Chapter 4

A Queen, a Reformer, and Weavers

King Enmetena of Lagash, whom we met in Chapter 3, was succeeded by his son, whose reign was short,¹ and who proved to be the last of the dynasty founded by Ur-Nanshe. The throne then passed to a man named Enentarzi, who had been a priest during Enmetena’s reign.² His reign was also brief—just five years. The six-year reign of Enentarzi’s son, Lugalanda, was barely longer than those of his immediate predecessors, but we will pause here, because the life and career of his wife Baranamtara is particularly well documented and provides a vivid picture of an Early Dynastic royal estate and its personnel.

Queen Baranamtara of Lagash: An Administrator, Diplomat, and Religious Functionary

When Lugalanda took the throne in Lagash, around 2400 BCE, queen Baranamtara did not immediately take over control of the queen’s estate, as might have been expected. Instead, her mother-in-law, the Queen Mother Dimtur, continued to control the E-Mi (literally the “house of women”) for another year.³ Perhaps during that time Baranamtara was learning from her mother-in-law, so that she would be able to take over the whole administrative machine effectively when the time came.

Meanwhile Baranamtara commissioned a new cylinder seal to be carved for her with an inscription suitable to her new rank: “Baranamtara, wife of Lugalanda, ruler of Lagash.”⁴ It’s a big seal, with three registers of images, each of them showing heroes flanked by rearing animals (see Fig. 4.1). This type of imagery was reserved for the seals of people with power.

Fig. 4.1 Impression of the seal of Queen Baranamtara of Lagash, c. 2400 bce. (Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY/Art Resource)

The E-Mi palace was located in the city of Girsu, which was the capital of the city-state of Lagash at this time. The E-Mi had traditionally been a temple estate, dedicated to the goddess Bawa, but the queen had taken over the management of the estate at some point before Baranamtara’s time. Running the E-Mi must have been a full-time job once Baranamtara took it over. Although it was called a “house” (the word was “e” in Sumerian), the E-Mi constituted much more than just a physical building. It owned 4,465 hectares (more than 17 square miles) of fields.⁵ These fields produced vast quantities of barley. During her husband’s reign as king, Baranamtara’s name appeared on records concerning all aspects of the grain production of the E-Mi. She oversaw the sowing of the seed, harvesting (which took a large workforce), storing the grain, and grinding it into flour. To provide water to the fields, canals stretched throughout the E-Mi’s territory, and those required regular maintenance. More land was allocated to reed beds, vegetable gardens, and orchards. About 100 fishermen also worked for the queen.⁶ The palace owned sheep and goats, cattle and pigs, and supported workers who cared for the animals. A vast workforce of about 700 people answered to Baranamtara.⁷ Among them, about 250 men in senior positions were awarded the use of subsistence fields as their payment, though they also received payments in barley four or five months a year. The other 450 lower-ranking workers were provided with barley allocations every month.⁸

Among these lower-ranking workers, a large cohort at the E-Mi was involved in producing textiles from the wool of the estate’s sheep; this was a source of wealth for the queen and for the kingdom. The women who worked in spinning and weaving were assigned to teams of twenty, each with a supervisor. The supervisors were mostly women, though men could also be found in these positions.⁹ We will return to them later in this chapter. The workforce of the E-Mi grew considerably during the time that Baranamtara was in control.¹⁰

It is odd, really, how rarely the king, Lugalanda, is mentioned in the 1,800 tablets that survived from the E-Mi. Did the royal couple live separately from one another in their respective palaces? We don’t know. They certainly worked separately, with dominion over their respective estates, neither needing to supervise the work of the other. King Lugalanda’s palace archive has not been found, but we have to assume that its contents would be similar to those of his wife’s estate. The one difference is that there is no evidence for a military role for the queen, whereas the king certainly was responsible for the troops of Lagash, like his predecessors. (Lugalanda did not, though, leave any royal inscriptions that mentioned military campaigns, so perhaps his short reign was not marked by warfare.)¹¹

Baranamtara was the mother of at least two princesses, named Munus-saga and Geme-Bawa,¹² whose births were cause for great celebration. Offerings were made of sheep and goats both to living relatives and dead ancestors on the day of a daughter’s birth, and a scribe kept track of the details. For one of the baby girls, it is just about possible to figure out her birthday based on clues in the text, but this was rare.¹³ Mesopotamians didn’t keep track of their birthdays or their ages.

