Shepherds of the black-headed people - New York Art Resources ...

sanctuary and saŋŋa a priest. Charvát also envisaged an importantrole of the "assembly", in view of the occurrence of the GAL.UKKINtitle. As against this, in his later treatise he ascribed a universal,that is, either sacred or profane, role to the AB of Ur. Here I wish topoint out that the purely religious role of the AB is attested to in thesources only later.Up to now, that last specialist to have commented on the archaic Urtexts has been Giuseppe Visicato. 36 He gives account of some 140texts constituting an archive of the Nanna temple at Ur and notesthat the PA.SI urí ki , as well as the é-gal, attest to the presence ofpalace administration.Let me now take up the evidence, and see how far may we go in theinterpretation of the key terms.First and foremost, we will have to decide whether the AB is atemple or a palace. The AB is commonly equated with èš,"sanctuary" or "temenos". Most famous of these is, of course, Enlil'sèš of Nippur. What was the situation at archaic Ur? The occurrenceof the sanga title seemingly confirms the religious character of theinstitution, but sanga is also known as a profane manager oradministrator of the é-gal in Lagaš. AB can also be translated as agreat complex, or precinct (Bezirk). The lexeme turns up in manycity names and may well have signified something like "place", in aquite general sense; note that in UD.GAL.NUN orthography AB/UNUGcorresponds to ki "place".The second sign, ŠID, is usually read sanga (saŋŋa) and interpretedas a "priest" or "administrator", "manager" and the like. The signmay also be read as umbisag with a meaning "scribe", "author", "theresponsible one". In addition to this comes also the reading of thissign as šed = "calculate", "count".Now we may try to discern whether SANGA EŠ 3 is really a "priest ofthe sanctuary". Unfortunately, as late as the Fara times both signsdisplay a high degree of fluidity and polyvalence. Let us see how thesituation looks like in some particular documents from Ur. Text UETII: 162 has a subscript lugal ŠID še while UET II: 182 has ŠE ŠIDAB. Both subscripts can easily be brought back to a common modelformula of še lugal ŠID ("accounts of grain of the king settled") andše AB ŠID ("accounts of grain of the precinct settled"). Text 162 alsocontains a clause of še lugal sanga, "grain of king andadministrator".36 Visicato 2000.33