Reform Edict of Urukagina

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. One can thus surmise that the contents of such displayed texts (for example, the Code of Hammurabi) were read by a public herald. Yet there were still other members of society, so to speak, who could read—the gods. Thus, monuments on public display were perhaps intended for a divine audience, as sort of a résumé of the monarch making the gods aware of his accomplishments on earth. This theory is enhanced by the fact that many documents were specifically dedicated to deities. In some cases, royal documents were deposited in building foundations or built into the structures themselves, to be read by the gods or by future monarchs who would expose them during reconstruction projects. Other inscriptions, however, were dedicatory and were meant only for divine inspection.

The original context and function of Urukagina's reform texts are not known. They were not excavated but acquired by purchase, and thus they have no precise context (though it is most reasonable to assume that they were from Girsu). Thus, it is impossible to discern the immediate audience for the texts. The issue is made more complex by the fact that each edition of the Reform Edict seems to have been written for a different purpose.