King Lugalanda and Queen Baranamtara also maintained separate diplomatic relationships.¹⁴ An important alliance for Baranamtara was with the queen of the city-state of Adab, which lay just upriver of Lagash; the two states shared a border. Adab was independent of Lagash, with its own ruler, whose wife was named Nin-gishkimti. She and Baranamtara kept in touch and on good terms by sending their agents back and forth between their palaces. Nin-gishkimti’s agent was given no professional title—not messenger or scribe or merchant. He was just “her man.”¹⁵

The agents probably relayed messages (though the queens’ letters have not survived) and brought along gifts, which were recorded in the archives. The agents of the two queens traveled together; this was a practice that was to continue for more than a thousand years, as the same types of diplomatic ties formed, generation after generation, across the Near East.

We know of three occasions when the agents traveled between the two cities with gifts from one queen to the other, but it is likely that they made many more visits.¹⁶ On one occasion, two messengers arrived in the land of Lagash with gifts for Queen Baranamtara from Queen Nin-gishkimti.¹⁷ You might think that the goods in each land would be pretty much identical, given how close they were to one another geographically, but Lagash was a center for the copper trade, which meant that the queens had different gifts for one another. The agent from Adab brought ten female donkeys, a footstool, and two female figurines, one made of wood and the other of ivory, from his queen for Baranamtara.¹⁸ In return, Baranamtara sent the queen of Adab 120 minas (43 kilograms, 120 pounds) of copper, along with 5 minas (2.25 kilograms, 5 pounds) of tin-bronze. Baranamtara also generously provided a personal gift to the agent from Adab: she gave him two garments and a jar of scented oil. Likewise, when Baranamtara’s agent delivered her gifts to Nin-gishkimti, the queen of Adab gave him a set of clothing.¹⁹ These types of rewards for messengers and envoys who maintained the diplomatic contacts between kingdoms also had a long life; a millennium later, a man carrying a letter and gifts to a foreign court could still expect to receive a valuable gift when he arrived.

Baranamtara’s diplomatic ties extended farther afield as well, and this helps to explain how she had access to copper to give to her ally, Queen Nin-gishkimti. The land of Dilmun, located on what is now the island of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, was an important trading partner for Lagash. This had probably already been true all the way back in the reign of Ur-Nanshe, but for this era more evidence survives. This includes a letter between two officials, pertaining to a gift from the queen of Dilmun to the queen of Lagash.²⁰ The latter might have been Baranamtara. The queen of Dilmun sent 120 minas (pounds) of copper—just the same amount sent by Baranamtara to the queen of Adab, in fact—along with some more personal gifts, namely fifteen baskets of dates and three linen garments.²¹ Dilmun was famous for its delicious dates, and no doubt linen garments would have been a delightful change from the hotter woolen clothes that were the norm in Mesopotamia.

Other documents found at Lagash show that regular trade, not just the gift exchange between the royal families, took place with Dilmun. Lacking a common currency, merchants from each land paid for goods in materials that they had in abundance. When a Lagash merchant named Urenki traveled to Dilmun (which he did at least once for Queen Dimtur, Baranamtara’s predecessor,²² and several times for King Lugalanda²³), he took with him barley, wheat, lard, and flour, which were local products, along with cedar, which had been imported from the hilly lands far to the northwest, and perfumed oil, which required imported plants for its scent. Urenki traded these items in Dilmun in exchange for hundreds of pounds of copper.²⁴

To put this in perspective, Dilmun was about 850 kilometers (530 miles) from Lagash, and Urenki would have traveled most of that way, if not the whole way, by boat. Seaworthy boats had been built long before cities developed, though their captains probably stayed within view of the coast as they traveled. It would have been a difficult journey, but evidently was worth the risk. Copper was needed everywhere for making bronze. The copper was not mined in Dilmun, though. It had come from even farther away, from what is now Oman (ancient Magan), where archaeologists have found evidence for extensive mining and smelting.²⁵ Dilmun had become an international center for trade, with goods and merchants meeting there from regions to the south and east, as well as from Mesopotamia and the cedar forests to the north. The rich Mesopotamian fields produced more food than was needed for the local population, so it could be used to trade for materials that they did not have.

