The following text belongs to a small group of documents once owned by Alfred Ossian Haldar, Uppsala. Two Old Babylonian contracts from the same collection, previously published by Pinches in 1917, were more recently treated by the author (Andersson 2008). Nine other Ur III texts were donated by Haldar to the National Museum in Copenhagen, including a text of similar type and content as the one treated here (Halvgaard and Johansen 2004: 9). The present text is the only Ur III text remaining in the Haldar collection. When and how the tablet entered into Haldar's possession is not known.

The document is small, as is typical for a messenger text, measuring 25×25×10 mm. The writing is minuscule, and not always very careful. The scribe seems to have misjudged the space available, as every other line on the obverse contains only a personal name, and, when compared with the reverse, the lines containing only personal names are written in a large and spacious hand. The repetitive format of most of the entries is helpful, but the right edge of the document where signs tend to spill over from both the obverse and the reverse is at times hard to make out. To facilitate the access to a single source of this type, the data of which become meaningful only when seen in combination with several other documents of the same sort, an electronic publication was seen as the most meaningful.

The text dates to Šu-Suen's third regnal year and no doubt originated in Umma or its close environs, as the date formula uses the Umma calendar. It records disbursements of the usual products: beer, bread, leeks, oil, potash, flour and semolina to ten named and an unknown number of unnamed recipients. A few names may tentatively be equated with persons appearing in other Ur III Umma documents. Several hundreds of similar texts have been published and discussed in earlier literature.

Commentary

Most of the entries correspond to the quantities of Umma group B, as defined by McNeil in his unpublished Ph.D. thesis (1970), and reiterated by F. D'Agostino & F. Pomponio (2002: 14).

The case for ninda as bread and not gruel (e.g. Sallaberger 1999: 298-99) has been settled by Brunke (2011: 95-97). I am grateful to I. Schrakamp for drawing this piece of information to my attention.

Rev. 7: the messengers coming in from Huhnuri had obviously been on a mission to the eastern side of the head of the Persian Gulf. The same city is mentioned in year formulae dating back to 5 years before the date of the present text. Then, Šu-Suen's father Amar-Suen mentions Huhnuri amongst cities or territories he had destroyed. Also Šu-Suen's son and successor Ibbi-Sin mentions a campaign against Huhnuri in his year dates, see Sallaberger (1999: 158).

The non-finite verbal form er-ra I take to be a subordinate perfective e-re-a, "(the messengers) that have come (from Huhnuri)."