Ur-Nammu

Sumerian king (r. c. 2112-2095 b.c.e.)

• Born: Late twenty-second century b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Ur, Sumer (now Muqaiyir, Iraq)
• Died: 2095 b.c.e.
• Place of death: In war with Gutium (now in Iraq)

Early Life

Before Ur-Nammu (oor NAH-mu), Third Dynasty regent of Ur and 120th king, monarchs of legendary stature people the Sumerian king list. Eight preceded the great flood, the first of whom, Alulim of Eridu, ruled for 28,800 years. After the flood, Jucar of Kish ruled for 1,200 years. Etana of Kish (fl. c. 2800 b.c.e.) is reasonably credited with uniting the city-states of Sumer. Gilgamesh (fl. c. 2600 b.c.e.), the fifth king of Uruk, is said to have ruled for 126 years. He is credited, in the epic preserved by Mesopotamians who succeeded the Sumerians, with being the son of the goddess Ninsun and visiting Utnapishtim, the Sumerian Noah, who was granted eternal life. Mec-ane-padda, first regent from Ur, is said to have ruled for 80 years. These claims bear comparison to longevity in Genesis.

AreaOfAchievement Architecture, government and politics, law, war and conquest

Excavations prove the historicity of Sargon of Akkad, the 82d king, who conquered Sumer in the twenty-fourth century b.c.e., creating the first known empire, a polity composed of different peoples. His existence is in no way challenged by the fact that Utu-hejal of Uruk, the 119th king, is said to have ruled after the flood for 427 years. Seven years, six months is another estimate. As for the historicity of Ur-Nammu, the ziggurat he built for the moon god, Nanna (the word means “Full Moon”), still stands. Fragmentary hymns for and about Ur-Nammu are extant, and his legislation and wise political innovations are celebrated in clay and stone.

Little is known of Ur-Nammu’s personal origin. His hymn to Enlil (god of the air, “Lord Wind”) credits the god with choosing Ur-Nammu to be king “from the multitude.” According to the hymn “To Nanna for Ur-Nammu,” his mother was Ninsun. The goddess Ninsun—literally “Lady Wild Cow”—is associated with cattle and healthy offspring. In the elegy on “The Death of Ur-Nammu,” on her son’s demise “holy Ninsun” is said to have wept and cried, “‘Oh My heart!’”

One can reconcile the two claims of origin by arguing that Ur-Nammu’s mother was a venerated woman named after the goddess who wept yearly at a ritual celebrating the death of her son, the wild bull Dumuzi (not to be confused at the outset with the god Tammuz, also called Dumuzi, though later conflated with him). Perhaps the elegy simply associates, through their names and the shared weeping, Ur-Nammu’s human mother and the divinity. Perhaps it conflates the two. Lady Wild Cow herself may have been thought to be Ur-Nammu’s mother. After all, the moon god Nanna, Ur’s patron divinity, whose symbol, the crescent, was sometimes represented as the horns of a bull, was also associated with cattle, bestowing fertility and increase on both herds and vegetation. “Ur-Namma C” (“A Praise Poem of Ur-Nammu”) credits the king with saying, “After my seed had been poured into the holy womb, Suen [Sumerian for “crescent moon,” an alternative appellation for Nanna that led to the god’s Babylonian name, Sin], loving its appearance [envisioning its possibilities?], made it partake of Nanna’s attractiveness.” The poem concludes, “I am the creature of Nanna! I am the older brother of Gilgamec [Gilgamesh, who preceded Ur-Nammu by centuries]! I am the son borne by Ninsun, a princely seed! For me, kingship came down from heaven! Sweet is the praise of me, the shepherd Ur-Nammu!”

Beyond the speculation such claims engender, the biography is short: Ur-Nammu, son of Ninsun, was a brother of Uruk’s king Utu-hegal, under whom he served as governor of Ur before replacing him as king. In the course of cementing alliances, Ur-Nammu married a woman of Mari who was identified as Taram-Uram (“She loves Ur”). The approximate dates of his reign are known but not the date of his birth.

