Deciphering the Late Uruk butchering texts

Throughout the history of early Mesopotamia the distribution of cuts of meat – usually in the context of what Michael Dietler (2001) has termed ‘diacritical’ feasts – was the primary mechanism for building solidarity among the elite, while at the same time differentiating and calibrating the status of individual office-holders and the institutional roles that they inhabited. The decisive question, if we are to make sense of meat distributions in the Late Uruk period, is how were the individual units or portions defined and how were these units represented in the textual record. Since only some individuals within the major institutions received meat rations (and multiple portions are closely linked to the highest levels within these hierarchies), the identification of this metric and its metrology within the Late Uruk documentation is of central importance to the question of Late Uruk diacritical feasting.