Reform Edict of Urukagina (2350 BCE) Commentary by Mark Chavalas, University of Wisconsin—La Crosse

Context

Although developments in Mesopotamian history and political institutions in the third millennium BCE are imperfectly understood, because of fortunate circumstances numerous royal inscriptions from the vicinity of Lagash, in the south of modern-day Iraq, have shed light on a portion of this period (ca. 2500–2340 BCE). The late-nineteenth-century French excavations at Tello (ancient Girsu) and American work in the 1970s at al-Hiba (ancient Lagash) unearthed thousands of cuneiform texts written in Sumerian. Included among these texts are over one hundred royal inscriptions and fragments in multiple copies that delineate a 150-year period during which the kingdom of Lagash, comprising the cities of Lagash, Girsu, and Nina, played a significant role in the region. Mentioned in the inscriptions are nine kings of Lagash, the last of which is Urukagina.

The Lagash kings describe many building (and rebuilding) projects for a multiplicity of deities, the most important being...