Position in chronology
TMH 05, 205
About this tablet
A fragment of an Early Dynastic administrative tablet from Nippur, roughly the mid-third millennium BCE. What survives are the headings of a set of institutional audits: one covering the overseers of the weavers, another the overseers of the fullers (cloth-cleaners), and a third recording labor obligations owed to the city together with silver taken in. It is the ancient equivalent of a file cover or ledger index — the labels for the accounts of a textile workshop and its associated labor dues, written before the totals themselves.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is the index page of an audit file: accounts for the supervisor of the weaving shop, accounts for the supervisor of the fullers, and a third account covering labor owed to the city along with the silver collected. Each heading breaks off before the figures — the right-hand portion of every line is lost, and the back of the fragment carries no writing. What we have is the filing label, not the ledger it introduced.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[Tablet of the account]ing, the balanced account of the foreman(s) of the weavers [...] [Tablet] of the accounting, the balanced account of the foreman(s) of the fullers [...] [Tablet] of the accounting: labor (assessed) for the city, silver received [...] (The remainder of each line is broken away; the reverse of the fragment is blank/effaced.)
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
[dub SZID?] nig2-ka9 ugula usz-bar-ke4-[ne ...] [dub] SZID# nig2-ka9 ugula lu2 azlag2-ke4-[ne ...] [dub] SZID# a2 iri-sze3 ku3 szu ti-[a ...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — TMH 05, 205. 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 (P020619) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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