Prestige on Display: Markers of Economic and Social Status in Ur III Babylonia

The Ur III kingdom, which flourished in southern Mesopotamia at the end of the third millennium (ca. 2110-2003 BCE), produced and kept detailed administrative records from which historians can reconstruct the economic and social life of the period. Among these sources, we find household inventories of wealthy individuals, lists of temple treasures, receipts of luxury gifts, and accounts documenting allocations of prestige goods. Collectively, these documents shed light on the material culture of Babylonian society in the Early Bronze Age. Clothing, footwear, accessories, jewellery, weapons, and furniture feature among the objects most frequently associated with royals, priests, urban notables, and other elites. By combining data from these diverse textual sources and comparing them with possible parallels in glyptic iconography and the archaeological record, we will examine the elements that most clearly identify high-status individuals to determine the relationship between the economic and socio-cultural value of these objects, and reconstruct the context within which they were gifted and displayed.