CDLJ has two more recent articles worth checking out, particularly since they are available as free downloads.  Magnus Widell published two Ur III texts and provides voluminous commentary on them and topics related to the contents of the tablets.  One of Widell’s most fascinating discussions is his interaction with Steinkeller’s hypothesis that many accounting tablets were written after, sometimes long after, the events that they record transpired.  Steinkeller posits para-writing devices such as counting sticks that helped jump-start the scribe’s memory when he wrote the information down.  Widell critiques this theory as lacking support and suggests that scribes merely wrote notes on small lumps of clay and then transferred these notes to tablets at a later time.

Here is the abstract of Robert McC. Adam’s essay, “Old Babylonian Networks of Urban Notables:”

§1.1. An argument is made for detaching a greater part of the field of concern in Mesopotamian historical studies from the presently uniform and narrow constraints of successively rising and falling dynasties. It is better considered instead within a more cumulative framework giving greater stress to shifts in the breadth and makeup of actively participatory social groups. The original 4^th millennium “Urban Revolution” probably should also be viewed in this light, as might the mid-3^rd millennium shift in the direction of more secularized forms of dynastic rather than theocratic government. However, this article concentrates on the following transition, whose character can be more readily and unambiguously defined. In traditional terms, it can be described as falling between the later Ur III and the Old Babylonian periods, at around the end of the 3^rd millennium.

§1.2. This is seen as a time of increasing privatization in most fields of social, economic and to some extent even political activity. A new, in large measure urban-based “proto-middle class”—its leading elements herein described as “notables”—was becoming recognizable in a time of dynastic weakness and rivalry. Not abruptly, but gradually, it assumed control or ownership of many productive forces and forms of property formerly thought of as largely within the royal orbit. It added its own forms of management and exploitation of the still mainly inert, larger part of the population to the continuing demands and exactions of dynastic overlords. A crucial technological means by which this was achieved was the modification and adoption to its own ends of growing new uses of cuneiform writing, which earlier had been very largely held under royal control.