Position in chronology
LB 0009
About this tablet
This is a small Early Dynastic administrative tablet — a short list of disbursements of pig fat, a measured commodity, and leather goods to a handful of named individuals. Texts like this come from the account-keeping of a household or institutional estate in third-millennium BCE Mesopotamia, where scribes tracked every jug of fat, sila of goods, and hide issued to workers or dependents by name. It's a tiny fragment of the vast bureaucratic record-keeping that underpinned early Sumerian economic life, giving us the actual names of ordinary people receiving rations or goods nearly 4,500 years ago.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a short receipt or ration list: one jug of pig fat was allotted, apparently to a woman named Nin-asu. Two more portions went to Ninanesi, two to Geme-dug, and two units (measured in sila) to someone or something called Ganbaba. The tablet then records two hides or pieces of leather, but the line breaks off and the rest is lost. The final entry names the recipient as Ahi-[linutil], though that name is partly reconstructed from the damaged clay.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 jug (of) suspended/measured-out fat, pig fat — (for) Nin-asu. 2 (units): Ninanesi. 2 (units): Geme-dug. 2 sila(?) (of) Ganbaba. 2 hides/leather ...[...] Ahi-[linutil].
Our translation engine — Sonnet 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) dug la2-a i3 szah2 nin-a-su 2(asz@c) nin-an-ne2-si 2(asz@c) geme2-du6# 2(asz@c) sila3? gan-ba-ba6 2(asz@c) kusz x [x] a-hi-[li-nu-til]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — LB 0009. 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: de Liagre Böhl Collection, Netherlands Institute for the Near East, Leiden, Holland (P247606) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-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.
A surviving administrative record of named people and livestock in the Ur III period. Together with other archives, such accounts reveal the work of managing animals, deliveries and institutional responsibility.