Ur III dairies: 6 (2024-08-10)

Created by: Englund, Robert K.

The growth of the herd described in AO 5499 over ten years, together with dairy products expected from the excess milk harvested from adult cows.

This illustration offers a glimpse into the developments within a hypothetical Drehem dairy cattle herd over a period of ten years, as recorded in the six-column account AO 5499 in the collection of the Louvre Museum. To the upper left of the full illustration are the four adult cows around which the herd was built. The herd owner requires the addition each year of one calf for each two adult cows, thus giving a total of six animals in year one. The author of this theoretical account followed the unlikely presumption that the first birth was of a bull calf, the second a heifer calf, the third a bull calf and so on throughout the text. In the succeeding year, the calves are weaned and move on to yearlings, in the 3rd year to two-year-olds and so on until, on the left, they join their mothers as adult, bearing cows, or to the right age into full plowing-strength oxen if castrated, breeding bulls if not. Further, the excess milk—milk not fed to unweaned calves—is processed to dairy oil and dry cheese (kašk) and delivered, again according to this theoretical account, at a rate of 5 and 7.5 liters per cow-year, respectively. The ratio of what was called “yellowed milk” (Sumerian ga še(x)-a) to butter oil was 20:1, so that we may assume that this “yellowed milk” had an oil content of 5% and thus was preprocessed in some way to enrich the oil from an expected average of ca. 3% for healthy cows in antiquity. CDLI entry: P131589.

credit: Englund, Robert K.