Defining collectives: materializing and writing Sumerian manpower in Ur III times

Cuneiform tablets from the Ur III period bear certain Sumerian terms related to manpower. Terms that we translate today as “female worker”, “male worker”, “weaver”, “miller”, “fuller”, “overseer” or even “son” or “daughter” are used in administrative texts to describe who is doing what in the productive environments of the institutions such as temples and palaces. The use of each of these terms involves a particular worldview and defines, at a certain point, an idea of a group. Here I propose to identify which collective is being referred to by analysing the contexts in which the terms are used. By so doing, I aim to identify the elements that are highlighted, paying particular attention to how gender, status and specialization are combined in all these different words.

The twentieth-century scholars who first proposed translations of terms and tablets quoted and used until the present day began by considering biological family and kinship to be the main structuring institutions. However, if first we try to describe other characteristics, in some cases we find that biological kinship is not relevant to the translation or understanding of a word, but that status or specialization may well be. Aware of this possible bias, I propose to reassess some terms in an attempt to identify what they highlight, and to determine how far they coincide with the modern readings proposed for them. Moreover, as administrative texts are synthetic, all the choices can be considered to be significant: by highlighting one aspect, others are rejected, for reasons of space. In brief, I try to use philology as a tool, as the starting point for the analysis of a worldview that is not clearly explained by those who use it, following the kernel of what Gramsci proposed some decades ago.