Late Uruk bicameral orthographies and their Early Dynastic Rezeptionsgeschichte

This paper argues that there may be a plausible historical referent for the two assemblies portrayed in Gilgamesh and Akka: at minimum, the two major lists of professional titles from the Late Uruk period (Archaic Lú A and Officials , which I will refer to here as the NAMESHDA List and UKKIN List respectively) likely served as inspiration for the bicameral model in Gilgamesh and Akka. As part of a broader trend towards the recognition of feasting and in particular the distribution of cuts of meat as a key practice for delineating social categories and stratifications, Milano’s “food paradigm” offers an especially fruitful approach to the elucidation of the early Mesopotamian textual record. And as Pollock has emphasised, it was probably within the context of these feasts that the vast majority of “political” activity took place in early Mesopotamian societies. If I am correct in linking certain uses of the Late Uruk lists of professional offices to the distribution of cuts of meat and fish, this would represent a straightforward logical extension of the approach to the NAMESHDA List that Nissen has championed throughout his career, namely an insistence on the interdependency between the textual record as a precipitation of institutional practices and the evidence for macro-social structures drawn from archaeological techniques such as surface survey. This paradigm has other salutary effects (its demand for a clear articulation of the interdependencies between the textual record and its archaeological correlates as well as its emphasis on the semiotic mediation of social relationships), but for my purposes here its chief advantage is that it puts the documents that were actually used to organise elite social institutions in early Mesopotamia at the heart of our efforts to reconstruct these same institutions.