Position in chronology
Nik 1, 222
About this tablet
This is a small clay tablet from Girsu (modern Tello), one of thousands of everyday administrative dockets produced by the Early Dynastic Lagash state bureaucracy around the mid-third millennium BCE. It records a delivery of animal hides — mostly sheep, plus a couple of goat skins left over from festival meals — handed over to a leatherworker named Ur-Ninpirig for tanning and processing. Such texts, part of the large 'Nik 1' archive from Girsu's temple households, show how the state tracked even byproducts like skins from ritual feasting and routed them into craft production.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet logs a hide delivery: fifty-eight sheep skins and two skins from full-grown goats, all identified as coming from animals eaten at a festival. The tanner Ur-Ninpirig took delivery of them in the month called "Amar-ayasigeda." The tablet closes with the numeral 3, likely a scribal or filing notation rather than part of the transaction total.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine58 sheep hides, 2 hides of full-grown goats, sheep hides — from festival consumption, Ur-Ninpirig, the tanner, month: "Amar-ayasigeda", received. 3
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(gesz2@c) la2 2(asz@c) kusz udu 2(asz@c) kusz masz gal kusz udu ezem gu7-a ur-nin-pirig aszgab-<be2> iti amar-a-a-si-<ge>-da-ka szu ba-ti 3(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — Nik 1, 222. 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: State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russian Federation (P221991) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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