It would be interesting to know more about the figurines that the queen of Adab sent to Baranamtara. Figurines and statues were not just works of art in the minds of the people of Early Dynastic Mesopotamia; they had a kind of built-in power and often bore inscriptions attesting to this. We have already seen this in the case of the statue of Enmetena, the earlier ruler of Lagash, which was placed in the temple to pray eternally for the king’s well-being.

Even people who were not members of the royal family could commission such statues (see Fig. 4.2). A cache of twelve of them was found in a temple at a Mesopotamian site called Tell Asmar, apparently put there for much the same reason.²⁶ Several of these figures, which were created at the beginning of the Early Dynastic period, held cups in their hands to pour libations to the gods on behalf of the donors whom they depicted.²⁷ Other figures in this group had their hands clasped in prayer, in the style of the statue of king Enmetena. Perhaps the queen of Adab sent a figurine of herself to pray on her behalf in a temple in Baranamtara’s city.

Fig. 4.2 Alabaster statue of a praying woman, c. 2600–2500 bce. (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Baranamtara’s role as queen extended beyond administration and diplomacy; she was also an important figure in the local religious rites. At festivals for the gods during this time, it was usually Baranamtara, not her husband the king, who was responsible for making the sacrifices. A typical text recording the expenses of a festival ends with the statement “At the festival of eating malt of (the goddess) Nanshe, Baranamtara, wife of Lugalanda, ruler of Lagash, made the sacrifice.”²⁸ Festivals were held throughout the year and each one took several days. The gods were provided with meat (from sheep and goats), fish, beer, oil, dates, bread, garlic, and flour²⁹—essential ingredients for an elaborate meal. Baranamtara did not stay only in the capital city of Girsu for these festivals; sometimes she traveled to other parts of the city-state as well. Although she was not described as a priestess, she took care of the gods and goddesses all the same.

The festivals of the goddess Nanshe seem to have been of particular importance to the people of Lagash, and Baranamtara’s role in them was extensive. The largest of the festivals was the curiously named “festival of eating malt of Nanshe.”³⁰

The festival lasted a full eight days³¹ and took place at the beginning of the agricultural growing season.³² On the first day, Baranamtara traveled from the capital city Girsu to the city of Lagash, bringing with her a sacrificial sheep for the god Ningirsu in his temple. Presumably she traveled with a large entourage, and she may have been transported in a chariot. On the second day, she dedicated more offerings—one was brought by a chariot to “the canal of the marsh,” while others went to three other deities in three temples in Lagash. Then Baranamtara moved on to the third great city of the kingdom: Nigin, seven kilometers (4.3 miles) southeast of Lagash.³³ A text notes that “The woman who came from Lagash (the queen) went through the gate of (the temple) E-Pa and brought a lamb. (It was) the second day.”³⁴ Even more offerings to even more gods took place in Nigin on the third day. Some of the offerings were also given to statues of past kings and queens of Lagash. It was not until the fifth day that Baranamtara returned to Lagash; on this day the offerings were made to the great god of Lagash, Ningirsu. Little is known about the rest of the festival, but by the eighth day Baranamtara presumably had returned home to her city of Girsu.

By making this journey around the kingdom, Baranamtara was doing more than appeasing all the gods and goddesses and providing them with food and drink, though that was certainly important. She was reminding the people of the kingdom of her legitimacy as queen and bringing her subjects together in a shared celebration.

Baranamtara commissioned the creation of a statue of herself during her lifetime, which later received offerings during festivals. The royal statues must have taken up considerable space in a temple. Eight are mentioned by name as receiving individual offerings, and others were grouped together and received collective offerings. Besides the statue of Enmetena, there was one representing King Ur-Nanshe (who founded the dynasty), both of which received offerings, as did a statue of Enmetena’s wife Nin-hilisud. After Baranamtara’s death, her statue joined this group, along with a statue of her husband Lugalanda.

Shasha, the queen who later took over control of the E-Mi from Baranamtara, also came to be represented by a statue that joined this group, and, remarkably, she made offerings to her own statue during her lifetime.³⁵ One did not need to be dead, apparently, to warrant such attention. And the statues were not just of queens and kings; other important figures from the past also had statues that received offerings, even including a temple administrator from Enmetena’s reign, an influential man named Dudu.³⁶ The royal and elite statues received food and drink on a regular basis.

