Люди города Ура

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50-53 — с. 237

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YBT (YOS) X, 46 — с. 199

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SUMMARY

This book, Men of Ur by I. M. Diakonoff, is one in a series devoted to the different aspects of life in Old Babylonia and specifically in the Kingdom of Larsa which preceded Hammurapi's kingdom as the leading state of Mesopotamia in the 19th — 18th centuries В. C. The work, mainly based on Ur Excavation Texts V by H. H. Figulla and A. J. Martin, aims at drawing a picture of Old Babylonian everyday life. The city of Ur was one of the three or four important cities in the Kingdom of Larsa, a seaport and the centre of the cult of the great Moon-God Nanna, or Sin. Ur was selected for our book as one of the very few ancient Mesopotamian cities where considerable residential areas have been excavated, with tablet archives and household objects found

in situ.

The present book is not the first devoted to Old Babylonian Ur. It was preceded by Foreign Trade in the Old Babylonian Period by W. F. Leemans (1960), and by Le clergé d'Ur au siècle d'Hammurabi by D. Charpin 1986). However, Leemans' book is concerned only with foreign traders and specifically with only one household in Ur, and Charpin's, mainly with priests, and not so much in their daily life as in their priestly activities. The present book was finished in 1983, and while it was with the publishers, the author could gratefully make use of some of Charpin's findings: but the three books do not actually overlap in any important degree. On the contrary, all] three are mutually complementary and draw a more comprehensive picture of Ur in the Old Babylonian period than any one of them.

A more detailed history of the Kingdom of Larsa can be found in another book in this series, Ancient Larsa. Sketches of Economic Life

, by Nelly Kozyreva (Puss., 1988). Therefore, the text of the present book contains only a short Historical Introduction (Chapter I), and then the following chapters:

Chapter II. The People in the of Mesopotamia: their appearance. It treats of the clothes and fashions, furniture, utensils, food, mores and manners of the people; the archaeological material from Ur and Larsa itself being not always sufficient, the chapter is also based on texts and objects found not only on Larsa territory but likewise on material 424 from other neighbouring Mesopotamian kingdoms.

III. The City of Ur under the Sons of Kudurmabug. Kudurmabug was a half-Amorite, half-Elamite nomad chieftain who managed to overthrow the ruling dynasty of Larsa. He did not, however, assume royal power but enthroned in Larsa his son WaradSīn (1826–1823) and, after the latter's death, his second son, RīmSīn (1822–1763) who proved to be a successful and energetic ruler. The chapter is devoted to a hypothetic reconstructive description of the city of Ur, its streets and buildings, under WaradSīn and RīmSīn, based on the results of L. Woolley's excavations and some relevant texts. The reconstruction differs in several respects from that of the excavator who was influenced by the image of modern commercial cities, on the one hand, and modern Iraqi cities, on the other. Thus, certain isolated rooms found along the narrow streets of Ur were interpreted by Woolley as shops, in spite of the fact that they lacked places for storing wares and privies for the salesmen. From texts we know, however, that city dwellers owned sheep, and that they had to be driven into the city before the city-gates were shut at sunset. Woolley's «shops» are actually sheep-cots. We have been able to establish that some blocks of buildings at Ur housed extended families; also other important corrections to the existing archaeological interpretations are suggested.