Near East Kingdoms

Ishim-Shulgi (City) (Sumer)

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The city states of Sumer formed one of the first great civilisations in human history (see feature link). This Near Eastern civilisation emerged a little way ahead of that of Africa's ancient Egypt, and up to a millennium before that of the Indus Valley culture.

It developed out of the end of the Pottery Neolithic across the Fertile Crescent, a period which had seen Neolithic Farmer practices spread far and wide across the Near East and beyond. Southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and the western edge of Iran) was subjected to permanent settlement, initially in the form of pastoralists but soon as farmers too.

By the late fourth millennium BC, Sumer was divided into approximately a dozen independent city states which used local canals and boundary stones to mark their borders. Many of the smaller cities emerged in two broad waves, in the mid-third millennium BC and at the start of the second millennium BC.

The city of Ishim-Shulgi (or I-šim-dŠul-gi) is not well known. It was either a city, a settlement, or an administrative region during the Ur III period of the twenty-first century BC. Even its location is uncertain, although it was in Ur's north, in an area which was becoming dominated by Amorites and which even required the building of a great defensive wall in the 2030s BC.

It sat either along the Tigris or in the Diyala river valley area to the east of the modern city of Baghdad, although both could essentially be true if it was positioned near the Diyala's confluence with the Tigris. The Diyala valley would become an important hub for a large number of new or recently-expanded smaller cities during the first half of the second millennium BC, but its status is far less clear a century or two before this period.

The fact that this city bore Shulgi's name indicates that it was founded during his reign. It also indicates that it was more than likely a peripheral location, one which probably had been chosen for the administrative operations it was required to cover, possibly little more than an expanded fortress. Several Ur III kings placed sons or important relatives in local governorships in order to ensure regional control, and this was one such location.

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(Information by Peter Kessler, with additional information from Encyclopaedia Britannica (Eleventh Edition, Cambridge (England), 1910), from Historical Atlas of the Ancient World, 4,000,000 to 500 BC, John Heywood (Barnes & Noble, 2000), from The Ancient Near East, c.3000-330 BC, Amélie Kuhrt (Routledge, 2000, Vol I & II), from Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East, Michael Road (Facts on File, 2000), from Mesopotamia: Assyrians, Sumerians, Babylonians, Enrico Ascalone (Dictionaries of Civilizations 1, University of California Press, 2007), from The Archaeology of Mesopotamia, S Lloyd (Revised Ed, London, 1984), and from External Links: Evolution of Sumerian kingship (Ancient World Magazine), and Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary Project (Published between 2003-2021, part of the Babylonian section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology), and the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, and Barakat Gallery, and Warfare In The Ancient Near East To 1600 BC, Samy Salah (William J Hamblin, Routledge, 2006, and available via the Internet Archive).)

c.2094 BC

Shulgi extends his father's empire to include all of the Assyrian city states and their at-present non-Assyrian neighbours such as the Lullubi. He also re-conquers Susa (and Urua) from Elam and its Simashki rulers, and may be responsible for finishing off rebuilding work at Nippur.

Some of the earliest cities, such as Sippar, Borsippa, and Kish in the north, and Ur, Uruk, and Eridu in the south, formed the endpoints of what became the complex Sumerian network of cities and canals (click or tap on map to view full sized)

The vassal kings of Kisurra are removed entirely, while at various times Ur's governors are in place at Anshan, Eresh, Ishim-Shulgi, Sabum, Susa, Urum, and Urusagrig, part of the dynasty's firmly-established administrative system.

c.2073 - ? BC

Šagina (military governor) for Shulgi of Ur (Year 21).

c.2073 BC

Following the destruction of Der, Shulgi builds two fortresses, those of Shulgi-Nanna and Ishim-Shulgi, in order to maintain Sumerian control of the Der region. He assigns Ur-Suena as military governor of the area.

fl c.2046 BC

Ensi (governor) for Shulgi of Ur (Year 48).

c.2046 BC

In the forty-eighth year of the reign of Shulgi of Ur (and therefore the final year of that reign), the ensi or governor of Ishim-Shulgi is Lugal-pa-è. This individual has been identified as being one of Shulgi's sons.

The ruins of the once-vast city of Ur were excavated in 1922 by Sir Leonard Woolley, which is when the 'Royal Tombs' were discovered (External Link: Creative Commons Licence 4.0 International)

fl c.2027 BC

Ensi (governor) for Ibbi-Sin of Ur (Year 2).

c.2027 BC

An administrative document from Year 2 of the reign of Ibbi-Sin of Ur covers rations being paid to official messengers. For Ishim-Shulgi this covers 'one roast lamb, five sila of soup: Abum-ilum, governor for Ishim-Shulgi when he went for barley'. A sila is a measure of capacity, about 0.85 of a litre.