Defining collectives : materialising and recording the Sumerian work force in Ur III times
Garcia Ventura, Agnès (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Departament de Ciències de l'Antiguitat i de l'Edat Mitjana)

Imprint:	Boston : De Gruyter, 2017
Description:	26 pàg.
Abstract:	Kinship is one of the main aspects that scholars have borne in mind in their attempts to characterise the workforce recorded in administrative texts of the Mesopotamian Third Dynasty of Ur (ca. 2112-2004 BCE). In my view, although some of the hypotheses proposed regarding marital status and filiation can improve our understanding of these texts, others risk distracting our attention from possible complementary or alternative readings. The twentieth-century scholars who first proposed the translations of Sumerian terms that are currently quoted and used1 began by considering the biological family and kinship as the main structuring institutions; only rather later did they begin to consider other ways of defining collectives and the workforce. In fact, their first translations may actually have been more a reflection of their own context than of the context they meant to describe. Aware of this possible bias, I propose to reassess some of these terms in an attempt to identify what they highlight, and consequently what they tell us about the ways in which work collectives were built and perceived.
Rights:	Aquest document està subjecte a una llicència d'ús Creative Commons. Es permet la reproducció total o parcial, la distribució, i la comunicació pública de l'obra, sempre que no sigui amb finalitats comercials, i sempre que es reconegui l'autoria de l'obra original. No es permet la creació d'obres derivades.
Language:	Anglès
Document:	Capítol de llibre ; recerca ; Versió publicada
Published in:	Understanding Material Text Cultures. A Multidisciplinary View, 2017, p. 5-30

DOI: 10.1515/9783110417845-002

26 p, 154.7 KB

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