Life’s Work

How exactly Ur-Nammu rose from king Utu-hegal’s governor of Ur to king himself is not known. By defeating Lagash, he managed to direct trade through his city, enriching its life with foreign contacts and its coffers through commerce. He reestablished Ur as capital and declared himself king of a united Sumer and Akkad, the fertile and civilized area that the Akkadian Sargon first consolidated. It had passed from the Akkadians into the hands of Ur-nijin of Uruk, only to be lost four generations later to the Gutians, reputed barbarians. Some twenty rulers later, the Gutians were themselves defeated, and under Ur-Nammu, Sumer rose to its last glorious ascendancy, characterized by artistic, economic, social, legal, and technological heights of remarkable character.

As ruler, in addition to overseeing such advances, Ur-Nammu was responsible for the relationship between the people and the city’s deity, Nanna (whose crescent currently graces flags and mosques of the region). In that capacity, Ur-Nammu constructed the god’s temple, the best-preserved ziggurat of the ancient world. The structure employs what ancient Greeks would rediscover and call entasis, the sophisticated use of a slight convexity that effects a more aesthetically pleasing form than straight lines would produce. The weight of the upper stories seems to be more lightly sustained because of the convexity of the structures below them. The effect serves a religious purpose as well. It produces an upward movement, an ascent toward the top of the ziggurat, where the temple, Nanna’s dwelling place, is located. Among other things, Ur-Nammu also erected the ziggurat at Uruk. During his reign, the Sumerians used columns, arches, vaults, and domes in the service of architecture, a panoply of structural possibilities that exceeds what the ancient Greeks would develop.

For Sumerians, the religious commitments of Ur-Nammu were as practical as his contributions to commerce, architecture, and agriculture. His service to the gods fulfilled the divinely established purpose of humanity as Sumerians understood it, submission to the yoke of service for which the gods created humankind. Indeed, that concept still dominates the region. The name of the religion of present-day occupants, Islam, means “submission to the will of God.” By honoring the gods, Ur-Nammu effected positive results, a comfortable and secure life for his people. Nanna, satisfied, preserved and benefited his devotees.

In addition to serving the gods, Sumerian kings performed ritually as the god Tammuz, who died and was reborn each year. His sacred marriage to Inanna (represented by and embodied in the highest ranking priestess), assured a fruitful year. The effect of the ritual union of king/Tammuz and priestess/Inanna, like the construction of temples, was thought to be as practical and efficacious as Ur-Nammu’s construction of roads for commerce or the canal that helped farmers water their crops and the dyke with which he managed to dry marshland so that it could be used for agriculture. The gods dug out the beds of the rivers Tigress and Euphrates, and—almost as remarkable—Ur Nammu created the canal and expanded the area of arable land. In fact, Ur-Nammu is said to have dug the canal “for Nanna.” His service to the Sumerian divinities may well have been thought most crucial, because without the blessing of the gods humanity was considered utterly helpless. Even today, “God is great,” people of the region aver, implicitly acknowledging the justice of God’s will, whether they are experiencing good or ill. The divinity trumps all.

Yet another of Ur-Nammu’s reputed accomplishments having to do with justice was his publication, some three hundred years before Babylonian Hammurabi, of the first known law code —“written in stone,” literally, though it was recovered, badly damaged, in a clay copy. Some attribute the code to Shulgi, Ur-Nammu’s son, but Ur-Nammu was credited with its creation by his near contemporaries. What remains of it is not so much a code, a reasoned set of laws, as a document that begins praising Ur-Nammu’s leadership; protection of widows, orphans, and the poor; and punishment of the wicked. Using legal precedents in specific examples of crimes and punishments, it specifies the cost of various misdeeds, including adultery, personal injury, the mistreatment and escape of slaves, false testimony, and issues of farming. Though the code is not without its primitive elements—the validity of a charge of witchcraft is tested in trial by water, for example—Ur-Nammu had moved beyond eye-for-eye justice. Different payments in silver are exacted for various forms of physical injury.

