The city of Adab (modern site Bismaya ), between Telloh and Nippur (modern-day Iraq), was important in the Ur III period but declined afterwards. Adab "suffered a short and not very successful excavation" by Edgar James Banks in 1903/04 in the words of A. Leo Oppenheim . The dig was sponsored by the Oriental Exploration Fund of the University of Chicago, but Banks later sold cuneiform tablets from the site to private collections. Fewer than fifty texts — scattered from Yale to California to Istanbul — have been published from this early site.
A king of Adab in an early Sumerian king list, and a mention of the city in the law code of Hammurapi await the publication of the cuneiform tablets found at the site. In the meantime, there is a Sumerian comic tale of the three ox-drivers of Adab.
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