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. This record has no stored scholarly English translation; the existence of published translations has not been checked; 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).
Related tablets
Related sources
An early example of administrative writing from Uruk. Its fragmentary numerical entries and commodity signs document record-keeping during the formative period of writing.
An early witness to systematic administrative notation at Kish. Its signs and numerals can be catalogued, but that does not establish a full translation or prove that it is the world's first writing.
An early surviving historical monument that joins named rulers, a territorial dispute and religious oaths. It shows how a city-state turned victory into a lasting public claim, without establishing that this was the first recorded conflict.