Position in chronology
TMH 05, 182
About this tablet
A small Early Dynastic clay tablet from Nippur, now cracked cleanly in two, recording small numbers of sheep and goats set against the names of individuals and of two households — the 'house of Mama' and the 'house of Ašdamail.' It is ordinary livestock bookkeeping of the mid-third millennium BCE: one ewe with its lamb here, a kid there, each entry tied to the person or estate answerable for it. Texts like this are the raw material of early Sumerian economic history, showing how animals moved between named family estates long before there were coins or contracts.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The opening lines are broken and only a few signs survive. What can be read is a short livestock tally: one ewe with a lamb, and another entry of one animal, credited to a man named U-muni-zal of the Mama household; then one kid for AN-lu-mah; then, after another break, one kid for Ur-du of the Ašdamail household. The numbers are small and the format is a bare list — animal, quantity, name, house — with no totals preserved.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] [...] disbursed(?), the year(?) [...] ... the house(?) of ...-gi 1 ewe (and) lamb 1(?) [...] U-muni-zal (from/for) the household of Mama 1 kid AN-lu-mah [...] 1 kid(?) Ur-du (from/for) the household of Ašdamail
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
[...] [x] ba? mu [x] na e2?-x-gi 1(asz@c) MUNUS-U8 sila4 1(asz@c)? [...] u3-mu-ni-zal e2-ma-ma 1(asz@c) masz2 AN-lu2-mah [...] 1(asz@c) masz2? ur-du6 e2 asz2-da-ma-il
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — TMH 05, 182. 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 (P020596) — 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.