Dispute Resolution in the Provincial Courts of the Third Dynasty of Ur.

Abstract

This dissertation is an investigation of dispute resolution as practiced in the two best-documented provinces of the strongly centralized state of the Third Dynasty of Ur (Ur III, ca. 2100-2000 BCE), Umma and Lagash. This southern-Mesopotamian state left tens of thousands of administrative documents reporting on a variety of economic and administrative activities, and this project focuses on approximately 370 of them, in particular those identified by the Sumerian term ditila (“case closed”) that record the outcome of dispute proceedings. The corpus utilized for this undertaking consists both of ditila-documents analyzed by Adam Falkenstein in his 1956 treatment of the topic, as well as many that have been identified or published since then. Previous studies of these documents have viewed them as evidence of “law” and as sources for the study of Sumerian linguistics. The approach adopted in this dissertation, however, views the texts as limited administrative summaries of procedures, and, inspired by studies in the anthropology of law, mines them for evidence of social groupings, mobility, and competition among provincial elites and their associates within the 38-year window covered by the texts. The study shows that, in spite of long-standing images of the Ur III state as a static, despotic entity, there were differences between the two provinces and changes in the nature of courts over time. The findings of other recent studies that have noted variations in administrative organization among the provinces are corroborated, while it is also demonstrated that there were regional differences in the organization and execution of disputing practices. The latter point indicates that there was not a centrally legislated, uniformly applied body of laws overarching the state, and thus challenges the idea of an Ur III “legal system.” Moreover, it is argued that the resolution system at work in these provinces was in constant flux, subject to both local political changes as well as currents of competition among urban, provincial elites. Disputing was engaged by a number of elite families, who participated both as disputants and court officials, in order to secure and transform status and negotiate their political standing within the community.