CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

EVERYDAY LIFE IN SUMER



Paul Collins

D

aily life in ancient Mesopotamia has often been depicted using a very broad brush,
relying on archaeological and textual evidence gathered from across at least three
millennia (e.g. Saggs 1965 ; Nemet-Nejat 1998 ; Bottéro 2001 ). Given the paucity of
information from any one period for the daily activities of individuals or groups
(especially before 2000 BC), such an approach is perhaps inevitable. It may also be
justified by the perceived longue duréeof Mesopotamian culture, a recognition that
there was much continuity in administrative, religious and artistic traditions (largely
preserved by the literate elite) and in the use of resources and their manufacturing
(seemingly paralleled in rural communities in Iraq until recently). In addition to such
generalisations, a preference by early excavators for the exploration of sacred and
palatial areas has led to a very biased view of daily life that focuses on the activities of
elite sections of society as revealed by monumental architecture, art and texts, at the
expense of the vast majority of the population who were engaged in agricultural,
industrial and ordinary domestic activities.
To help illuminate a greater range of activities within Mesopotamian daily life,
scholars have sought help in ethno-archaeology; a method of reconstructing ancient
ways of living by studying the material and non-material traditions of modern societies
(London 2000 ). One of the most extensive ethno-archaeological studies that has direct
relevance to the reconstruction of life in ancient Sumer was undertaken by Edward
Ochsenschlager from 1968 to 1990 in the modern villages around the ancient mound
of al-Hiba (ancient Lagash) ( 1998 a, 1998 b, 2004 ). He was struck by the fact that people
living in the area depended on many of the same resources as the people who lived
there in the third millennium BC. This raised questions about whether the resources
were used and transformed in the same way as in antiquity. Ochsenschlager focused his
work on the use of clay, reeds, wood, bitumen, cattle and sheep. His conclusion was
that ‘there was abundant evidence that many of the details of village life had parallels
in the archaeological record’ ( 1998 b: 29 ).
Perhaps inevitably, ethno-archaeology has its limitations. David and Kramer point
out that, ‘cross-cultural comparisons even of data collected by ethno-archaeologists and
limited to a particular domain of material culture are... likely to be subject to biases’
(David and Kramer 2001 : 101 ). Indeed, Ochsenschlager highlights issues raised by his
own study, which