In the service of equity and universal economic understanding, Ur-Nammu created weights and measures and divided his empire into clearly demarcated provinces in a land register that declared him to be acting on behalf of the god of each province. Naram-Sin (fl. 2291 b.c.e.), a descendant of Sargon, is credited with providing standardized weights and measures earlier, but the attribution to Ur-Nammu indicates his awareness of their utility. In part as a result of such objectively fixed, and therefore apparently fair, measurements, procedures, and boundaries, Ur-Nammu ushered in a period of economic, political, and social peace and prosperity that was enjoyed most during the reign of his son. The Sumerians considered Ur-Nammu the great lawgiver.

The constructive quality of Ur-Nammu’s reign is celebrated in the elegy on his death. Ur-Nammu, who shepherded his subjects, is gone, and they are terrified. Betrayed by the gods, Ur-Nammu has been slain in battle. The streets are full of sorrow. He and his loyal soldiers proceed to the underworld. There he presents offerings to the seven gatekeepers. Replacing the underworld’s bitter food with a sumptuous feast, he sacrifices the cattle he has brought along and presents each god of the underworld with the proper offering. To the extent possible in such a place, he creates a better existence even for the dead, and he is rewarded, becoming a judge in the underworld of status equal to Gilgamesh.

Significance

Credited with supporting the worthy and defeating the wicked in this world as well as in the next, Ur-Nammu saw the value of clarity and specificity, ordering polities no less than individual lives. The creation of clear boundary lines between provinces contributed to pacific relations among neighbors. The boundaries in his code delineate acceptable and unacceptable social action. Those who lusted after the virgin slaves of others could temper their desires in the light of the stated consequences. Slaves who were considering flight could weigh their risks and options. The physically injured could not demand unreasonable recompense, and those who injured them were required to pay a penalty. The code set limits and established relationships among people. Ur-Nammu thus lent moral choices a sort of physical substance. The progeny of Hammurabi’s near contemporary, the biblical Abraham, who came from Ur, as well as Hammurabi himself, may have been influenced by Ur-Nammu’s code.

Ur-Nammu’s canal was a service both to his people (who benefited from more plentiful crops and better-fed animals) and the gods (who enjoyed more sumptuous offerings from those riches). The significance of Sumer for biblical exegesis, sometimes clear but inexplicable, cannot be exaggerated. The statue from Ur of the Sumerian Ram god in the Thicket, contemporary with Gilgamesh and housed in Iraq’s national museum, strikes one as crucially related to the ram caught in a thicket that Abraham sacrifices in place of his son in the biblical book of Genesis. Ur-Nammu’s constructions for the gods were thought to benefit his subjects practically, evoking divine blessings that would ease their lives. He was a king who took his office as a moral responsibility rather than a tool of self-aggrandizement. Aesthetic effects were perhaps outside the realm of his intentions, but those who praised him honored the aesthetic value of both his person and works. They declared him comely and a magnificent creator, one who had crafted a beautiful, secure, and just world for both the living and the dead.

Bibliography

Fluckiger-Hawker, Esther. Urnamma of Ur in Sumerian Literary Tradition. Fribourg, Switzerland: University Press, 1999. Contains transliteration, composite text, translation, photographs, and commentary.

Kramer, Samuel Noah. The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963. An informed overview, beginning with archaeological discoveries and the decipherment of Sumerian and concluding with mythology and literature. Photographs of recovered treasures are included as illustrations.

Postgate, J. N. Early Mesopotamia: Society and Economy at the Dawn of History. New York: Routledge, 1992. A careful history, grounded in details of language and a thorough assessment of extant texts, including remarkable photographs.

Potts, D. T. Mesopotamian Civilization: The Material Foundations. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997. This study moves from climate, geography, and natural resources to the foundations’ uses for physical, cultural, and religious purposes. Includes excellent illustrations.

Sasson, Jack M. Civilization of the Ancient Near East, I-IV. New York: Scribner, 1995. A wide-ranging, comprehensive survey of the entire region.