The Umma Messenger Texts from the Harvard Semitic Museim and Yale Coll

Bread, beer and oil handed to travelling envoys: these are the small transactions recorded on 240 clay tablets from the Sumerian city of Umma, now held at Yale and Harvard and published together here by Noemi Borrelli. Known as Messenger Texts, they log rations and goods disbursed to officials on the move, and they run from the fifth month of Amar-Suen's third year to the twelfth month of Ibbi-Sîn, the closing decades of the Third Dynasty of Ur.

Earlier volumes in the Nisaba series covered nearly 900 similar tablets in the British Museum, so this edition fills out a substantial body of evidence for the sociology and economics of Neo-Sumerian Umma. It is a specialist working edition, and it belongs on the desk of Assyriologists and economic historians who want the primary records themselves.