1. The Documents of the Provincial Administration
Since 1911 in modern Jokha lootings brought to light the extensive archive of the provincial administration of Ur III Umma[geogr=Umma] (Sallaberger 1999a: 202-203). Umma has never been excavated officially until the salvage excavations by the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, directed by Nawala A. Al-Mutawalli and Hamza Al-Harbi in 1999-2002. These excavations unearthed cuneiform documents above all from the „Main Tell“ and from the temple of the main god Šara, a huge building from the 21st century B.C. While for Umma, the documentation known so far concentrated primarily on the Ur III period (21st century B.C.), these new excavated texts date to the immediately following Early Old Babylonian period (19th c. BCE, Al-Mutawalli/Ismael/Sallaberger 2019).
The texts from Umma of the Ur III period share many aspects with the archives from the southern neighbour province of Ĝirsu/Lagas, though they also reveal many differences, as in the scale of the documentation, in the types of records used by the administration and their wording (Sallaberger 1999a: 315; Sharlach 2004: 4-5; 25; Dahl 2007: 33). These records again cover a wide range of fields of the provincial economy, including agriculture, husbandry, wool production and textile industry, and the production of foodstuffs like fruits and cereals. Like in Ĝirsu, the Umma province fostered a well-organised network of guest houses for travellers on official missions and maintained transportation and shipbuilding. The Umma documentation features particularly abundant evidence on crafts in sectors like metallurgy, leather and reed industry, and wood processing. As other provinces like Ĝirsu and Irisaĝrig, also Umma used a local calendar (Sharlach 2004: 25-27; Sallaberger 2021).
For a detailed introduction to and an analysis of the central text typologies of the written sources from Umma in the Ur III period, see Sallaberger 1999a: 202-203, 315-330 and further cited literature. Furthermore, Sharlach 2004: 23-59 and further cited literature specifically studied the role of the province in the economy of the Ur III kingdom; Dahl 2007 investigated the ruling family of the Umma province, whereupon Pomponio 2013 revived the suggestion that dumu could both mean „son“ and sometimes a „hierarchical subordinate“; eventually Ouyang 2013 analysed the role of silver in the economy of the Umma province.
2. The Province of Umma in the Ur III Kingdom
The city of Umma (modern Jokha) was the capital of the homonymous province and the seat of the provincial administration under the responsibility of the governor. Since the year Šulgi 33, the administrative sources document at least three governors of Umma, who were all „sons“ of Urniĝar the chief livestock administrator (Sharlach 2004: 24; Dahl 2007: 45 - 74 and in particular 51; Pomponio 2013). From this year on, the ruling family of Umma controlled uninterruptedly both provincial and temple institutions holding the majority of the strategic offices in their hands (Sharlach 2004: 24; Notizia 2009b). In the provincial economy of Umma, the temples as economic units seem to have had less impact than the provincial institutions (Sharlach 2004: 24); the latter were labelled as „offices“ or „bureaus“ by Steinkeller 2003, who identified at least ten of them within the administrative apparatus of the province.
The size of the arable land in Umma comprised only less than a sixth of the land in Ĝirsu/Lagas (Sharlach 2004: 67). The agricultural territory of the Umma province was divided into three districts: Da-Umma, Apisal, Guedina and Mušbiana, whereby Da-Umma was the largest and agriculturally most productive one (Maekawa 1987b; Dahl 2007: 33-36; Dossier A.1.1.05).
As Ĝirsu/Lagas did according to the bala-obligation system, Umma supplied the Ur III kingdom with bulk commodities like barley too. This mechanism assigned each province a month (or more or none) for its bala-duty in order to provide regular revenue to the crown. The evidence on the bala roster reveals that Umma was never responsible for more than or less than one month of bala-duty (Sharlach 2004: 56-58). Umma’s payments to the crown did not consist only of barley and cereals but also included a great variety of other goods, like reeds, timber and products of the marshes, manufactured items and food as well as workforce; but never wool, although it was one of the most important products of Umma’s economy (Sharlach 2004: 29-30).