Position in chronology
Nisaba 25, 13
About this tablet
A small, badly worn administrative tablet from the Early Dynastic city of Ur, excavated at Tell Muqayyar and now in the British Museum. It is a bookkeeping record: single and double units of commodities — apparently beer, barley, and other goods — checked off against people or institutions, possibly including a labour gang. Too damaged to reconstruct the full transaction, it nonetheless shows the everyday accounting that ran a Sumerian city some 4,500 years ago.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives is a tally sheet. The clerk lists small quantities item by item: one unit of beer, another unit of beer, one unit of something multicolored, two units of an unidentified commodity. After a gap, an entry seems to involve a work-gang or labour crew, then one unit of a lost item and two units connected with 'the house' — probably an institutional household. After another break come two more units of something, an entry of barley, and two final counts of goods whose names are too worn to read. The beginning and end of the record are lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Beginning broken) 1 — beer(?) 1 — beer(?) 1 — ... multicolored(?) ... 2 — ME, NAGA(?) (Break) ... KU(?), work-troop(?), KI 1 — [...] 2 — é-ak ("of the house"?) (Break) 2 — [...] barley 1 — ... 2 — ... (Remainder lost)
Our translation engine — Fable 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
[...] 1(N01@f) , kasz#? 1(N01@f) , kasz#? 1(N01@f) , x kur#-dar#? 2(N01@f) , ME# NAGA#? [...] KU#? EREN2#? KI 1(N01@f) [...] 2(N01@f) , e2#-ak# [...] 2(N01@f) [...] sze# 1(N01@f) , x 2(N01@f) , x
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — Nisaba 25, 13. 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: British Museum, London, UK (P449000) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
Related tablets
Related sources
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