Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
THE THIRD DYNASTY OF UR
The ancient kingship of Sumer, so gloriously regained by Utukhegal with his expulsion of the Gutians, was his for a very brief space, his reign lasting for not much more than seven years, coming to an abrupt end, and his city of Uruk therewith losing the sovereignty. During these years and for some three decades longer the great impulse of national sentiment and strength which had thrown off the enemy seemed to have exhausted itself in that one exertion. Of Utu-khegal himself nothing more was preserved by the historical memory of his country than his one heroic act and a story about his fate. But the hazard of modern discovery has been kinder; at Ur and in its neighbourhood inscriptions have been found which show the sovereign concerning himself with the affairs of that city, and thereby they explain the origin of the Third Dynasty of Ur which was to supplant Uruk—by conquest, according to the king-list's unvarying phrase, but nothing is known of a war. In the first of these inscriptions occurs the name of Ur-Nammu, not yet king but only deputy over the city for Utū-khegal, on whose behalf he undertook to restore a part of the great temple at Ur, a work of which so much remains to this day.
The Third Dynasty of Ur began therefore with the appointment of its first member by the preceding king, who doubtless selected one of his principal adherents, perhaps not a native of the place he was given to rule. Another inscription, upon modest little clay cones from unknown sites,4 is of Utu-khegal himself. These cones are dedicated to the deities Ningirsu and Nanshe, the owners of Lagash, and relate that Utu-khegal fixed the boundary of their possessions 'to the man of Ur'.
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