘Will Ur-Utu remain alive and well? Establish a good oracle for Ur-Utu, an oracle of health and life!’ (Di 261, De Meyer 1982: 274–5). It covers a whole year of 360 days, from and to the 20th day of Nisannu, the first month of the year. This prayer is addressed to the god Ninsiana, the male version of the Venus deity, the Ištar of the stars. This deity was connected with light, as seen too in a dedication also found in the archive, a remarkable four-line text in Akkadian and unorthographic Sumerian which states:

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Ninsiana, pure god whose light fills heaven and earth, who dispenses good, prosperity and life for his servant who reveres him. (De Meyer 1989: 213–222)

The second one is addressed to the goddess Annunitum (Di 262, De Meyer 1982, 277–78). Again, Ur-Utu requests well-being for the whole year, from the month of Nisan to the next month of Nisan. Di 306 is another prayer to Ninsiana, dated on the eleventh day of the sixth month of the fourteenth year of Ammi-ṣaduqa. The god is asked to grant well-being to Ur-Utu, for a period of eight months. Ur-Utu hopes that he will see the faces of Annunitum and Marduk. In a very broken prayer to Annunitum (Di 515) Ur-Utu prays for his life and well-being, again for a period of less than a year. Two periods seem to be involved: from the tenth to the twelfth month and from the fourth to a month whose name is broken in the text. All of the prayers were found in room 17, indicating they were meant to be kept. Finally, in an undated letter to his goddess Annunitum, Ur-Utu quite movingly writes: To my mistress who loves life, say: ‘thus speaks your servant Ur-Utu. As my mistress knows, a servant who for his master, a servant woman who for her mistress does not carry an unconscious fault (hı̄tum) or a conscious one ( gillatum), does not exist (Di 525, De Meyer 1989a)

and then proceeds to request the rapid lifting of the taboo (asakkum) of Adad. These texts show a person who was greatly concerned about his future and that of his household, a concern that was probably based on the frequently dire situation linked to his office. From darkness to light in a never ending cycle.

Conclusion As the chief dirge singer of the goddess Annunitum’s temple in Sippar-Amnanum, Ur-Utu was certainly a prominent citizen. He had power, as head of a large institution. He was wealthy and, to a certain extent, learned. He could read and write to an elementary level, which was more than most of his contemporaries. He knew the value of the written word, both practically for the management of his estate but also more emotionally through the mementoes he kept in his archive, which kept his ancestors’ names from oblivion. On the other hand his life cannot always have been a happy one. His office of chief dirge singer seemingly entailed repeated dangerous ‘bindings’ from which only the gods could free him, not without some period of anxiety. As if this were not enough, his brothers did not make life easy for him. They disputed his inheritance and that of his mother in lawsuits over many years. But even this was not the end of his toils. In a letter his dear wife with the lovely name Ra’imtum (literally ‘lover’), wrote to him:

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michel tanret Now you have gone to the lawsuits and I do not know what you have been doing. As a [very unfortunately broken] I came to the house of a poor man. I always respected your father but whereas I take care you will never have anything …(Di 617, Janssen 1993: 49) Poor, poor rich man!

Further reading The final report on the excavation of Sippar Amnanum in general and the Chief Dirge Singer’s house in particular is Gasche (1989, in French). The history of the house, in archaeology and texts is to be found in Janssen et al. (1994, in French). An overview of the composition of the archive is Tanret (2004, in French) and the complete story of the tablet box is given in Tanret (2008). The scribal education of Ur-Utu is the subject of the monograph Tanret (2002, in French).

