CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
SOCIAL CONFIGURATIONS
IN EARLY DYNASTIC BABYLONIA
(c. 2500 – 2334 BC)
Petr Charvát
T
he third segment of the Early Dynastic period (c. 2500 – 2334 BC, henceforth
ED III) in south-eastern Mesopotamia represents an age when city-state centres
competed with each other for power, for glory and the favour of the gods. Numerous
cuneiform tablets and archaeological artefacts allow us to sketch a broad outline of
the Sumerian society of that age, as it lived its sacred and profane days, months and
years.
THE KINGLet us begin by examining the sources of the kings’ revenues. First and foremost,
they drew on their own personal property, which they inherited from their ancestors.
Enmetena of Lagash, for instance, records that he made a pious donation of land
which he had presumably inherited from his illustrious forefathers.^1 Second, they
could rely on shares in public (landed) property, due to them as citizens of their
native community. An example of this is given by texts such as RTC 66 , in which
a sovereign’s official disposes of grain harvested from a ‘state’ field.^2 In fact, these
fields were classified in Sumerian as ni 3 -en-na, ‘demesne-holding’, which refers to a
part of the original landed property of a temple. Even the sovereign’s consort could
have held ni 3 -en-na land,^3 theoretically not private, but ‘divine’ property. The land’s
first couple could also enjoy possession of kur 6 land,^4 a kind of ‘salary’ or remuneration
to citizens who performed services for the temple. Such land, however, fell to them
by the same legal title as it could fall to any Lagash burgers.^5 The arable itself
evidently ‘belonged’ to somebody else, most probably to the gods.
A third source of royal income consisted of any emoluments accruing in consequence
of the tenure of their office. We can see an example for this kind of siphoning off of
the surplus at Lagash:^6 part of the harvest of a field plot has been ‘taken in charge’
by the sovereign(’s men) and disposed of according to his instructions, while another
part went to a storage facility called Ekilamka.^7 However, not all the field plots
referred to in Lagash texts belonged solely to the sovereign’s family. With whom the
rulers shared these lands is not particularly clear, though deities seem to figure