Most of the sites in Mesopotamia yielding good third
millennium tablets are found in the southern region, in Sumer, although
one important site, Jemdet Nasr, is further north. It is believed that this
southern region, containing such cities as Ur and Uruk, was the most developed
area at the time, but how much this conclusion could be challenged by new
archaeological evidence is unclear. Certainly the current excavations of
Hamoukar in the far north could provide important new information and the
standard view of the Uruk expansion in the fourth millennium seems to be
undergoing some revisions which will doubtless affect our view of the subsequent
periods (see, for example, Algaze
(1993), Stein
(1999) and Van
de Mieroop (1997)). We restrict our attention here to core Mesopotamia
and say nothing about the important sources from Ebla to the northwest (see
Archi
(1989), Friberg
(1986)) and Elam in the southeast (Damerow
and Englund (1989)).
This section is largely based on a talk I gave at the Annual Meeting
of the Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of Mathematics in June
2000, and the paper that appeared in the subsequent Proceedings.
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