Although these dead royals were not called gods, in the minds of the people of Lagash, the distinction between immortal gods and mortal monarchs might have been a little hazy. Statues of royal family members stood in temples, just like statues of gods. Both the statues of dead monarchs and those of gods needed food, drink, and clothing.

It is often argued that most Mesopotamian royals were not divine, in contrast to Egyptian kings who were, but the hard-and-fast line between god and human that we perceive now was probably a lot more porous in the mind of an ancient Mesopotamian. The average person might have had trouble distinguishing between the divinity of deities and deceased royals. It’s clear that queens were in the same category as kings in this regard—both required offerings. In fact, there were almost as many queens as kings among the venerated statues.

This was not an “ancestor cult,” not only because the statues were not exactly worshiped, but also because many of the statues were not of ancestors of Lugalanda. The dynasty started by Ur-Nanshe had ended before this time, but the kings of the dynasty were still venerated. The last of the queens to maintain offerings to the dead elites, Queen Shasha, was not a descendant of any of the people whose statues she cared for.³⁷ The statues were, however, of people who in the past had led the kingdom of Lagash, and this seems to have been the reason why they were important—not necessarily because of a blood relationship. If treated well, the dead kings and queens, in the form of their statues, could help the kingdom continue to prosper.

The Funeral of Baranamtara

The royal leaders, male and female alike, also received lavish funerals. It’s not clear how Baranamtara died, but it must have been during the reign of her husband’s successor. Her funeral was planned with the attention owed to a great leader, so there seems to have been no hostility between the two successive royal couples. Two records have survived listing the people who were paid rations by Shasha, the next queen, in honor of her predecessor. The names on the list were described as “people (who) were mourning in the death rituals for Baranamtara,” and more than 300 of them were present on both days of the funeral.³⁸

Of great importance were gala priests, who were specialists in lamentation. They played the lyre and sang at funerals. No fewer than seventy-two of them attended the first day of Baranamtara’s funeral, and ninety-two of them were present on the second day. Imagine a massed choir of ninety-two singers accompanied by the sound of their lyres; the music must have carried across the city. The gala priests received payment in bread and beer for their participation: three and a half loaves each on the first day, and three more loaves and a jug of beer on the second day. Joining them on the second day was the highest-ranking member of their group, the chief gala priest, who received sixteen loaves of bread for his participation. Gala priests were men, who were sometimes married and had children, but they were often classed with women in ration lists, and their songs were apparently sung in Emesal, a dialect of Sumerian that was associated with ritual but also considered to be a women’s language. The gala priests seem not to have been constrained by normal expectations of gender that prevailed at the time for most of the population.³⁹

An Early Dynastic sculpture of a musician named Ur-Nanshe (not to be confused with the king of the same name), which was discovered in the ancient Syrian city of Mari, may have represented a person who might now be described as gender nonconforming (see Fig. 4.3).⁴⁰ The inscription on the statue is clearly written about a man: “For Iblul-Il, king of Mari, Ur-Nanshe, the great musician, has dedicated his statue to the goddess Inana-[…].”⁴¹ But the statue’s gender is ambiguous; the musician has a somewhat feminine physique, his face has no beard, but he wears male clothing. Some scholars believe that he may have been castrated,⁴² though others disagree. Although he does not describe himself as a gala priest, Ur-Nanshe may well have been one.

Fig. 4.3 Statue of a musician named Ur-Nanshe, from Mari, Early Dynastic period. (Renée Lessing-Kronfuss/Art Resource)

Women of a particular status or behavior were often associated with the gala priests at funerals. They were usually referred to as “crying old women,” though at Baranamtara’s funeral they were called “wives of the elders”—seventy of them present on the first day and forty-eight on the second.⁴³ They were provided with bread and beer as though they were paid professional mourners. Although this suggests a detached attitude to the queen, if these eminent women had worked with her during her lifetime, they might well also have been sincerely mourning her death. The same is probably true of Baranamtara’s ten “brothers by birth” who came to the first day of the funeral and were also paid. The people named may have been a mix of paid professional mourners, relatives, and friends.

