During roughly the last century of the third millennium B.C., the city of Ur in southern Mesopotamia served as the capital of the vast kingdom referred to as the third dynasty of Ur. So far, 3284 administrative and economic cuneiform texts can be attributed to the city, offering a unique opportunity to study one of ancient history's most intriguing bureaucracies and administrations. This book is intended to serve as a guide to this important material and attempts to make all these texts accessible to Sumerologists and scholars from related fields. In the first part of the book, all the texts from the city are listed according to their contents or characteristic keywords/expressions. A separate listing includes the texts with keys to their contents, dates, terminology, and excavation history. The excavation history of the material is extremely important to establish the geographical distribution of the texts within the city. In the second part of the book, all texts from Ur not published in UET 3 or UET 9 are described, transliterated and annotated. The book includes complete indices of keywords and expressions found in the texts.

Widell provides a welcome handbook to accompany the two volumes of published texts from excavations at Ur. This work will be of interest to specialists wanting to investigate the massive Ur III corpus." - Mathew Rutz, Religious Studies Review

Magnus Widell was born in Torshalla, Sweden, in 1971. He studied Assyriology, Classics and Egyptology at Uppsala University in Sweden from 1991 to 1998. In addition to shorter periods of study in Israel, Syria and Jordan, he studied Akkadian, Sumerian and Mesopotamian history at the University of Vienna in 1994 and 1996-1997. After he received his MA degree in Assyriology in 1998, he continued his doctoral studies at the Institute for the History of Ancient Civilizations in Changchun, China. He received his doctoral degree in Assyriology in 2001. Currently, he works as a research associate in the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago.