Sources of Information. Evidence about the Mesopotamian workforce comes from various bureaucratic documents, chiefly lists of workers and their compensation (rations or wages), as well as correspondence among administrators concerning the need for workers, problems with workers, or the release of workers from their duties. As with other aspects of the social and economic history of Mesopotamia, the conclusions of modern scholars are limited by the available source materials, which provide uneven documentation for different time periods and geographic locations. Consequently, the researcher must think in terms of individual case studies for particular times and places rather than draw general conclusions that apply to the entire span of Mesopotamian civilization. Two distinct groups of written documents have been particularly informative for reconstructing aspects of the early ancient Mesopotamian workforce: some 1,800 tablets dating to the Pre-Sargonic period (circa 2350 B.C.E...