Also listed were slave women—148 on the first day and perhaps more on the second day, each of them provided with three loaves of bread and some beer on both days. Enslaved people in ancient Mesopotamia included prisoners of war, debtors paying off their loans, people sold as children by their impoverished parents, and individuals born into slavery—we will return to the subject of slavery later.⁴⁴ The enslaved women at the funeral might well originally have been prisoners of war. Baranamtara’s funeral was probably an even bigger event than these texts suggest. Many more people would have attended than just those being paid to be there. Thousands might have gathered,⁴⁵ drawn by the music and the wish to witness a dramatic and unusual ceremony, and to pay their respects to their former queen, who would have been a familiar figure in their lives.

The dead queen was sent to the afterlife with elaborate gifts. There is no record of these for Baranamtara’s funeral, but lists survive from the Syrian city of Ebla at around this same time. There, the gifts for a queen’s funeral were similar to the ones she received for her wedding.

A list of gifts that Baranamtara and her husband had previously provided, either for a royal funeral or wedding, was found at Girsu and it gives a sense of how a queen or princess might be buried (or perhaps married) in style. These goods had been accumulated by the royal couple, and the recipient was their son’s wife.⁴⁶ We just do not know if they were celebrating a marriage or mourning a death at the time.

The wealth that Baranamtara and Lugalanda provided on this occasion was impressive—eight items of clothing, a team of donkeys, a slave girl, several large wooden items including a sledge, a bed, a chair, and a footstool, plus plenty of small, valuable items made of stone, copper, silver, gold, carnelian, wood, and ivory. These included eleven pieces of jewelry, eight containers of various kinds, a mirror, and a pot of perfumed oil. These sound, of course, like the types of things a princess would need during life, rather than after death. They would make up a sensible and generous gift to a new daughter-in-law to help her in her married life and her new role in the royal family. With these items, she would now have the kinds of clothing and jewelry appropriate to her status, along with some fine furniture and vessels for her household. The donkeys and slave girl seem as though they would be much more useful to the couple in life than after death. The problem is that the term for the event when they were sent is ambiguous, and some scholars do think these were funerary gifts. The riches buried in the royal tombs at Ur show that members of the royal family could be sent to the afterlife with exactly these types of goods. If so, what should we make of the slave girl who is mentioned in the text?

It does not seem likely that she was sacrificed. By Baranamtara’s time, the practice of killing attendants and placing them in royal tombs seems to have stopped in Ur, and there is no mention of it in the funerary texts from Lagash. The servants and enslaved women who were named as receiving bread when they were mourning for Baranamtara fortunately do not seem to have ended up dead themselves.

King Urukagina: A Reformer

Baranamtara was a widow when she died, her husband Lugalanda having predeceased her. She had seen some remarkable changes in her later years, because the king who had taken the throne was a reformer; he seems to have been the first individual in Mesopotamian history to boast of his efforts to curb corruption among his officials and civil servants.

Unfortunately, we really do not know how to pronounce this king’s name. It was written in one way in cuneiform, but it is transcribed in many different ways by modern scholars. The king may have been named Urukagina, Uruinimgina, Irikagina, Erekagina, or even Eri’enimgennak!⁴⁷ The first two signs in his name, URU and KA, can be read in a number of different ways, resulting in different possible meanings for the name, hence the confusion. Since there is no consensus, I will call him Urukagina here. In any event, he was not the son of Lugalanda, but he doesn’t seem to have overthrown his predecessor in a violent way.⁴⁸

Urukagina (mid-twenty-fourth century BCE) wanted life in Lagash to go back to the way it had been in the past, or at least to the way he imagined it had been, in some earlier, less decadent time. This would be a way of life that would restore (as he saw it) an appropriate respect for the state god Ningirsu, who would no doubt approve of his actions. Urukagina claimed, using the third person about himself, that “he (re)established the norms of old; the commands which his king the divine Ningirsu had commanded him.”⁴⁹ Many people, he believed, had been getting rich at the expense of the state and the temples; those people were to be removed from their positions, and even his own royal court was to become a religious institution. “He put the house of the ruler (and) the fields of the ruler in (the hands of) the divine Ningirsu his king.”⁵⁰

These reforms had an impact on Baranamtara’s palace, the E-Mi, as well. Urukagina determined that it should be dedicated to the goddess Bawa (as perhaps it had been in the past): “he put the house of the E-Mi (and) the fields of the E-Mi (into the hands of) the divine Bawa, his queen.” So the E-Mi would no longer be the “house of women,” it would be the E-Bawa, or “house of (the goddess) Bawa.” But the records found there show that, after the reforms were enacted, nothing much changed in practice. After Baranamtara’s death, the queen in charge of the queen’s palace, now Urukagina’s wife Shasha, continued to administer the estate with its fields, canals, orchards, flocks of sheep and goats, and dozens of weavers.

