Position in chronology
CBS 08117
About this tablet
A tiny clay receipt from Nippur recording the handover of a single garment. One fine-woven bardul-cloak passes through the hands of Igi-Enlil-še, the šabra — the chief administrator of a large household or temple estate — and is issued to a porter, one of the corvée carriers attached to the institution. The scribe dated it precisely: the third month of the Nippur year, seven days gone. It is the most ordinary kind of document imaginable, and that is exactly why it survives in the thousands: Mesopotamian institutions counted every piece of cloth.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Delivery note: one bardul-cloak, fine weave, women's(?) issue. Handed over by Igi-Enlil-še, the estate's chief administrator, to the porter. Dated the seventh day of the month of Brick-Making (the third month by the Nippur calendar).
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 bardul-garment, of fine (thin) weave, of/for the women(?); Igi-Enlil-še, the chief household administrator (šabra), the porter (ug₃-íl): he paid (it) out to him. Month: "Bricks-placed-in-the-brick-mould" (month III, Nippur calendar), day 7 having elapsed.
Our translation engine — Opus 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
1(asz@c) tug2 bar-dul5 sal-la munus-ne igi-en-lil2-sze3 szabra ug3-il2 i3-na-la2 iti sig4 u5-szub-ba-gar u4 7(disz) zal-la-a
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — CBS 08117. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA (P263025) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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Related sources
One of the earliest specimens of human writing. Not literature, not law — accounting. The need to keep track of grain in a temple bureaucracy is what pushed marks-on-clay into a system that could one day carry epics.
A window into the world's first total state. The Ur III administration tracked every animal, every worker, every shekel — for a population in the millions. The level of paperwork was not exceeded until the modern era.