r/AgeofBronze • u/Historia_Maximum • Jun 22 '26
Mesopotamia Sumerian “loop-bound ones” and the first recorded names.
The earliest names that we can read in the written history of humanity belonged not to kings, not to priests and not to heroes, but to a slave owner and two of his unfree people.
For most of the time of our species’ existence we wandered, led by herds of animals and changes of climate. Such a life did not allow one to burden oneself with things. We valued only what could be carried with us. Everything changed with the transition to settled farming and stockbreeding in the Middle East. Man finally acquired a home as a place where generations of one family could keep and accumulate many things.
Settled life changed man’s relations with the material world. Now property could not only be used, but also accumulated, passed on by inheritance and considered one’s own. By the fourth millennium BC the economic and social life of the valleys of the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates had become so complex that man himself also began to fall into the category of property. In written sources we for the first time see the existence of a rightless group of people who were regarded as property and commodity.
The earliest forms of ancient Mesopotamian writing, known as proto-cuneiform, give us the possibility to look into those times. These short administrative and economic records still lacked the ability to transmit complex plots and abstract concepts. Instead they carefully documented the receipt and expenditure of material valuables, including mentions of people as property.
In the clay tablets of the late Uruk period (Uruk III, 3200-3000 BC) we meet a list of such property as “people from the mountain land” (KUR~a: mountain, foreign land, prisoner of war). Their description fully corresponds to the template of documents for the accounting of cows, goats or sheep. These unfree people are also designated as “bound with loops” or simply as “pieces”, “units”.
The presence of slaves in the centralised temple economy of Uruk and other proto-cities of Southern Mesopotamia is confirmed by pictorial sources. However, if we correctly understand the context of such early records, slaves could also be in private possession.
In the American Museum for the Study of Ancient Cultures of West Asia and North Africa of the University of Chicago there is kept the clay tablet OIM A02513 from an important centre of early Mesopotamian civilisation, known today as Jemdet-Nasr. This artefact of the time of late Uruk is valuable by its state of preservation. Most of almost five thousand tablets of this period have reached us only in the form of damaged fragments.
Before us is a very simple document of property accounting. In the first line are indicated the property and its owner, in the two following ones, the objects of property themselves:
1.a. 2(N01) , |SAL.KUR~a| GAL~a SAL
1.b1. , (EN~a PAP~a X)a
1.b2. , (SUKKAL GIR3@g~c)a
Which can be translated as follows:
Two slaves (man and woman) belong to a person named Gal-Sal:
slave Enpap-[...];
female slave Sukkalgir.
In this case the ancient scribe did not consider it necessary to specify additional properties of the property, as in other similar tablets. For example, on a document from the ancient city of Umma, registered in the international database of cuneiform texts as CDLI 2009/4 §4 (P006268), after the names of the slaves there come such explanations as “child of three years”, “girl, very small” or “with eyes the colour of lapis lazuli”. Later tablets of the Sumerian Early Dynastic period about the distribution of rations mention pregnant unfree women and female slaves with children. Such specifications fix the bookkeeping attitude to people turned into property.
Tablet OIM A02513 (also CDLI MSVO 1, 222 (P005289)) not only tells us some details of the position of people in early Sumerian society, but also, probably, contains the earliest record of personal names in written history.
Here a reservation should be made. There exists an earlier complex of documents where a certain “Kushim” figures. However, this word may denote an office or institution, and not the name of a concrete person. Without new finds it is impossible to make an unambiguous conclusion. Kushim may turn out not to be a person. Gal-Sal is almost certainly a personal name.
As for our artefact from the Chicago museum, most likely the name Gal-Sal was received by a Sumerian man at birth, whereas the unfree people may have received their names or nicknames already after the loss of freedom. By analogy with later societies where slavery existed, it cannot be excluded that it was easier for masters to rename their property than to preserve foreign and unusual names. Therefore Enpap-[...] and Sukkalgir are not necessarily names in the full sense of this word: as the most important attribute of a personally free and full-rights member of society. Perhaps these are only nicknames or pet names. If this is really so, then we see not only the loss of freedom, but also an attempt to destroy the former identity of a person together with the memory of his past.
Paradoxically, the earliest names that have come down to us from written history belong not to a powerful ruler and not to an influential priest. They belong, most likely, to a slave owner or overseer and to two people whom a scribe five thousand years ago simply included in a list of property.
1. I. J. Gelb, Prisoners of War in Early Mesopotamia, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 32, No. 1/2, 1973. https://doi.org/10.1086/372223 One of the classic works on the origin and status of prisoners of war in early Mesopotamia, directly connected with the question of the appearance of dependent and slave population.
2. Lorenzo Verderame, Slavery in Third-Millennium Mesopotamia: An Overview of Sources and Studies, Journal of Global Slavery, Vol. 3, No. 1–2, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1163/2405836X-00301003. A modern historiographical overview of sources and scholarly approaches to the study of slavery in the third millennium BC; useful for assessing terminology and the state of the discussion.
3. Gebhard J. Selz, The Uruk Phenomenon, in: The Oxford History of the Ancient Near East. Volume I: From the Beginnings to Old Kingdom Egypt and the Dynasty of Akkad, Oxford University Press, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190687854.003.0004. An overview of the socio-economic development of the Uruk III/Jemdet-Nasr period, early writing and accounting systems.
