Babylonian Slaves: 18 (2024-06-03)

Created by: Englund, Robert K.

Slave accounts of the Late Uruk period (ca. 3350-3000 BC)

Another beautifully preserved Jemdet Nasr tablet in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum retains the same text structure as the previous text, but with many more entries. Indeed, our inspection of this text demonstrated that it in fact was a larger account into which were copied, line for line, the entries of the smaller document. This unexpected early instance of account consolidation, now particularly well documented in the Ur III records of the 21st century BC (for one striking example, see CDLJ 2003/1), was illustrated in Nissen, Damerow & Englund, Archaic Bookkeeping (Chicago 1993) pp. 72-73. CDLI entry: P005279

credit: Englund, Robert K.