Position in chronology
OSP 1, 141
About this tablet
A small, badly damaged administrative record from Nippur in southern Iraq, written in the Old Akkadian (Sargonic) period around 2300 BCE. It lists quantities of goods — including a group of five birds — alongside the names of several men (Ur-Emaḫ, Kurrere, Lu-ḫegal, Ur-Inanna, Mes-utu-ba) who either delivered or received them, and ends with what looks like a date or sequence number. It is a scrap of the everyday bookkeeping by which temple and palace households at Nippur tracked food, animals and personnel; the fragment was reassembled from two pieces held in Philadelphia.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives reads like a short ledger. Thirty of something (the item is lost) are entered first, next to the name Ur-Emaḫ. Then five birds of a kind no longer legible, under Kurrere. A line with the figure 3 follows, but its contents are broken. Three more men are listed — Lu-ḫegal, Ur-Inanna and Mes-utu-ba — and the final line, mostly lost, closes with a sequence note, 'the second'. The beginning and ending of several lines are missing, so who gave what to whom cannot be reconstructed.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. 30 [......] 2. Ur-Emaḫ(?) 3. 5 bird(s) [......] 4. Kurrere 5. [......] 3 [......] 6. Lu-ḫegal 7. Ur-Inanna 8. Mes-utu-ba 9. [......] the 2nd (......)
Our translation engine — Fable 5.1. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Spotted an error? Suggest a correction — confirmed corrections feed the engine's knowledge base.
Transliteration
3(u) [...] ur-e2-mah#? 5(asz@c) muszen-[...] kur-re2-re2 [...] 3(disz) [...] lu#-he2-gal2 ur-inanna mes-utu-ba [...] 2(disz@t)-kam
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — OSP 1, 141. This record has no stored scholarly English translation; the existence of published translations has not been checked; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA (P216148) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5-1 (2026-09-20/v8-evolved).
Related tablets
Related sources
An early example of administrative writing from Uruk. Its fragmentary numerical entries and commodity signs document record-keeping during the formative period of writing.
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