We Gave A 4,000-Year-Old Strike To Two Arbitrators. Both Called It Unlawful.

PHILADELPHIA, United States — The stoppage has an hour on it. Not a season, not a reign — an hour. The middle watch of the night, which is the second of three, which is roughly midnight.

That is unusual in an ancient text and ordinary in a labour record, and it is the detail that made this newspaper stop treating the Igigi mutiny as a creation myth and start treating it as a case file.

What we did

We took a clean translation of the mutiny account and three extraction schedules from the same administrative tradition, stripped every proper name out, replaced the parties with letters, left every numeral exactly as written, and sent the whole thing to two people who arbitrate industrial disputes for a living.

Neither is an Assyriologist. Neither was told what the text was, when it was from, or that the other existed. Both were briefed identically: read this as an undisclosed pre-industrial workplace record and file the classification memo you would file on a live case.

Both were paid the same fee, in advance, and both were told before starting that their memos would run whether they agreed or not. They run entire with this story.

The unit

Nkiruka Balogun-Reyes, who has arbitrated deep-mining disputes for nineteen years, opens by establishing the bargaining unit, because that is what the form makes you do first.

She finds one. A defined body of workers, doing one class of work, under one principal, distinguished in the text from a second class who did not do it. Continuous employment. Common ration grade. Common shift.

Dr. Halvard Ostrowski-Nnaji reaches the same conclusion on his page three and adds the thing that decides it for him: the group acts as a group and is addressed as a group. Nobody in the record negotiates individually.

The shift

Three watches to the night and no relief day appears anywhere. Forty years continuous, on the text's own count.

Both memos flag deaths in the cut. The text records men who went down into the excavation and did not come up, and records them as an ordinary category rather than an event.

Then forty days of grievance, itemised. Then the delegation to the gate.

The classification

Both arbitrators, working blind, filed the same words.

A lawful concerted stoppage by a defined bargaining unit over an itemised grievance, met by an employer response, closed by a settlement.

Not a riot. Not a mutiny in the military sense, which both considered and both rejected on the ground that the workers went to the gate and waited. Not spontaneous — the stated hour is what rules that out. An hour agreed in advance is the signature of a concerted act.

The term that closed it

Then both of them, unprompted and within the first ten pages, flagged the settlement term.

The dispute was closed by manufacturing a replacement workforce.

Balogun-Reyes wrote that in a modern jurisdiction this would be characterised as unlawful replacement of striking labour. Ostrowski-Nnaji, who had never heard of her, used the phrase "permanent replacement" and appended the standard test.

Zecharia Sitchin read this passage as a labour dispute. Two people who settle labour disputes for a living read it as a labour dispute, on the text alone, not knowing whose text it was or that the reading was controversial.

The formula

The closing line — the fault was not with the workmen — turns up in PX-1901 and in PX-1903, on grain and on copper, and 211 times more in the concordance of Ur III closings at PX-1908.

Both arbitrators identified it independently as a no-fault recital: the boilerplate by which a settlement is closed without either side conceding liability. It reads as poetry only if you have never signed one.

One correction belongs in this paragraph rather than at the foot of it. For three years this newspaper read the same line on PX-1207 as the same recital, and withdrew that reading on 21 August. On the gold schedule the verb takes an object and names a place: line 11 there is a delivery entry, not a recital. That tablet was in the pack both arbitrators were sent, and a translation with the names stripped out is not the instrument that would have caught it.

The door that is shut

The grievance is summarised and never quoted. Forty days of it, brought to a gate, and not one word of what the men actually said.

The tablet that would carry those words is known from a single 1928 dealer's photograph. The Cologne firm denies ever holding it and its reply is at the foot of this page, along with the dates on which its 1927–1930 stock books were destroyed.

We have a photograph of a print of a photograph. Somewhere behind it, six hundred men wrote down what they wanted.