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Document Details : Title: Anna Schneider, Anton Deimel, and the Sumerian Temple City Author(s): FOSTER, Benjamin R. , HIEPEL, Ludger Journal: Orientalia Volume: 94 Issue: 1 Date: 2025 Pages: 205-229 DOI: 10.2143/ORI.94.1.3295543 Abstract : This essay focuses on the first study of Sumerian administrative documents by an economic historian, Anna Schneider’s Die Anfänge der Kulturwirtschaft: Die sumerische Tempelstadt (1920), under the direction of Johann Plenge. It takes up Schneider’s education and her family relationship to Anton Deimel, who was pioneering their systematic analysis and interpretation when she was a student. Ongoing publication of records from the 'Household of Ba’u' from the Sumerian city-state of Lagash at the same time offered economic data millennia older than sources previously known but economic historians had no access to them. Deimel’s transcriptions and translations of these records provided Schneider with her data and Plenge’s training the structure and goals of her inquiry. Developments in German historical economics, notably efforts to integrate data with theory and to set both against guiding cultural assumptions and beliefs of a given society, influenced her work. Largely ignored by Assyriologists because her technique and approach lay outside the parameters familiar to them, Die sumerische Tempelstadt was taken up by V.V. Struve, a key figure in early Mesopotamian studies in the Soviet Union, and was reprinted in 1979 as a classic of economic history. Schneider herself did no further work in the field. |
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