INTRODUCTION

The discovery of an administrative tablet of the Ur III period housed in the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology at the University of Michigan offers an unlikely but welcome opportunity to revisit briefly the topic of divine kingship in ancient Mesopotamia. Ideally, a new study of this topic should consider Mesopotamian textual, art-historical, and archaeological data as well as cross-cultural comparanda and theoretical anthropological literature. However, such an undertaking would go far beyond the scope of this contribution.

One of the persons mentioned in the Kelsey tablet published here is an otherwise unattested woman named Sat-Su-Sin, whose title is given ...