RA 059, 036 no. 15

~1900 BCE·Old Assyrian·P390556

About this tablet

A fragment of an Old Assyrian legal record from the merchant colony network in Anatolia, around 1900 BCE. It preserves the opening of a formal deposition: the trading-colony assembly (the kārum) of Waḫšušana, meeting in plenary session 'small and great,' appointed the named men — Mannum-kī-Ištar and Enna-Suen, son of Šu-Anum — to act in a dispute. Such tablets are the everyday machinery of self-governing merchant justice, showing how Assyrian traders far from home resolved conflicts through their own assemblies rather than local courts.

Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.

Written in modern English

Only the opening survives. It reads like the preamble of a sworn statement: 'Mannum-kī-Ištar ... and Enna-Suen, son of Šu-Anum — in this dispute, the full assembly of the trading colony at Waḫšušana, junior and senior members alike, assigned us to act...' What follows — presumably the testimony itself and the outcome of the case — is broken away and lost.

A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.

Translation — our engine

Our engine

Low confidence

[Mannum]-kī-Ištar [...] (and) [Enna-Su]en, son of Šu-Anum: [for] these [ma]tters the [kārum of Waḫ]šušana, [small and great], gave us (as arbitrators/witnesses), [and ...]

Indicative reading — translated without a photograph. Generated from the transliteration alone, without examining the original. Read it as an accessible first taste, not as a verified catalogue entry.

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

[ma-nu]-ki#?-esz18-[dar ...]
[e-na-su2]-en6# _dumu_ szu-a-nim# [a-na]
[a-wa-tim a]-ni-a-tim [ka3-ru-um]
[wa-ah]-szu#-sza-na [s,a-he-er _gal_]
[i]-di2-in-ni-a-ti2-[ma ...]

Scholarly note

Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Assyrian (ca. 1950-1850 BC)) — RA 059, 036 no. 15. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).

Attribution

Image: MAH 19631 (Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva, Switzerland) — from Kanesh (mod. Kültepe) ? — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P390556). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).

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