Position in chronology
CDLI Lexical 000003, ex. 011
About this tablet
This is a fragment of one of humanity's oldest schoolbooks: the Standard Professions List, copied by trainee scribes at Nippur in southern Iraq around 2600 BCE. It is not a story or a contract but a bare column of job titles — purification priest, sage, overseer, court attendant, vizier — set down in a fixed order that scribes memorized and recopied for a thousand years. Only one narrow column survives legibly; the rest of the tablet is chipped and worn smooth. Lists like this are how literacy itself was transmitted in early Mesopotamia.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives is a vertical roster of offices and ranks: an entry written with the ŠE.NAM₂ sign, then pa-nam₂-šita, the purification priest attached to the shrine, a chief officer whose title sign is damaged, an en of IB, the head of the šita-office, the sage, the overseer, the court attendant, and — after a break — the vizier. The last readable line dissolves into scattered signs including a word for stone. Everything after that is lost to breakage and surface wear.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our enginešuš (written |ŠE.NAM₂|) pa-nam₂-šita shrine-išib (purification priest of the shrine) gal-|BAD×DIŠ| (chief …-official) en-IB gal-šita (chief of the šita-office) abgal (sage) kingal (overseer / leader of the assembly) tiru (court attendant) […] sukkal (vizier) […] … stone … ti … |KA×X| … na […] (The remainder of the column, and the reverse, are broken away or 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
szuszx(|SZE.NAM2|) pa-nam2-szita3# esz3 iszib gal |BADxDISZ@t| en IB gal szita abgal kingal tiru# [...] sukkal [...] x na4 x ti |KAxX| na# [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — CDLI Lexical 000003, ex. 011. 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 (P020642) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.
Marks the boundary between proto-writing and writing. We can see signs being used systematically — but not yet phonetically. The leap to recording speech itself comes a few centuries later.
The earliest historical document in human history. Before this, we have lists, accounts, and dedications. Here, for the first time, a ruler tells us what happened — with names, places, and consequences.