Position in chronology
Nisaba 25, 18
About this tablet
A small, badly broken livestock account from the Early Dynastic city of Ur, excavated at Tell Muqayyar and now in the British Museum. Each surviving line records a single sheep, kid, or nanny-goat against a personal name — the individuals responsible for, or receiving, the animals. It is a scrap of the everyday bookkeeping by which temple and palace households of the mid-third millennium BCE tracked their herds, from a period when writing was still young.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a herd ledger, most of it lost. The readable entries say: an unknown number of calves; one sheep charged to a man called Amar-egal; some sheep — the number is broken away — under Nanna-duggen; one young goat under Ama-e-si; and one sheep together with a nanny-goat under a person whose name is too damaged to read in full. Just a handful of animals, each tied to a named individual, the rest of the account destroyed with the missing part of the tablet.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine... calves. 1 sheep — Amar-egal ('Calf-of-the-palace'). [...] sheep — Nanna-duggen. 1 kid goat — Ama-e-si. 1 sheep (and) nanny-goat — ...-gi (name partly unreadable).
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
x AMAR 1(N01)# , udu amar-e2-gal# [...] udu# nannax(|SZESZ.NA|)#-du10-gen7 1(N01)# masz2 ama-e2-si 1(N01) , udu# ud5# |SU3-SU3-UN|-gi4#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — Nisaba 25, 18. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: British Museum, London, UK (P449005) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-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.
A window into the world's first total state. The Ur III administration tracked every animal, every worker, every shekel — for a population in the millions. The level of paperwork was not exceeded until the modern era.