Zum, Igi-bar, and Emete: Weaving Supervisors at Girsu

Among the hundreds of workers listed on the ration lists drawn up by the queen’s scribes were three women named Zum, Emete, and Igi-bar. (Actually, the last woman’s full name was Igi-barluti, but the scribes often referred to her as Igi-bar, so I will do the same.) They were all weavers and we can follow their careers as they moved up in the hierarchy of the textile workshops thanks to the work of several scholars who have recently analyzed the administrative tablets in creative ways.⁵¹

Weavers in the E-Mi were assigned to teams of up to twenty women (the weavers there were all women). Some worked in wool, some in linen. The members of each team presumably sat there together at the horizontal looms (known as ground-looms) in the palace workshops, day in, day out, making the bolts of cloth for which southern Mesopotamia was famous (see Fig. 4.5).⁵²

Fig. 4.5 Cylinder seal and impression showing two weaving women operating a loom, a third woman holding a skein of thread. (Yale University, Peabody Museum)

They received monthly wages that varied in amount. Some women always received more than others, some could be suddenly paid less, then the amount went up again, for reasons we can only guess at. Some of the women had small children and were given more, so as to provide for them. Girls worked on the looms next to grown women and were paid for their efforts—perhaps they had been in the workshops since infancy at their mothers’ sides, or perhaps they were orphans.

In any event, the weavers would have known one another well. Zum was one of the wool weavers and, when we first hear of her shortly before Urukagina took power, she was on a team of twenty women overseen by a man named Malga. Zum was at the top of the list when the wages were recorded. Lists were almost always hierarchical, so Zum must have been the most senior or influential woman on her team. She would have been seen as a relatively important person within the world of the textile workshops of the palace. Zum was also paid more than the rest of the women. Whereas the other women on her weaving team received a monthly allotment of 18 silas of barley, Zum was paid 24 silas.⁵³ A sila was about a liter, so this was not a great deal of food on which to live for a month, but 24 silas certainly would have helped her family’s livelihood. Men who worked for the E-Mi in other roles were paid considerably more than women (usually 48 silas per month in this period),⁵⁴ and children received 12 silas of barley, so a family could bring in plenty of wages between them.

Unlike some of the other women, Zum had no young children to feed at this point—no sons or daughters were listed next to her name. Perhaps her children had grown by now and were working independently. It’s likely that she did have children; almost every woman did, whether biological or adopted. Zum also probably had a husband (unless he had died before this), but the women’s husbands weren’t named on the lists.

Zum’s overseer, Malga, was probably in charge of assigning the weavers to particular projects, weighing and measuring out the wool that they would use, and keeping an eye on the quality of the weaving. Spinning the wool was the responsibility of a different department in the E-Mi, and it was a time-consuming activity. It has been estimated that one piece of cloth the size of a modern sheet for a single bed would have required 47 kilometers (29 miles) of woolen thread, which, using the hand-spinning technology of the third millennium BCE, would have taken 1,382 hours to spin.⁵⁵ A team of twenty spinners could have produced this much woolen thread in sixty-nine hours. Spindle whorls are common finds on ancient archaeological sites; spinning thread was a form of specialized work that many women did constantly, not just as workers for the palace but in their own homes, in order to produce clothes for their families.

Malga’s was not the only team of weavers who worked for the E-Mi at this time. Another twenty women worked for a man named Nanshe-danumea.

After four years, the supervisor Malga left his position and Zum got a new boss. This time it was a woman, Nin-kazida. We do not know where she came from; this is the first time her name appears in the archives from the E-Mi, but presumably she had experience in weaving at another institution in the city of Girsu. It would be fascinating to know how Nin-kazida was hired. Did someone from the E-Mi ask around at other temples and palaces for good prospects, once Malga left?