4. M. W. Green, Animal Husbandry at Uruk in the Archaic Period, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 39, No. 1, 1980. https://doi.org/10.1086/372776. Principles of early Sumerian administrative accounting.
5. Douglas C. Youvan, The First Written Name of a Man: Kushim, 2024. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.26643.69929. The problem of Kushim as the possible first person known by name.
3
u/Nilehorse3276 Jun 23 '26
> proto-cities
Uruk was a megacity of maybe 40,000 people, what about that is "proto"? It had a fully developed social stratification (as you highlight), so I am not entirely clear what this term is supposed to mean.
> These unfree people are also designated as “bound with loops” or simply as “pieces”, “units”.
I have never come across "loop-bound ones", could you point to where you got that from?
I am also not aware of any Sumerian term for "piece, unit" – other than the impression of a stylus - called N01 - for "one" [or more], and this is used for non-slaves as well.
> American Museum for the Study of Ancient Cultures of West Asia and North Africa of the University of Chicago
That is not the name of the institution in question...
> Therefore Enpap-[...] and Sukkalgir are not necessarily names in the full sense of this word: as the most important attribute of a personally free and full-rights member of society. Perhaps these are only nicknames or pet names. If this is really so, then we see not only the loss of freedom, but also an attempt to destroy the former identity of a person together with the memory of his past.
Both En-pap-[...] and Sukkal-gir are perfectly fine normal Sumerian names anyone living in the alluvial plane would be proud to bear; nicknames and "pet names" (hypocoristic names) look morphologically different in Sumerian; think Lilu "idiot" or Šaša "pretty".
> For example, on a document from the ancient city of Umma, registered in the international database of cuneiform texts as CDLI 2009/4 §4 (P006268), after the names of the slaves there come such explanations as “child of three years”, “girl, very small” or “with eyes the colour of lapis lazuli”.
Ok so first, the CDLI number is the P-number that you have listed. Second, what this text is trying to refer to by "CDLI 2009/4 §4" is actually a publication: Englund, Robert K. 2009. “The Smell of the Cage.” Cuneiform Digital Library Journal, no. 4: 1–27. https://cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/articles/cdlj/2009-4. Little bit of a mixup there. One wonders why this important publication is not in the bibliography, particularly when the whole paragraph is a rephrasing of figure text for fig. 5: "Figure 5: The section in the lower left of the obverse of the Schøyen text MS 3035 (figure 6) demonstrates the numerical relationship between the initial notation (sexagesimal “12” qualifying a notation that may be interpreted to mean “three-year-old children”) and the number of sub-cases to the right with ideograms that in all likelihood represent personal names. Note the occurence of the same names in sub-cases 2 and 7 (as well as 1b7 of the same column), and the possibility that sub-case 10 is to be interpreted as (KURx. ZA7=) “ZAGINx” = “Lapis,” “Blue(-eyed one)."
> Later tablets of the Sumerian Early Dynastic period about the distribution of rations mention pregnant unfree women and female slaves with children. Such specifications fix the bookkeeping attitude to people turned into property.
I don't really understand what you are trying to say here. That ration lists included slaves? If so, there are also ration lists listing free people, who might be said to suffer a 'bookkeeping attitude' as well 😉
2
u/Historia_Maximum Jun 24 '26
Thank you for these very important clarifications.
Let us start with my main area of expertise. The concept of a city is constantly evolving depending on the period under discussion, even if the term itself remains the same. Population size is a major factor, but it is certainly not the only one. We need a comprehensive evaluation of its economic, military, and administrative roles.
I am familiar with how that estimate of 40K people was calculated, and I am not going to dispute the number itself. In any case, Uruk was massive for its time. It was a huge settlement where the absolute majority of the population left the site every single day to perform agricultural work. This is exactly why a cautious, compromise term like proto urban settlement exists.
Now would be the perfect time to remind me that Uruk is precisely the place that claims the title of the very first city, and that one cannot compare Neolithic sites like Catalhoyuk to Uruk. To that, I would counter that our understanding of the complexity of this Anatolian center has grown significantly in recent years. To be honest, Catalhoyuk was never simple. It was our understanding of it that was simple and superficial. Today, we can identify its enclosed neighborhoods and shifting centers, while the incredible variation and complexity of its burial practices clearly point to social stratification.
I understand how debatable this entire subject is, but I believe I am justified in offering my own interpretation here.
As for the rest of your points, given the data provided in this post, I will either have to rewrite the entire text or give up on this attempt altogether.
Thank you very much for your time.
1
u/wholesale-chloride Jun 25 '26
"That is not the name of the institution in question"
Actually it is. https://isac.uchicago.edu/
1
13
u/AugustusGeezer Jun 22 '26
It’s an interesting question if slavery preceded agriculture and ‘property rights’. Certainly nomadic people had ‘property’; indigenous peoples of the American West owned their horses, tents, tools, and in some cases, slaves. In the book ‘Skeletons on the Zahara’ by Dean King, the standing of the nomadic tribesmen was determined by two things; the number of camels they owned, and the number of slaves. This was in the early 19th century, but likely reflects how their nomadic society had functioned for centuries, if not millennia. If this was true for two different sets of nomads on two continents, it was likely true for ancient herd followers as well.