Position in chronology
TMH 05, 114
About this tablet
A small bun-shaped clay tablet from Nippur, written roughly 2400 BCE, recording the issue of three pieces of cloth from an institutional store. Two garments — one of the ḫala'um type, one aktum — go out in connection with a woman named Nin-ur-men and a man called Lu-ma-mušen; a third, another aktum, is booked against A-dingir-mu and Lu-i, with a lukur (a class of consecrated priestess) named in the group. The closing line, "garments: expenditure," is the scribe's bookkeeping stamp: these textiles have left the storehouse and been debited. It is the plainest kind of temple accounting, and exactly the sort of document that shows how cloth functioned as wealth and payment in early Sumerian cities.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Issued from stores: one ḫala'um cloth and one aktum cloth, charged to Nin-ur-men and Lu-ma-mušen; one further aktum cloth, charged to A-dingir-mu and Lu-i, the lukur-priestess. Total entry: textiles, disbursed.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 ḫala'um-garment; 1 aktum-garment — (for) Nin-ur-men; Lu-ma-mušen. 1 aktum-garment — (for) A-dingir-mu; Lu-i ("Man-of-the-Canal"), the lukur-priestess. Garments: expenditure.
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) ha-la-um tug2 1(asz@c) aktum tug2 nin-ur4-menx(|GA2xEN|) lu2-ma2 muszen 1(asz@c) aktum tug2 a-dingir-mu lu2-i7 lukur tug2 zi-ga
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — TMH 05, 114. 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: Hilprecht Collection, University of Jena, Germany (P020528) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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