Position in chronology
TMH 05, 172
About this tablet
A small Early Dynastic tablet from Nippur, now in the Hilprecht Collection at Jena, carrying nothing but personal names — five of them, written out and then written out again. Every name begins with 'Ur-' ('man/servant of'), the commonest Sumerian name-pattern of the mid-third millennium. The doubling of the list, in ruled boxes, points to a scribe practising: the same short roster copied twice on one tablet, of the kind produced in Nippur's scribal circles around 2500 BCE. It is a scrap of the training routine by which literacy was passed on.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet lists five men: Ur-Ennugi, Ur-Šulgame, Ur-Nina-(LAK590), Ur-Sig, and Ur-Nin-Sig. Then it lists exactly the same five again, in the same order, in a second set of ruled boxes — the third name spelled slightly differently the second time round, and its final sign now too damaged to read. There is no other content: no quantities, no transaction, no date. Just a short roster of names, written twice.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineUr-Ennugi Ur-Šulgame Ur-Nina-LAK590 Ur-SIG₄ (Ur-Sig) Ur-Nin-SIG₄ (the same sequence repeated:) Ur-<En>-nugi Ur-Šulgame Ur-Nin-|GEŠ×KID₂|-a-x Ur-SIG₄ Ur-Nin-SIG₄
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
ur-en#-nu-gi4#! ur-szul-ga-me ur-nin-a-LAK590 ur-SIG4 ur-nin#-SIG4 ur-<en>-nu-gi4 ur-szul-ga-me ur-nin-|GESZxKID2|-a-x ur-SIG4 ur-nin-SIG4
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — TMH 05, 172. 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 (P020586) — 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.
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.