The other supervisor, Nanshe-danumea, stayed on, continuing to oversee his team for all of the eight years covered by the surviving records. But during the reign of King Urukagina and Queen Shasha, the workforce of the E-Mi began to increase and more supervisors were needed. The monarchs seem to have been particularly interested in textile production, increasing the number of teams of weavers from two, when Urukagina took power, to four in his second year on the throne.⁵⁶ Two of the teams had male supervisors, and two had women in that role. One of the women was Zum’s supervisor Nin-kazida, the other was named Igi-bar.⁵⁷

Igi-bar and Nin-kazida had all the same responsibilities as the two male supervisors (though they were paid less well), and, just like the men, their workshops were named for them. For example, at one point, timbers were needed by all the weaving houses, though it is unclear what they were to be used for. All four of the supervisors received a specified number of these timbers and took responsibility for whatever it was that would be done with them. The list noted that thirty-nine timbers “were deposited in the weaving house of Igi-bar,”⁵⁸ whereas “the weaving house of Nin-kazida” received twice as many: seventy-eight timbers. The supervisors also sometimes were given lump quantities of flour, wheat, and wool that they were charged with distributing evenly to their workers.⁵⁹

King Urukagina and Queen Shasha kept on expanding the number of workshops so that, by the king’s sixth year, six weaving houses were making woolen textiles, and three weaving houses were making linen, with a workforce of 138 women and children serving on these teams.⁶⁰ These women made up the largest group of workers of any kind on the queen’s estate.

Many workers came and went from the weaving teams during this time of growth and restructuring of the weaving workshops. At the end of the eight years, only five of the women on Nanshe-danumea’s original team were still working for him; some had switched to other teams and some had left palace employment. This suggests that the women weren’t enslaved or tied to the palace household; they were free to leave if they chose.⁶¹ But Zum had stayed on with her team even when other women had moved on, and perhaps she stood out as someone who was hard-working and organized.

When the palace administrators needed three supervisors for new teams of weavers that they were creating, they promoted Zum into one of these spots. In fact, they put women at the heads of five of the six teams of wool workers. Nin-kazida, Zum’s old boss, kept her position as supervisor, as did Igi-bar. Zum led her own team, and two other women became supervisors. One of them, like Zum, had been listed at the top of her team previously, receiving higher wages than the rest.⁶² Another had come over from the spinning workshops.⁶³ Outstanding weaving women were clearly being rewarded through promotions and increases to their salaries. All three of the linen weaving houses had women in charge.⁶⁴ Nanshe-danumea was by then the only male supervisor in the palace textile workshops.

The scribes who listed the weavers and their payments on the monthly accounts henceforth made a distinction between the wool weavers who had been there all along (who were described as being “from former times”) and the ones who had been brought in to staff the new teams. The new women were paid, though not well, and none of them was listed as having had children. Some scholars think they may have been slaves.⁶⁵ Either way, they probably had a harder life than that of the older generation of weavers. Zum was now in charge of twenty of these presumably young women. If they had little experience with weaving, as seems likely, she would have been training them as well as supervising them.

A woman named Emete might well have been the most senior of all the supervisors. Even before she took control of one of the weaving workshops, she was the “head of female royal servants”⁶⁶ and therefore presumably a close advisor to the queen. Unlike any of the other women who supervised the weavers, but like the male supervisors, she was not just paid in grain but was also given the use of fields that she could cultivate herself.⁶⁷ Given how consuming her career must have been, she no doubt hired laborers to farm her fields. She took on other typically male roles as well, such as providing a sacrificial goat for a ceremony and being formally recognized as a gift-giver to others.⁶⁸

Unfortunately, after the sixth year of Urukagina, no more records from the E-Mi survive. The brief, shadowy glimpses of these weavers and supervisors come to an end. But we can guess a little about their life outside the palace. Although she spent her whole life weaving textiles, a weaver like Zum (before she became a supervisor, at least) probably only owned one or two garments for herself. Wool for clothes was expensive and she was not paid particularly well. She would have paid for anything she needed to live—wool, salt, oil, and so on—out of the surplus barley that she was paid and that her family did not need for food each month. Presumably she (and her possible husband and older children) lived in a house elsewhere—it is highly unlikely that the palace contained barracks for all its hundreds of workers.

