Insights into the Administration of Ancient Irrigation Systems in Third Millennium BCE Mesopotamia

Abstract

Mesopotamian administrative documents provide an extraordinary insight into the mathematics used in the recording of economic data from various sectors of early state economies. This paper will discuss the computation and quantification procedures as related to the administration of irrigation systems in Southern Mesopotamia in the third millennium BCE. The largest and the most detailed corpus of such administrative texts derives from the highly bureaucratic Ur III state (2112–2004 BCE) that controlled an area roughly corresponding to modern Southern Iraq at the end of the third millennium BCE. Texts discussed in this paper provide insight into one of the earliest examples of geographic surveys by which the natural environment was translated into quantifiable units, necessary to compute workloads, labor demands and the division of the work amongst different social groups and state institutions. It has been proposed that Ur III bookkeeping served to keep track of the fulfillment of a province’s tax obligations and/or was the result of a planned economy. However, this paper suggests that it equally functioned as a means to streamline the workflow associated with the upkeep and operation of irrigation systems.