temples. As pointed out by Renger in the previous chapter, the households operated
more or less autonomously and maintained huge gangs of labourers through a ration
system.
Competition between the city-states intensified in the course of the third millennium,
as the defensive structures excavated at sites from around 2500 BCillustrate. First
Sargon of Akkad, and, two centuries after him, Ur-Nammu and his son Shulgi of
Ur, succeeded in conquering a territorial empire covering the largest part of Mesopo-
tamia and founding a dynasty. They integrated the rich local temple organizations
into their royal administration so as to redirect the surpluses to royal destinations.
Especially Shulgi, the second king of the Ur III dynasty, instigated some large-scale
centralization projects. Thus, the settlement Puzrish-Dagan, near Nippur, the major
cult centre of Babylonia, was set up to control the delivery and processing of cattle
and livestock sent as tribute to Nippur from the different provinces. All the aspects
of the processing, from the actual delivery to the allocation of the meat, the tendons
and other parts of the cadaver, as well as the labourers involved in the further handling
of these parts, are accounted for in the administration of the central household by a
chain of delivery and receipt records. Other households recorded aspects of their
economical management, such as the administration of labourers in workshops and
the collection of wood, in a comparable, detailed manner (Steinkeller 2003 ).
However, these innovations pertained to the centralization of the surpluses rather
than bringing about economic integration of the temple households and other local
economic powers. Especially outside the core area of southern Babylonia, which had
been Ur III governmental control seems to have been restricted to the extraction of
tribute. Thus, when the Ur III empire disintegrated under the reign of Ibbi-Sîn,
provincial governors or high officials of the temple households had easy access to a
sound economic basis.
Written evidence of the third millennium BCconcentrates on the management of
these households or ‘great organizations’, as Oppenheim labelled the Mesopotamian
palace and temple households. The class of individuals living independently of the
‘great organizations’ in the countryside, are only hinted at in the documents. The
relative importance of this economic class cannot be assessed.
SOUTHERN BABYLONIAThe early Isin-Larsa period (ca. 2002 – 1831 BC)After the disintegration of the Ur III empire, some of the governors of the provincial
centres, such as Isin and Eshnunna, were able to establish their power over the city
and its environments and to found a dynasty. In the southern part of Babylonia,
which had been the core of the Ur III empire, the dynasty of Isin attempted to
continue the Ur III institutional and economic traditions on a smaller scale. The
rulers of Isin were able to control southern Babylonia during the twentieth century
BC. After that time, they gradually lost power in favour of the kings of Larsa who
finally annexed Isin at the beginning of the nineteenth century BC.
Only few archives date from the twentieth century BC. The Isin craft archive (Van
De Mieroop 1987 ) is the major source for the economy of this period. This means that
only a small section of the economy of Isin is documented. At first sight, the archive
— The Old Babylonian economy —