---
title: "Barley, canals and captives: what fifteen Ur III tablets say about a princess’s estate"
description: "Tablets in the Iraq Museum record a Mesopotamian royal estate outside the governor’s control, and a village that may have held prisoners of war"
author: "Jan Sokol"
published: 2026-10-05T21:00:08Z
modified: 2026-10-06T01:22:14Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/barley-canals-and-captives-what-fifteen-ur-iii-tablets-say-a-4aecda
language: en
tags: ["archaeology", "history", "mesopotamia", "cuneiform", "iraq", "world"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Barley, canals and captives: what fifteen Ur III tablets say about a princess’s estate

*Tablets in the Iraq Museum record a Mesopotamian royal estate outside the governor’s control, and a village that may have held prisoners of war*

By Jan Sokol · October 5, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/barley-canals-and-captives-what-fifteen-ur-iii-tablets-say-a-4aecda

## In brief

- Fifteen Ur III cuneiform tablets in the Iraq Museum, mostly from the Umma region, were published in the journal Iraq
- Researchers link several tablets to the estate of Princess Šat-Eštar, which operated outside Umma’s provincial administration
- Accounts record barley wages, 45.36 hectares of farmland, canal work and an administrator named Zariq
- Authors cautiously suggest the settlement of Du-murula may have been populated by prisoners of war
- The tablets reached the museum in 2005–2008 via confiscations and a return from Jordan; some came from illegal digs

In the Iraq Museum in Baghdad there are fifteen pieces of fired clay. According to La Brújula Verde, the smallest is just over 3 centimetres long and the largest 11.5. On them, in cuneiform, scribes recorded who got barley, how much earth had to be shifted out of which canal, and how many workers were Elamites. Four thousand years later the lists have been read again. Through the barley rations they show something larger: a state that was very well organised, and an estate that lived partly beside it.

The tablets come from the Ur III period, roughly 2112 to 2004 BCE, when the kings of the Third Dynasty of Ur ruled much of southern Mesopotamia through governors, temples and archives. Most of the fifteen come from the Umma region. Abather Rahi Saadoon, Noemi Borrelli and Maurizio Viano published them in the journal *Iraq*. La Brújula Verde [reported](https://www.labrujulaverde.com/en/2026/10/15-clay-tablets-from-ur-reveal-unknown-places-an-ancient-princess-whose-farm-ran-on-its-own-rules-and-a-village-inhabited-by-prisoners-of-war/) that the paper went online on 2 October and that the authors work at Kerbala University, the University of Naples L’Orientale and the University of Turin.

## The king’s daughter

Her name was Šat-Eštar. She was a king’s daughter and the wife of a man called Šarakam. Earlier evidence had already put her estate somewhere in the Umma region. Saadoon published texts from [her archive in the same journal in 2018](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/iraq/article/abs/sumerian-texts-from-the-archive-of-the-princess-satestar-in-the-collections-of-the-iraq-museum/6840350EF65DD18A8E1A0A935935D4FA). The three researchers now name her estate as the most likely origin of at least two of the new tablets, and possibly two more. The personal names, the administrative terms and the workers drawn from two provinces point to the border zone between Umma and Ĝirsu/Lagaš. That is where the governors’ jurisdictions ended and the Crown’s continued.

It was not a country house with a few fields around it. Combined with older personnel lists, the tablets show a whole economy: cereals, orchards, herds, food processing and garment-making. Its people included craftsmen, guards, kitchen staff, labourers and entertainers. It could mostly run on its own and hire outside hands when it needed them. It had its own administrators and its own scribes, and it did not go through the governor of Umma.

## Scribes who wrote their own way

The clay shows that independence too. The large state and temple archives of Ur III are known for their uniform phrasing. Several of these tablets have odd spellings, a mix of documentary formulas, unusual jargon and occasional Akkadian. The authors do not read these as mistakes. They suggest that some of the scribes trained outside the official institutions, borrowed from different administrative traditions and gradually built up local habits of their own.

This is a reflection, not a finding: an empire that standardised everything still could not standardise the people holding the stylus.

## The ration lists

One tablet from the Šat-Eštar archive records a monthly distribution of 810 litres of barley to workers. They are listed as Elamites, ox drivers and junior herdsmen. According to La Brújula Verde, fifteen workers shared the grain, four of them Elamites, and the standard ration was 60 litres a month, about two litres a day. Related personnel records let the researchers match some of the names to jobs such as groom and cupbearer.

A second tablet covers seven months of expenses on 45.36 hectares of cultivated land: seed, fodder, wages for hired hands, rations for builders, supplies for cattle, reeds and canal upkeep. In all it comes to 18,796 litres of barley. Men digging a stretch of the Sisa canal were paid in grain. Other hired labourers received about 3,300 litres for carrying royal grain to Pašime. The account names Zariq, probably an administrator of the estate, who handled storage, wages and farming. La Brújula Verde adds that a seal names a Zariq serving another princess, Ninlil-tukulti. The authors say he may have managed estates for more than one of the king’s daughters, but they put this forward only as a possibility.

Fields had to be sown, canals cleared, animals fed and grain moved from one settlement to the next. Kings are remembered for palaces and armies. The tablets are a reminder that a king’s power also depended on a man like Zariq who could make the grain account balance.

## Canals missing from the map

Some of the place names are new or barely attested. One text mentions the mê-Lamassim canal, which had not appeared before in the Ur III corpus, along with other difficult names. Another concerns upkeep of the Nanna-gugal irrigation system near the border between Ur and Ĝirsu/Lagaš and calculates thousands of cubic metres of earthwork. The wider evidence suggests the canal ran across provincial territory and may itself have marked a boundary. Neighbouring administrations had to work together to maintain it, under royal planning.

## Du-murula

The boldest proposal concerns a place called Du-murula. One tablet splits agricultural work there among four groups, including farmers, menials and 11 Elamites, and sets 4,072.5 cubic metres of earth to be removed for irrigation maintenance. Other documents show Du-murula supplying reeds, vegetation and timber, with close ties to officials who served the Crown. Over six months, about 240 tons of fresh reeds went from Du-murula through the state chancellor. Much of it seems to have been fodder for fattening sheep, which ties the settlement to the royal livestock economy.

The researchers suggest that Du-murula may have been under direct Crown control. More cautiously, they propose that it could have been one of several settlements founded by royal order in southern Mesopotamia and populated by prisoners of war. The Elamites support this, and so does a group that may have come from Simanum. La Brújula Verde reports that this reading depends on an unexplained term, “IGI-nu-um”, which the authors think could be a misspelling of “men of Simanum.” They present the whole idea as a hypothesis. It does not prove that every worker at Du-murula was a captive.

If the hypothesis holds, some of the people in these ration lists were not hired at all. They were brought there by war and set to dig the king’s ditches.

## How the tablets reached Baghdad

None of the fifteen tablets was found in a documented excavation. They reached the Iraq Museum between 2005 and 2008 by several routes, including confiscations and a batch returned by Jordanian authorities. La Brújula Verde names the bodies that seized them: the museum’s technical committee, the National Intelligence Service and the Ministry of the Interior. Some of the texts linked to Šat-Eštar originally came from illegal digging, which broke up her archive and makes it hard to reconstruct the estate in full.

So the princess’s records were scattered twice: once when her world ended, and again when looters dug them up and sold them. What has come back to Baghdad is incomplete. Even so, it records Elamite workers, an administrator named Zariq, canals that cut across provincial borders, and a reed-cutting village that may have been settled with prisoners of war.