OFFPRINT AKKADICA 142 (2021), fasc. 1 - COPYRIGHT CENTRE ASSYRIOLOGIQUE GEORGES DOSSIN THIS DOCUMENT MAY BE PRINTED FOR PRIVATE USE ONLY. THIS DOCUMENT MAY NOT BE DISTRIBUTED, STORED IN A RETRIEVAL SYSTEM WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER 31 Akkadica 142 (2021), pp. 31-41 Neo-Sumerian letter-orders from Umma in the Iraq Museum Abather Saadoon  and Nicholas L. Kraus  Abstract : The following article is devoted to five Ur III letter-orders belonging to the collection of the Iraq Museum. Letter-orders are not found in great abundance in the Iraq museum and these texts were not discovered in scientific excavations, but were confiscated by authorities or handed over to the Iraq Museum by Iraqi citizens. The texts can be dated to the Ur III dynasty ( ca. 2114-2004 BC) by their palaeography and prosopography, and one text includes a date formula on its reverse that refers to the second year of the reign of Ibbi-Suen. Additionally, the prosopography of the texts suggests that the origin of most of the tablets was the city of Umma. These texts contribute to the corpus of letter-orders from the Ur III period and the administrative affairs of its officials. Keywords : Neo-Sumerian, letter-orders, Ur III, Sumerian, Umma. I NTRODUCTION Sumerian letter-orders have drawn a lot of attention since the major publication by E. SOLLBERGER in 1966 (TCS I), and the many additional examples that have been subse- quently published 1 . Letter-orders are typically short, terse documents that normally request the delivery of goods to an individual, or that some particular action take place. These docu- ments are easily identified by their opening address, u 3 -na-a-dug 4 “speak to (PN)”. Occasionally, some documents that clearly fulfill this function, however, do not use a salutation at all, but instead use only a precative verbal prefix, which indicates that the recipient was to carry out a specific deed. Some have even argued that letter-orders should be considered separate from institutional documents, as these requests sometimes blur the lines between public and private affairs of members of the Ur III state ( ALLRED 2007, 2). The following letter-orders follow the standard formula seen most often in Neo- Sumerian letter-orders, and are concerned with administrative requests for grain, livestock, beer, seed, and in one case the cost of a boat hire. Unfortunately, few of the letter-orders  Al-Muthanna University, College of Arts, Department of Archaeology ; abodaar.rahee@mu.edu.iq.  Freie Universität Berlin, Institut für Altorientalistik ; nkraus@zedat.fu-berlin.de. 1 Other examples include letter-orders published by MICHALOWSKI (1976 ; 1993), OWEN (1972), V AN DE MIEROOP (1984), and MOLINA (1999-2000) to name a few. In addition, there are 785 letter-orders available on the Database of Neo-Sumerian Texts (BDTNS, available at <http ://bdtns.filol.csic.es/index.php ?p=home>). We would like to express our gratitude to the general director of Iraqi museums Mr. Qais Huseen Rashed for permission to study these texts and a special thanks to Prof. Dr. Basima Jaleel Abid and Ass. Prof. Dr. Saja M. Abdul-lateef for their kind help in the preparation of this work. We would also like to thank the chief of cuneiforms department in the Iraqi museum Mss. Elham Shaker Jwad and all members of the cuneiform stud- ies department. It is a pleasure to also acknowledge Prof. Dr. Manual Molina at the Center of Humanities and Social Studies (CSIC) Madrid for suggesting the publication of these texts in the first place. Finally, we thank the reviewers of this article for their valuable comments which have undoubtedly improved the quality of this publication. The hand copies and photographs of the tablets shown in the appendix were produced by Ass. Prof. Dr. Abathor Saadoon. Abbreviations follow the standard list of abbreviations used by the CDLI at <http ://cdli.ox.ac.uk/wiki/doku.php ?id=abbreviations_for_assyriology>.