Letter from Ur-dun to Shulgi about the purchase of cedar resin

Translation · reference

High confidence

Say to my lord: this is what the merchant Ur-dun, your servant, says: My lord gave me silver and sent me to a distant land in order to purchase cedar resin. After I had entered the land and had purchased cedar resin, Apillaca, the 'Sage of the Assembly', sent men to me and they took away my goods. When I arrived at his palace gate, no one enquired about my business. Aradju, your servant, and Babati, the ...... official, had gone from Zimudar to Simurrum and had learnt ...... and their messengers ....... ...... of my lord ....... Being in a weak (?) position, I was not able to ...... their illegal seizure.

Source: ETCSL c.3.1.11.1: Letter from Ur-dun to Shulgi about the purchase of cedar resin. Black, J.A., Cunningham, G., Robson, E. & Zólyomi, G. (eds.), The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford. https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=c.3.1.11.1

Why it matters

Transliteration

Scholarly note

Composition c.3.1.11.1 in the ETCSL catalogue. Sumerian literary text reconstructed from multiple cuneiform manuscripts, the great majority Old Babylonian (c. 1900–1600 BCE). Translation reproduced from the ETCSL edition.

Attribution

Image: .
Translation excerpted from ETCSL c.3.1.11.1: Letter from Ur-dun to Shulgi about the purchase of cedar resin. Black, J.A., Cunningham, G., Robson, E. & Zólyomi, G. (eds.), The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford. https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=c.3.1.11.1.

Related tablets

Related sources

~650 BCE

Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet XI (the Flood)

The single most important literary discovery of the 19th century. It rewired the understanding of the Bible's literary context and proved that the Mesopotamian flood tradition is older. It is the oldest surviving epic poetry in human history.

~2300 BCE

Disk of Enheduanna

The literary tradition is no longer anonymous from this point. Authorship — the idea that a specific human voice composes a specific work — enters the historical record with her.

~1808 BCE

Sumerian King List (Weld-Blundell Prism)

The single most influential Mesopotamian king list — the model for every later attempt to chronicle the deep history of the region. It transmits the political theology of divinely granted kingship, an idea that would echo through Babylon, Assyria, and into the Hebrew Bible. The Weld-Blundell prism (WB 444) at the Ashmolean is the most complete surviving copy.