Reform Edict of Urukagina

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 Ningirsu, the aforementioned city god of Lagash. Significant texts from Girsu concern a boundary dispute with a neighboring kingdom, Umma. The earliest king of Lagash known to have left inscriptions was Urnanshe (ca. 2500 BCE), who fought against an alliance of Umma and another Sumerian city-kingdom, Ur. A historical, if perhaps propagandistic, perspective on the border conflict was recorded during the reign of the third known king of Lagash, Eanatum (ca. 2450 BCE), in his so-called Stele of the Vultures. Here, the Lagash king wrote a history of the conflict tracing the issue back to Urnanshe, his grandfather. He argued that Umma had violated an agreement over the use of an agricultural area between the two territories called Gu'edena (a term etymologically related to the Hebrew “Eden”), which belonged to the kingdom of Lagash (in the name of the god Ningirsu). During the reign of Eanatum, the Lagashite king forced the Ummaite monarch to swear an oath that he was to use Gu'edena as an interest-bearing loan. The conflict was reignited during the reigns of the next kings, Enanatum I and Enmetena, both of whom claimed victories over their Ummaite enemies.

Few royal inscriptions from the next Lagash kings have been unearthed, but there are over sixty surviving texts from the last monarch, Urukagina, who was defeated in about his seventh year by Lugalzaggisi, king of the neighboring city of Umma. Apparently, the Lagash king, though defeated, was able to claim the title “king of Girsu,” perhaps implying rule over a smaller territory. In addition to the royal inscriptions, more than seventeen hundred administrative texts have been dated to the last three Lagash monarchs (Enentarzi, Lugalanda, and Urukagina), most of which are concerned with the Emi, the bureaucratic structure organized by the wife of the ensi (a major Lagashite official). The wife of Urukagina, Sa-Sa, is mentioned several times in these texts.

Although the date of its composition is uncertain, the earliest version of the Urukagina Reform Edict was most certainly written before Urukagina's defeat by Lugalzaggisi, the king of Umma and of the city of Uruk. Later versions describe Urukagina as the king of Girsu, and thus they were probably promulgated after his defeat by the Ummaite. The Reform Edict begins with a description of a number of building projects completed by the monarch for a plurality of gods. The Lagashite king then delineates a series of abuses by previous Lagashite monarchs (to whom he was evidently not related). These abuses included grain taxes on priests, excessive fees imposed upon mourners, the exploitation of the poor by the rich, and the exploitation of the property of the masses by the crown. To atone for these abuses, Urukagina pledged to fix certain prices, to cancel certain debts, and to protect widows and orphans.