The overwhelming majority of the tablets are simple accounts documenting flows
of commodities. Many record the disbursement of textiles, grain, or dairy products to
individuals. While generally they do not record details of the institution or institu-
tions making these disbursements and only rarely record the status of the individuals
receiving them, parallels to later cuneiform documentation suggest that many such
accounts represent summaries of allotments to administrators for later distribution to
fully or partially dependent workers under their command (Nissen, Damerow and
Englund 1993 ; Englund 1998 ).
That such workers existed is both directly documented in the tablets and indirectly
inferable from them. Direct corroboration, for instance, is provided by about fifty
individual tablets that deal with individuals or groups of individuals that are explicitly
characterized as dependent laborers. Most of these tablets, to be sure, date to the later
Eanna III script phase, but some can be assigned to the Late Uruk period on paleo-
graphic grounds (Englund 2011 ). A case in point is provided by a recently published
text in clear Uruk IV-type script which summarizes groups of male and female captives
used as laborers, totaling 211 individuals (Englund 1998 : 178 – 179 , fig. 66 ). While it is
difficult to ascertain how representative tablets such as these really are, the frequency
of references to captive individuals in the Archaic Texts as a whole is quite high. Robert
Englund ( 1998 ) notes that if one excludes non-numerical signs, the second most
common sign in those texts is that denoting female slaves of foreign origin. Signs for
captive males, while less common, are also quite frequent.
Inferential evidence for the importance of encumbered labor to Uruk institutions
is also not hard to find. Such evidence takes several forms. One has emerged only
recently as scholars were finally able to peruse the numerous plundered Archaic Texts
in the Schøyen Collection, which exponentially expanded the repertoire of personal
names known from such texts (from 38 to 440 !). In a recent study of those names,
Englund ( 2009 ) convincingly shows that the overwhelming majority of them are
composed with signs that specifically denote the status of the individuals bearing them
as either outright chattel or as fettered in some way, a fact he presumes is explained by
Uruk overlords renaming foreign captives in terms comprehensible to themselves. In
an exquisitely ironic twist of history, it would seem that most of the personal names
we have for the earliest Mesopotamian cities and states are those of slaves rather than
those of their owners. Another line of evidence that betrays the importance of captive
labor to early Mesopotamian urban institutions is comprised by scribal summaries in
the Archaic Texts that detail the composition of groups of foreign and native laborers.
These summaries consistently describe these laborers with detailed age and sex cate-
gories that are identical to those used to summarize the composition of state-controlled
herds of domestic animals (Englund 1998 : 176 – 81 , 2009 , 2011 ). It would appear,
therefore, that in the minds of Uruk scribes, and in the eyes of the institutions that
employed them, such laborers were conceptualized as “domesticated” humans, wholly
equivalent to domestic animals in status and partially equivalent to them in function.
To be sure, the evidence just outlined is too partial for a reliable picture of the Uruk
economy to emerge, as the tablets that provide most of our information, by definition,
exclude all activities beyond the immediate purview of the urban scribes that produced
them and of the institutions they worked for. Accordingly, that evidence does not
necessarily mean that captives were a significant component of the Uruk labor force
as a whole, just that they were the primary component of the institutional labor force
–– The end of prehistory and the Uruk period ––