Position in chronology
Sumerian cuneiform tablet dating approximately 2041 B.C. Is a receipt for the donation of livestock to the feast for a Sumerian king
Not yet translated
This tablet is catalogued and photographed, but no English translation is stored in this record yet. Our translation engine works through the untranslated corpus every night, oldest first — this page will update the day its turn comes. If you are a specialist and can read it, we would love your help.
The world it comes from
Hammurabi, the Epic of Gilgamesh, mathematics.
Scholarly note
Tablet image sourced from Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0). No scholarly translation referenced in source metadata. Source description: The oldest piece in the McDonald Rare Book Collection at OSU is a Sumerian cuneiform tablet dating approximately 2041 B.C. The fragile piece has a prosaic purpose, it's a receipt for the donation of l
Attribution
Image: Oregon State University — Wikimedia Commons. source
Translation excerpted from Wikimedia Commons file: File:Sumerian cuneiform tablet dating approximately 2041 B.C. Is a receipt for the donation of livestock to the feast for a Sumerian king.jpg. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ASumerian_cuneiform_tablet_dating_approximately_2041_B.C._Is_a_receipt_for_the_donation_of_livestock_to_the_feast_for_a_Sumerian_king.jpg. Description: The oldest piece in the McDonald Rare Book Collection at OSU is a Sumerian cuneiform tablet dating approximately 2041 B.C. The fragile piece has a prosaic purpose, it's a receipt for the donation of livestock to the feast for a Sumerian kin.
Related tablets
Related sources
An early example of administrative writing from Uruk. Its fragmentary numerical entries and commodity signs document record-keeping during the formative period of writing.
A surviving administrative record of named people and livestock in the Ur III period. Together with other archives, such accounts reveal the work of managing animals, deliveries and institutional responsibility.
Part of the earliest known body of international diplomatic correspondence. Akkadian, written in cuneiform on clay, was the lingua franca of Late Bronze Age statecraft — used between Egypt, the Hittites, Mitanni, Babylon, Assyria, and the Levantine vassals.