Position in chronology
TMH 05, 160
About this tablet
A small clay tablet from Nippur in the mid-third millennium BCE, recording animals and timber issued for two named religious festivals — the festival of the Holy Mound (Duku) and the ox festival Gu-si-su, both fixed points in the Nippur cultic calendar. The goods were handled by a man named Ur-gu, who held the office of sa12-du5, the estate's land registrar. It is an ordinary receipt, but it shows how temple festivals were provisioned out of the same bureaucratic machinery that measured fields and counted herds.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Six goats and five lengths of long timber were supplied for the Duku (Holy Mound) festival. A further five goats, an unreadable number of pigs, and one other item — the sign is broken — went to the Gu-si-su ox festival. Ur-gu, the land registrar, was the official who delivered the lot.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine6 goats, 5 long timbers — these are for (the festival of) the Holy Mound (du6-ku3). 5 goats, [n] pigs, 1 …(broken sign) — these are for the festival "Oxen-going-forth" (ezem-gu4-si-su). (reverse) Ur-gu, the land registrar (sa12-du5), brought (them).
Our translation engine — Opus 5. 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
6(asz@c) masz2 5(asz@c) gesz gid2-da du6-ku3-kam 5(asz@c) masz2 [x] szah2 1(asz@c) x ezem-gu4-si-su3-kam ur-gu sa12-du5-ke4 ba-de6
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — TMH 05, 160. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Hilprecht Collection, University of Jena, Germany (P020574) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
Related tablets
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.