Abstract
P. A. Deimel's contributions relating to the land system of the Sumerian city-state of Lagash in “Orientalia” about half a century before are sometimes referred to and quoted from by Western scholars as the most fundamental on this subject to this day. But on the other hand, particularly as to his conclusive conception of the socio-economic structure of the Sumerian city-state, so called ‘Tempelwirtschaft’, he has been often criticiyed for the reason that he made mistakes in the interpretation of individual materials as well as in the process of building up the conception. In consideration of such state of diversified evaluations of his achievements, the present writer discusses in this paper the following items so as to discriminate the points in question from his acceptable results relating to the land system.
(1) Deimel's elucidation of ‘níg-en-na’; the propriety of the point of view that ‘gán-níg-en-na’ was cultivated and harvested by the labour organization of ‘gán-kur6’-holders. (2) The interpretation of ‘kur6’; the reason why ‘übernehmen’ than ‘festgesetzt’ should be adopted as the interpretation of ‘dab5’ between Deimel's duplicate presentation. (3) Questions about Deimel's proposition that ‘gán-kur6’-holders were as a whole 'militärkolonen or military husbandmen, and that all of them were under the obligation of corvée and military services. (4) The writer's points to demonstrate are as follows. Among the ‘gán-kur6’-holders, there were, to a not inconsiderable extent, administrators, officials, and higher religious personalities who did not appeared in še-ba lú-kur6-dab5-ba' lists or the records concerning mass labour and appreciably more who did not appeared in the recruitment lists. The ‘šub-lugal’ people in the narrower sence, most of whom appeared in both of the še-ba lists and of recruitment lists, were only one specific sort of ‘gán-kur6’-holders, Of course, the writer, too, does not deny the existence of the ‘gán-kur6’-holders as a social order, considering them in view of the people of the other social orders who did not hold ‘gán-kur6’. The writer's central aim in this paper is to make clear the complexity of this order.
