Ricerc@Sapienza

The marshy environment of Southern Sumer in the 3rd millennium BC surely had an impact on the local economy that can be sought for in the written sources. The perception of marshes was however twofold: as a prosperous environment in literary compositions and as a place to be tamed for regular, state-controlled exploitation in royal inscriptions. The great majority of attestations of marshes in economic documents refer to field names, thus, probably referring to agricultural units in drained marsh areas.

Recent studies have discussed the importance of marshes in the economic landscape of Southern Mesopotamia in the fourth and third millennium BC. If, on the one side, extant documentation offers abundant evidence for marsh natural products, on the other one, mentions of marshes as place of provenance of incoming commodities are quite scarce. This might be due to several factors, among them, to the fact that in economic texts the information about the provenance of incoming commodities can be simply replaced by the name of agents who had to supply specific commodities.