Ubarum was just a man living in a small village in north Babylonia, one among possibly a few million. He was a soldier by trade, but also managed a little bit of side business and by the end of his life became comfortably middle class. Today we will not be telling the story of gods or kings, but the life of this simple man as best as can be understood from a collection of business receipts and legal documents found together in what archaeologists call the Ubarum Archive. It is only one part of his life, but it is still a perspective we don’t see too often.
I am working off four reputable papers dealing with the Ubarum archive, and each one of them presents a fairly different picture of how things work. The plain reading of these contracts is thatÂ
With the year names, they really are a bit difficult, but I am generally using the list found at CDLI from UCLA, with the exception that I am equating the year A with year f, which makes the two disputes with Ili-Iqisam occurring in two consecutive years. https://cdli.ucla.edu/tools/yearnames/HTML/T12K8.htm
For reference, if anyone is curious, I am putting my own notes on the cache below, and if I can manage it, a translation of the actual documents themselves here as well. Note that these translations were made by a frenchman in the 1950’s and then machine translated into what I am working off of, so they aren’t exactly the easiest to read, but if you are interested in more resources, leave a comment below and I can try and point you towards whatever I can.
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