Third Dynasty of Ur
▶ Explore on the mapThe Third Dynasty of Ur, or Ur III, ruled southern Mesopotamia from about 2112 to 2004 BCE and is remembered for the most thorough bureaucracy the ancient world produced. Ur-Nammu, the founder, took the title king of Ur, of Sumer and Akkad, built the great ziggurat of Ur that still stands, and promulgated a law code that precedes Hammurabi's by three centuries. His son Shulgi ruled for forty-five years, deified himself, and organised the country into provinces governed by appointed officials who reported the harvest, the herds and the workers on clay tablets that filled the archives of thousands of scribes. Every gift to the temple, every sheep and every jar of beer was counted; the tablets number in the hundreds of thousands. The state imported copper, timber and stone, which Mesopotamia lacked, and settled Amorite and other nomads on the land. But the empire overextended, governors became hereditary, and the last king Ibbi-Sin lost his provinces to the Amorites and Elamites; Ur fell about 2004 BCE. The dynasty's temples and its accounting survive, and with them the picture of a Sumerian renaissance. The dynasty's scribes wrote a dictionary of Sumerian, a language already dead, which preserved it for later scholars.