Third Dynasty of Ur - Height of Sumerian Civilization
The Third Dynasty of Ur ruled southern Mesopotamia for about a century from 2112 BC and left more written records than any earlier state. Ur-Nammu took the throne of Ur and within a few years controlled the whole of Sumer and Akkad, reuniting a region that had fragmented after the fall of the Akkadian empire. The administration is what makes the period remarkable. Something like 100,000 clay tablets survive from it, most of them accounts: receipts for sheep, records of labour days, temple inventories, ration lists, weights of wool. A state warehouse at Puzrish-Dagan handled livestock for the whole empire and recorded every animal. The bureaucracy standardised weights, measures and the calendar, and used a fixed accounting year. Ur-Nammu also issued the earliest law collection that survives, some three centuries before Hammurabi, and its penalties are largely monetary compensation rather than the retaliation of the later code. The great ziggurat at Ur is his, and the core of it still stands. His son Shulgi reigned forty-eight years, had himself declared a god in his lifetime, built roads with rest houses, founded scribal schools, and claimed in a hymn to have run from Ur to Nippur and back in a day. The end came from a combination of Amorite incursions from the west, Elamite attack from the east, and an administrative and agricultural crisis in which grain prices rose enormously. Ibbi-Sin was taken to Elam in chains around 2004 BC, and Sumerian survived afterwards only as a written language. Its collapse produced a body of lament poetry — the destruction of Ur described as a storm, the gods abandoning their shrines — that scribes were still copying five centuries later, and that is among the earliest literature we can read about the fall of a state.
- Year: 2112 BCE
- Category: Political
