Position in chronology
OSP 2, 111
About this tablet
A badly broken administrative tablet from Nippur in the Sargonic (Old Akkadian) period, roughly 2300–2200 BCE. What survives is the right-hand part of a list of personal names — Enlil-amu, Ur-tir, Lugal-gubbani, Ur-li and others — with the quantities or commodities that once stood before each name lost in the break; a trace of the word for silver in the first line hints that it recorded payments or valuables. It is a scrap of the temple-city's bookkeeping: who received, owed, or handed over something, in a roster of ordinary people whose names are all that now remain.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet is a ledger listing people one per line, but the left side with the amounts is gone. The first line mentions silver, though the rest of that entry is broken. Then come the names: Enlil-amu, someone whose name ends in '-sa', Ur-tir, Lugal-gubbani, Ur-li, a name ending in '-da', Ur-kidma, a name built on the god Enlil, a name with the element 'ur-ni', a name ending in '-ra', and a last damaged name ending in '-da'. Nothing more of the record survives.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse(?) 1. [...] silver(?) ... [...] 2. [... En]lil-amu 3. [...]-sa 4. [...] Ur-tir 5. [...] Lugal-gubbani 6. [...] Ur-li 7. [...]-da 8. [... Ur-kid]ma 9. [... En]lil-la 10. [...] ur-ni 11. [...]-ra 12. [...] ...-da
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
[...] ku3? x [...] [... en]-lil2#-a2-mu [...]-sa6 [...] ur#-tir [...] lugal#-gub-ba-ni [...] ur#-li [...]-da [... ur-kid2]-ma [... en]-lil2#-la2 [...] ur2#-ni [...]-ra [...] x-da
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — OSP 2, 111. 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 (P216265) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5-1 (2026-09-20/v8-evolved).
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