Position in chronology
Nisaba 25, 54
About this tablet
One of the very early administrative tablets from the city of Ur, written around 2700–2600 BCE, before cuneiform could fully record spoken language. It is an account of bread and crushed emmer wheat handed out on festival days — including a day connected with Nanna, the moon-god who was Ur's patron deity. The recipients or responsible parties are recorded in compressed sign-groups whose exact readings scholars still debate, but the tablet shows a temple or household economy already keeping careful count of festival food distributions centuries before the first connected texts.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a distribution ledger. One unit of a special bread made from crushed emmer wheat was consumed on a festival day — logged as a 'giving of bread.' Then three single-unit entries follow, each tagged to a party identified by clusters of signs we can no longer fully decode (something like 'AB-SAR-DU₈,' 'TI-SUR-A,' 'KA-GUR,' each associated with the recurring label AN-GANxḪI). On the day of Nanna — the moon-god's festival — another party's ration was consumed, again noted as bread handed out. The account closes with a larger entry of two ten-unit measures under the same AN-GANxḪI label, and a final short line noting another consumption. The reverse of the tablet is blank.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 (unit) — NINDA₂xŠIM-bread of crushed emmer, on the day of the festival: consumed; giving of bread. 1 (unit) — AB SAR DU₈, AN-GANxḪI, KA GUR. 1 (unit) — TI SUR A, AN-GANxḪI, KA GUR. 1 (unit) — KA GUR, AN-GANxḪI. On the day of Nanna: TI KA UR consumed; giving of bread. 2 (tens) — AN-GANxḪI, GUR(!). KA(?) consumed; AN-GANxḪI(!).
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) , |NINDA2xSZIM| ziz2 gaz2 u4 ezem gu7 szum2 ninda 1(N01@f) , AB SAR DU8 AN |GANxHI| KA GUR 1(N01@f) , TI SUR A AN |GANxHI| KA GUR 1(N01@f) , KA# GUR AN |GANxHI|# u4 nannax(|SZESZ.NA|)# TI KA UR gu7 szum2 ninda 2(N14@f) , AN |GANxHI|# GUR#! KA#? gu7 AN |GANxHI|#!
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — Nisaba 25, 54. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: British Museum, London, UK (P449041) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-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.
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.