Month after month the workers received their wages, and each month the scribes created a big ledger-sized tablet on which they listed all the workers’ names, the amount of barley each person received, the number of young children each woman had, and the team and workshop that employed her. These tablets were stored in an archive room and must have been consulted from time to time, perhaps when the administrators were called on to account for all the barley that had been spent.

The lists include many other workers besides those in the textile workshops (see Fig. 4.4). There were men and women who worked as millers, brewers, and swineherders.⁶⁹ These teams of workers had remained more stable than had the weavers during Urukagina’s reign, without big increases in staff and without much turnover of personnel either.⁷⁰ One orphan girl who served as the “assistant to pigs in the pasture” was paid 24 silas per month.⁷¹ This was a higher amount than many women, perhaps because she had no family to help support her.

Fig. 4.4 Cuneiform account of workers from Umma, c. 2400–2350 bce. (Yale University, Peabody Museum)

The palace seems to have made a point of integrating the children of their workers, even orphaned children, into the system of work and wages. This had the advantage of giving them a salary and a place to belong (working with their mothers, if those women were alive), and it kept orphaned children off the streets.⁷² Of course, the palace also benefited from their labor, and it never seems to have occurred to them that children should not be put to work—child labor laws were thousands of years off in the future. Many, perhaps most, of the children born to palace workers became palace workers themselves.

Wages weren’t equitable; that was a fact of life. A male senior official could be paid eight times as much barley as a female manual laborer.⁷³ But in spite of this, and although the work was hard, one does not have the sense that the E-Mi palace was a cruel place. King Urukagina even emphasized in his royal inscriptions that his goal was to make sure that weaker members of society were treated fairly. He had his reforms listed and copied out on large clay cones, along with clay “nails”—smaller conical objects—and on at least one clay plaque.⁷⁴ He wrote that he “made a compact with the divine Ningirsu that the powerful man would not oppress the orphan (or) widow.”⁷⁵ Of course, one has to take royal inscriptions with a pinch of salt; they were propaganda for the king as he tried to impress the gods. But at least it seems that the gods approved of kindness, and Urukagina aspired to please them.

The weavers in Lagash had their counterparts in other cities. We may not know their names or be able to trace their careers everywhere, but women with similar lives and responsibilities produced textiles in Umma, Ur, Uruk, Adab, and all over Sumer, as well as in cities to the north in Syria.

Given that the natural environment in Sumer provided its people with no mineral ores for metalwork, wood for building or carpentry, hard stones for sculpture, or other luxury goods to trade, it makes sense that they created something precious from one resource that they had in abundance—wool. The spinners, dyers, weavers, and embroiderers must have pushed themselves to create fabrics of unmatched quality. Although the textile workers were paid in similar amounts of barley as millers and brewers, their work must have matched the artistry of jewelers and sculptors. This was true throughout Mesopotamian history. Imagine if robes and carpets from this period were hanging in museums today; it would be so much more obvious why they were sought out in lands far from home. We would no doubt be dazzled at the fineness of the weave or the stitches or the intricacy of the designs.

Early Dynastic Sumer was a patriarchal society. Men were in charge of most aspects of the society and economy. But in some cases, women did the same work as men, in supervising weavers and in some other positions, such as doorkeepers, rope-makers, and barbers.⁷⁶ Children growing up in the society would have heard about powerful men, like the reforming king Urukagina, and also about powerful women like Baranamtara, with her responsibilities for administration, diplomacy, and ritual. Many women worked outside the home for monthly pay in barley and could expect to be provided with additional amounts if they had children to support. And perhaps it did not escape people’s notice that the region’s most valuable export, the textiles that were sold and given as luxury gifts, were made by women. Women were not considered to be the equals of men, but they were central to politics, society, religion, and the economy, and seem to have been regarded with respect.

Sumer was rich and prosperous during the Early Dynastic period. The kings and queens of its city-states practiced diplomacy, managed vast estates, and benefited from trade with distant lands. The period of time when attendants were buried with monarchs was short-lived, and wars, though violent, were not constant. It is unlikely that people lived in perpetual fear. The kings seem to have decided not to terrorize their populations into submission but to try to endear themselves to them and to emphasize that the gods had chosen them to rule. Many of the same strategies were adopted by their contemporaries to the northwest, in Syria. This is seen, especially, in the remarkable finds from the city of Ebla, which will be our focus in the next chapter.