Ur III · Neo-Sumerian

After the Akkadian collapse, the city of Ur — under a new dynasty founded by Ur-Nammu around 2112 BCE — restores something like the old Sumerian order, and pushes it further than anyone had thought possible. The Third Dynasty of Ur, "Ur III" for short, lasts only about a century. In that century it produces more administrative tablets than any other period of Mesopotamian history.

Tens of thousands. By some estimates, half of all surviving cuneiform tablets are from this single century. The reason is bureaucratic: the Ur III state attempted to track every animal, every worker, every shekel of silver, every measure of grain in motion through its territory. The clearing-house for livestock was a city called Drehem (ancient Puzrish-Dagan), where animals were received, redistributed, slaughtered, and accounted for. Each transaction generated a tablet. Many of those tablets survived because the clay was simply buried at the end of the fiscal month and never disturbed.

Ur-Nammu — or perhaps his son Shulgi; the attribution is contested — also gives us the oldest surviving law code. The Code of Ur-Nammu predates Hammurabi by three centuries. Strikingly, it favours monetary compensation over physical retribution: cutting off another man's foot is punished with a silver fine, not with maiming. Hammurabi will move in the opposite direction.

Sumerian is the official language again. Akkadian persists as the vernacular, and the two languages live in parallel — Sumerian for the temple, the law, the school; Akkadian for the street, the household, the letter. Bilingual education is the rule for any scribe. The literary tradition that will eventually produce the Epic of Gilgamesh is being preserved and recopied in Sumerian schools.

The state is centralised, ambitious, and almost unbelievably literate. We know the names of provincial governors, the schedules of religious festivals, the rations of millers and dyers. We know what was delivered, on what day, by whom, to whom. The visibility is uncomfortable; the Ur III state resembles, more than any other in antiquity, a modern bureaucratic government.

It does not last. By around 2004 BCE the dynasty has collapsed under pressure from Amorite migrations in the west, Elamite invasion from the east, and the failure of its own ambitious irrigation system. Ur is sacked. The standard Sumerian Lament for Ur — preserved in Old Babylonian schools — describes the catastrophe with extraordinary literary force.

What survives from Ur III is its archives. Every line of them attests to a state that believed writing could hold a society together. For a hundred years, it did.