A Note on Administrative Inconsistencies

Assyriologists are accustomed to working with incomplete archives and records due to the chance of discovery, preservation and, occasionally, publication. In the analysis of the administrative records, this challenge is compounded by inconsistent terminology applied to inherently abbreviated texts. While certain transactions can be identified through contextual cues, some, such as the bala, rely more heavily on the explicit use of identifying terms. This article presents a series of related bala accounts, one of which does not identify the text as bala. This has implications for how researchers reconstruct and understand this enigmatic system within the Ur III state.