* An early version of this article was presented as a paper with the same title at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the British Association for Near Eastern Archaeology held at the University of Liverpool, UK. I wish to thank Bendt Alster, Daniel Foxvog, Alan Millard, and Foy Scalf for reading various drafts of this article and making many valuable comments and suggestions. Any mistakes that remain are, of course, my own. All references to cuneiform texts in this article follow the abbreviations used by the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (www. cdli.ucla.edu). In addition, the following abbreviations have been used: OECT 1 = S. Langdon, The H. Weld-Blundell Collection in the Ashmolean Museum. Vol. 1: Sumerian and Semitic Religious and Historical Texts, Oxford Editions of Cuneiform Texts 1 (London, 1923); SpTU 5 = E. Von Weiher, Uruk: Spatbabylonische Texte aus dem Planquadrat U 18, Teil V, Ausgrabungen in Uruk-Warka, Endberichte 13 (Mainz am Rhein, 1998); Urk IV = K. Sethe, Urkunden der 18. Dynastie. Erster Band: Historisch-bibliographische Urkunden, IV. Abteilung (Leipzig, 1906). 1 M. Widell, “The Sumerian Expression igi-kar2 Revisited,” Iraq 70 (2008): 131–45. For the igi-kar2 and its indisputable connection to the queens and the royal household of the Ur III state, see large amounts of foodstuff and beer,2 were brought to the birthplaces of infants and were almost certainly intended for the festive consumption of large groups