Reform Edict of Urukagina (2350 BCE)
Audience
As with many documents from ancient Mesopotamia, the Urukagina reform texts do not reveal much, if anything, about their intended audience. A significant percentage of the Sumerian texts from Girsu were uncovered by French archaeologists in the late nineteenth century, when excavations were relatively primitive, at least by modern standards. As such, many of the original spatial contexts of the artifacts were not recorded. In fact, historians are not even certain as to which excavation site some of the documents came from. In turn, some of the texts that were uncovered by the American team at Lagash in the 1970s had evidently been reused by succeeding monarchs as fill material for construction projects.
In general, many Mesopotamian public inscriptions were intended for display on monuments, delineating the accomplishments of the ruler in power. However, only scribes were literate; the masses and even the ruling aristocracy for the most part were not trained to read....
