In his book "A history of the near east" Marc Van De Mieroop states "For about seventy years, this dynasty governed Babylonia and adjacent regions to the east, using an elaborte bureaucracy that produced an exorbitant number of written documents. Virtually no period of ancient Near Eastern history presents the historian with such an abundance and variety of documentation. Indeed, even in all of the ancient histories of Greece and Rome, there are few periods where a similar profusion of textual material is found." So my question why is this? Is it possible that there are just more archeological findings from that period or did the third dynasty of Ur really produce that much written material?
Good question! There are more documents from Ur III that we have. Most of these come from a site called Drehem(we don't know exactly where it is since most of the tablets come from early 20th century clandestine digging, but the texts tell us that they they come from the same site), along with several other archives at Umma and Garshana. Drehem in particular was basically a center for redistributing livestock among temple households and the state administration. Indeed, most of these texts are very similar and terse; they record small disbursements of goods and livestock or records of laborers. So basically, you have an astronomical number of texts that record things like "So-and-so was given 399 sheep" or "So-and-so produced 500 bundles of reed for fodder". Probably virtually every cuneiform collection contains a great many of these texts and probably virtually every collecting museum of antiquities has a few of these tablets.