The Standard Professions List is often taken as a classic example of Sumerian list
science, although it differs from the other lists in several respects. And it is held up as
a hierarchical representation of Uruk society, with the “king” in first position, heads
of departments next, followed by everyone else in order (Nissen 1976 ). While ordering
is visible in this list, with at least some of the high officials known to receive large
quantities of goods, and groups of related entries being listed with a senior official
before his junior counterpart, there is no good reason to believe that these are anything
more than convenient devices to facilitate memorization. Nor is there compelling
evidence to suggest either that the first official is “king” or that the list closely reflects
the full hierarchy of Uruk society. The identities of some of the putative departments
- based on readings of signs and meanings from later cuneiform texts – are highly
suspect here: was there really a department of justice? Later Mesopotamian history
suggests otherwise. A significant feature of the Uruk IV lists is that their contents vary
from one manuscript to the next, in contrast to their Uruk III and later descendants.
Many officials from the Uruk IV sources do not survive into the Uruk III version. The
Uruk III scribes would also copy another list of professions (the “Officials” list), the
contents of which partially overlap those of the Standard Professions List, but in a
different order.
The extant Uruk III list repertoire is much wider than that known from Uruk IV,
although it would not be at all surprising were Uruk IV sources one day to be found.
Other lists, built around graphic similarities, are now also known. Among the thematic
we find lists for bovines, birds, fish, vessels (and foodstuffs and textiles), metal objects,
trees and wooden objects, grain products, plants (and time designations), and cities.
They display fixed contents in a fixed order, although there is some variety in that
occasionally lists can be combined on the same tablet. They would maintain this fixed
form as they were copied for more than 1 , 000 years hence.
A disconnect is visible between the contents of the lists and the signs found in the
administrative corpus. It is often suggested that the reason for this is that the missing
signs never actually existed. The lists are said to function as a theater for learned specu-
lation. This would be remarkable in a system used purely for administrative purposes,
by practitioners who all dealt with the commodities in question. Altogether this is a
limited corpus. There are still relatively few lists, still no lists for categories that do not
feature in the documentation, and the longest lists contain barely more than 100 entries
each. They seem to be arbitrary (but not random) selections of words, arranged sys-
tematically; many signs are lacking from the lists. The degree to which lists contain
entries generated purely by paradigm is greatly exaggerated in the secondary literature.
It is difficult to believe that most of the entries in the archaic Vessels list were fictional,
especially while the Standard Professions List is supposed faithfully to document the
administrative hierarchy. Almost half of that list’s entries are lacking in administrative
texts (two-thirds for Uruk IV); a further third are attested no more than five times, and
previously unattested entries are being found as new texts come to light. There is a limit
to which impossible entries could have had didactic value in this system; similarities
with much later cuneiform traditions are only partial, and comparisons may be
misleading. About a third of all signs in the proto-cuneiform repertoire are attested just
once and another fifth are attested only two or three times (Englund 1998 : 8 n. 131 ).
The sign repertoire is large, and populated with many forms that resemble each other
increasingly closely. The Uruk III scribes systematically controlled the variation that
–– Jon Taylor ––