Lagash: amargi, the earliest recorded releases

Enmetena, ruler of the Sumerian city of Lagash about 2400 BC, recorded that he 'instituted a remission (ama-gi) of the obligations of Lagash', returned the mother to the child and the child to the mother, and remitted interest-bearing barley loans: the earliest known use of the word, literally 'return to the mother'. Some decades later a successor, Uru-inimgina (Urukagina), decreed a debt amnesty soon after taking power: people held in debt bondage went home and even the prisons were cleared. The decree may already have been customary, and later Mesopotamian kings issued the same kind of decree under the Akkadian name andurarum.

The mechanism

RELEASE

How it was checked

• EvidenceT5 INDEPENDENT SECULAR; Status: ADDED 2026-09-19
• Letter eraTHE ENCLOSURE AT THE BIRTH OF WRITING c. 3500 to c. 1150 BC
• SourcesRECORD — Enmetena, official inscription, RIME 1.09.05.04 composite, lines 30-35 (transliteration and translation), Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative; Eva von Dassow (University of Minnesota), 'Proclaim debt amnesty throughout all the land?', The Conversation, 2022; Britannica, 'Urukagina' (dates his period to the first half of the 24th century BC) · checked 19 September: CDLI, RIME 1.09.05.04 composite: Enmetena of Lagash, primary text with translation; Louvre, Cone A d'Enmetena (dates Enmetena's cone 2420-2400 BCE); von Dassow, The Conversation 2022 (the row's own source); Britannica (read in a browser; WebFetch is refused by the site), 'Urukagina'; Wikipedia, 'Ama-gi' and 'Enmetena' (cross-check only)