Position in chronology
CDLI Literary 000561, ex. 004
About this tablet
A fragment of a Sumerian literary composition, copied by a scribe at Nippur in the Old Babylonian period (c. 1800 BCE), when the city's schools mass-produced copies of the classical Sumerian repertoire. Only three lines survive, but they carry vivid, unsettling images — dust in the speaker's eyes, a dog gnawing at a corpse, a dragon striking down its victims. The imagery of death and predation suggests a lament or a reflective poem on mortality. Tablets like this one are how nearly all Sumerian literature reached us: as classroom copies, often broken, pieced together from many duplicates.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Only three lines can still be read. The speaker complains that a lump of earth soaked in water has thrown dust into his eyes. Then come two grim images: a dog tearing at a dead body, its chest heaving as it feeds; and a great dragon that has struck down and killed — but the line breaks off there, and the rest of the tablet is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineobverse (fragment, three lines preserved): [A cl]od that has been bathed in water — dust has come into my eyes. A dog, when it gnaws a corpse, its chest heaves up. The great dragon (ušumgal), having smitten heads (i.e. having slain) [...] (remainder broken)
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
[lag]-e# a mi-ni-in-tu5-a sahar# igi-ga2 ba-e-DU ur#-e ad6 ub-gu7 gaba-bi ib2-zi-zi uszumgal#-e# sag gesz um-ra#-ra# [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Babylonian (ca. 1900-1600 BC)) — CDLI Literary 000561, ex. 004. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: IM 058335 (National Museum of Iraq, Baghdad, Iraq) — from Nippur (mod. Nuffar) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P356598). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
Related tablets
Related sources
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.
The single most important literary discovery of the 19th century. It rewired the understanding of the Bible's literary context and proved that the Mesopotamian flood tradition is older. It is the oldest surviving epic poetry in human history.
The literary tradition is no longer anonymous from this point. Authorship — the idea that a specific human voice composes a specific work — enters the historical record with her.