Position in chronology
TMH 05, 181
About this tablet
A small clay receipt from Nippur, written in the reign of Sargon of Akkad — the year-name at the end dates it to the year he sacked a city, one of the campaigns that built the world's first empire. The body of the text is mundane: a long copper tool or fitting belonging to a weaver named Ur-lu is handed over to a man called Lugal-kigala so that he can mount it on a wooden frame or shaft, issued out of the stores of a household overseer in the fourth month. Tablets like this are how we date great events: an imperial conquest survives only as the calendar label on somebody's workshop paperwork.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Item: one long copper fitting with a wooden shaft, belonging to the weaver Ur-lu. Released to Lugal-kigala, to be fitted onto the wooden frame. Issued from the stores of Ugula-E, the household supervisor. Month four (Šu-numun, the seeding month), in the year Sargon destroyed the city. The opening line or two of the tablet are broken away, so the exact quantity is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) [...] [...] talent(s)(?): a long copper (implement) with wooden (haft), the weaver's — it belongs to Ur-lu. (reverse) To Lugal-kigala, in order to mount (it) on the wood, it was given to him. Month: Šu-numun ("Seed-time"). From Ugula-E (the household overseer). Year: Sargon destroyed the city (Uru...).
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
[...] [...] gu2# gesz uruda gid2-da usz-bar ur-lu2-kam lugal-ki-gal-la gesz-a du3-de3 an-na-szum2 iti szu-numun# ki ugula-e2-ta mu sar-um-gi-ne2 uru18#!(|URUxMIN|) mu-hul#-a
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — TMH 05, 181. 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 (P020595) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.