References Barberon, L. 2005: ‘Quand la mère est une religieuse’, N.A.B.U. § 89, 94–5. Bourdieu, P. and Passeron, J.-Cl. 1970: La reproduction. Elèments pour une théorie du système d’enseignement. Paris: Minuit. Charpin, D. 1988: ‘Sippar: deux villes jumelles’, Revue d’Assyriologie 82, 13–32. —— — 2008: Lire et écrire à Babylone. Paris: Cerf. De Meyer, L. 1982: ‘Deux prières ikribu du temps d’Ammı -̄ ṣaduqa’ in Van Driel, G., Krispijn, T.J.H., Stol, M., Veenhof, K.R. (Ed.), Zikir Šumim. Assyriological Studies Presented to F.R. Kraus on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday (= NINO5), Leiden: Brill, 271–8. —— — 1989: ‘Le dieu Ninsianna ou l’art de transposer les logogrammes’ in De Meyer, L., Haerinck, E. (éd.), Archaeologia Iranica et Orientalis. Miscellanea in honorem Louis Vanden Berghe. Gent: Peeters, 213–21. —— — 1989a: ‘Une lettre d’Ur-Utu Galamah à une divinité’ in Lebeau, M., Talon, P. (éd.), Reflets des deux fleuves. Volume de mélanges offerts à André Finet (= Akkadica Suppl. 6), Leuven; Peeters, 177–80. Gasche, H. 1989: La Babylonie au 17e siècle avant notre ère: approche archéologique, problèmes et perspectives, Mesopotamian History and Environment, Memoires 1. Gent: University of Ghent. Janssen, C. 1991: ‘E’iltam paṭārum: awāt hadê!’, Mésopotamie et Elam. Actes de la XXXVIème Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale. Gand, 10–14 juillet 1989. Mesopotamian History and Environment, Occasional Publications, Gent: University of Ghent, 77–107. —— — 1992: ‘Inanna-mansum et ses fils: relation d’une succession turbulente dans les archives d’Ur-Utu’, RA 86, 19–52. —— — 1993: ‘De brieven van het Ur-Utu archief ’ [= The letters from the Ur-Utu archive], unpublished doctoral dissertation, Ghent University.

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—— —, Gasche, H., Tanret, M. 1994: ‘Du chantier à la tablette. Ur-Utu et l’histoire de sa maison à Sippar Amnanum’ in Gasche, H., Tanret, M., Janssen, C., Degraeve, A. (éd.), Cinquantedeux réflexions sur le Proche-Orient ancien offertes en hommage à Léon De Meyer (= MHEO2), Leuven; Peeters, 91–123. Robson, E. 2001: ‘The tablet house: a scribal school in Old Babylonian Nippur’, RA 95, 39–66. —— — 2008: Mathematics in Ancient Iraq. A Social History. Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ. Tanret, M., Van Lerberghe, K. 1993: ‘Rituals and profits in the Ur-Utu archive’ in Quaegebeur, J. (Ed.), Ritual and Sacrifice in the Ancient Near East. Proceedings of the International Conference Organized by the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven from the 17th to the 20th of April 1991 (= OLA 55), Leuven: Peeters, 435–49. —— — 2001: ‘As years went by in Sippar Amnanum…’ in Abusch, T., Beaulieu, P.-A., Huehnergard, J., Machinist, P., Steinkeller, P. (eds.) Historiography in the Cuneiform World. Proceedings of the XLVe Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale. Harvard University, Bethesda MA (2 vols.), 455–65. —— — 2002: Per aspera ad astra. L’apprentissage du cunéiforme à Sippar Amnanum pendant la période paléobabylonienne tardive. Mesopotamian History and Environment, Texts 1/2, Ghent: University of Ghent. —— — 2004: ‘Verba volant, scripta non manent. Tablettes nomades dans les archives des gala. mah à Sippar-Amnānum’ in C. Nicolle (ed.), Nomades et sédentaires dans le Proche-Orient ancien. Actes de la XLVIe Rencontre assyriologique internationale (Paris, 10–13 juillet 2000) (Amurru 3), Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les civilisations, 249–70. —— — 2008: ‘Find the tablet box…New aspects of archive-keeping in Old Babylonian Sippar Amnanum’ in R. van der Spek (ed.), Studies in Ancient Near Eastern World View and Society presented to Marten Stol on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Bethesda, MD: CDL Press, 131–47. Veldhuis, N. 1997: ‘Elementary Education at Nippur. The Lists of Trees and Wooden Objects’, unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Groningen (available online at http://irs. ub.rug.nl/ppn/30177613X).

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