Revisiting Bala (Provincial Taxation and the Ur III State) (Critical Essay‪)‬

The Ur III period (ca. 2100-2000 B.C., according to the conventional middle chronology) is well known for its massive bureaucracy, which has left us with tens of thousands of cuneiform documents. The brief period when the kings in Ur seem to have exercised absolute power and to have controlled nearly every aspect of economic life, essentially spanning the forty-five years between the adoption of Shulgi's administrative reforms (sometime after Shulgi 21) and the demise of dynastic supremacy during the early years of Ibbi-Suen, is one of the best documented periods from the ancient world. From this brief period we have detailed information on all kinds of mundane topics, in particular from the old provincial centers Girsu and Umma, from royal administrative centers such as Drehem, and from such newly discovered "rural estates" as Garshana. Nevertheless, vital aspects of the social, the economic, and above all the political system, still escape our understanding. Specialists have agreed for decades that one of the most vexing questions for understanding Ur III economic and political history addresses a term very common in accounts, namely Sumerian bala. The recent publication of a revised 1999 Harvard dissertation proposes to assist us in understanding this important administrative term, which as a verbal stem means simply "to cross over," often found in documents describing, for instance, the transfer of living beings or goods from one river bank to the other. There seems already in the ED IIIa period to be an idiomatic usage of the term to describe a passage of time, thus "period," and when speaking of rule, a "term of office," as bala has indeed been described since the first Assyriological treatments of the term. Tonia M. Sharlach, the author of the book under review, has made it her task to define the problematic economic, political, and perhaps religious system encompassed by the term bala during the Ur III period. In her introduction she gives a brief outline of the history of the period and presents her hypothesis about the bala system. In the following chapters she describes the bala contribution of the Lagash and Umma provinces. Each of these chapters is split into two comparable sections: one concerning animals, and one concerning all other contributions to the bala. A brief conclusion follows. The book is appended with a number of charts, indices, and about 150 never-before-published texts.