Tablet IM 204157 in the Iraq Museum in Baghdad records “414.1.0 še gur,” a barley total that the editors of a new Cambridge-published study convert to 124,260 liters “according to the royal gur.” It is a single clay account from the Umma region of southern Mesopotamia. The tablet is dated to the 48th year of King Shulgi and names a field called Hibaritum.
The tablet is Text 4 among fifteen cuneiform documents edited by Abather Rahi Saadoon, Noemi Borrelli and Maurizio Viano in “From the collections of the Iraq Museum: New Ur III tablets primarily from the Umma region,” published in the journal Iraq in 2026.
One Tablet, One Barley Account
The authors’ abstract, on Cambridge Core, describes the group as agricultural administration, with unusual date formulas, nonstandard spellings and place names previously unknown. The 124,260-liter figure is the largest barley sum reported from the group, but it is one entry in one record and not a running total across all fifteen tablets.
Archaeology Magazine’s summary ties the barley to fields in the Umma region and lists a second tablet that records more than 30,000 liters shared among people and different types of land. It also describes records that separate domain land, sustenance land and tenant land, and a field survey around a place called Gawarrum whose plot groups measure 788.4 and 396.18 hectares.
Fifteen Tablets from the Ur III State
Barley is the right commodity to anchor an Ur III audit. Britannica describes the dynasty’s administration as highly centralized, with provinces run by crown-appointed governors called ensi, who managed state resources under a rotating system known as bala. Grain accounts like Text 4 were the paperwork of that machinery, written in Sumerian cuneiform on clay and filed by field, season and responsible official.
The texts date from 2112 to 2004 BCE, the span of the Third Dynasty of Ur, which Britannica’s entry on Shulgi places at c. 2112 to c. 2004 BCE, with Shulgi himself reigning from about 2094 to 2047 BCE. Twelve of the fifteen tablets come from Umma, two from the archives of Irisagrig, and one possibly from Ur or Girsu/Lagash. That mix shows how scattered the material is: these are objects of the kind that circulate after illegal digging, and the archive of Princess Shat-Eshtar was among those dispersed.
The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative catalog illustrates the point with a related piece, IM 204248, a fragmentary Umma-region account from the Shat-Eshtar archive that the Iraq Museum acquired in 2009 after it was confiscated from smugglers. It was published earlier by Saadoon in Iraq 80 in 2018.
Shat-Eshtar’s Estate in the Wider Group
The royal link comes from a different set of tablets. According to the Cambridge abstract, some documents seem to come from a non-institutional setting, likely royal estates operating outside provincial control, such as the estate of Princess Shat-Eshtar. The authors propose that estate for Texts 6 and 9 and possibly Texts 3 and 11, and locate it likely on the border between the Umma and Girsu/Lagash provinces.
The clues are stylistic. Several tablets differ in spelling, wording and format from the records of the main provincial offices, and they name officials and places unknown from other sources. In Archaeology Magazine’s account, the authors link those features to records made outside the main administration of the Umma governor and caution that some of their readings are still uncertain. Greek Reporter adds that the household may have processed food and clothing, grown cereals, kept orchards and animals, and employed craftsmen, servants and guards.
Digging and labor appear in the same group. One tablet plans work around a canal named mê-Lamassim, a name absent from earlier Ur III texts the authors studied, and another plans irrigation work totaling 4,824 cubic meters of soil on the field Nanna-gugal, near the Ur-Girsu/Lagash border. A further text lists 12 workers, among them four Elamites, four ox drivers and four junior herdsmen, who received 810 liters of barley as monthly wages.
A kilogram conversion is out of reach, since the abstract gives the capacity in liters and the unit as the royal gur and says nothing of the grain’s weight or the area sown. The sources that do give an area, the survey of Gawarrum fields, describe plot groups of 788.4 and 396.18 hectares, which the reports present as a separate record and which cannot be used to estimate the yield behind Text 4.
The barley total therefore belongs to the administrative layer of the corpus, while the estate hypothesis belongs to the stylistic layer. Whether the tablet with 124,260 liters came from a royal household at all is something the abstract does not say.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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