Position in chronology
JANES 18, 46 13
About this tablet
A fragmentary administrative account from Old Babylonian Nippur, in southern Iraq, recording the distribution of bread. A large stock — 90 gur — is booked in, and the surviving lines itemize how portions of it were paid out: as daily wages, to messengers, and to named individuals, closed out with a delivery notation and the month name Gusisu. It is a scrap of the everyday bookkeeping by which a temple or estate tracked its bread stores.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The ledger opens with a total of 90 gur of bread on hand. Out of that stock, the clerk lists the outgoing amounts: 4 gur of flour-bread; then 2 barig, 5 ban, and 4 sila of bread charged against daily wages; another 7 sila of bread for a purpose now lost; a broken entry mentioning a house; 3 ban and 8 sila of bread for the couriers; and further payments to a man named Gud-ili and something recorded as hire or wages. The next lines are too damaged to read fully, but they end with a delivery notation, one more broken entry, and the date: the month of Gusisu, the second month of the year at Nippur.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine90 gur of bread. Therefrom: 4 gur of bread (of) flour, 2 barig 5 ban 4 sila of bread [...], from the wages of the day(s) ... [...]; ... 7 sila of bread [...], ... poured out(?) ... house of [...]; 3 ban 8 sila of bread ... (for) the messenger(s); [...] Gud-ili(?); [...] hire/wages(?); [...]-ra; [...] bread ...; delivery. 1 [...] ...(?) Month: Gusisu (2nd month of the Nippur calendar).
Our translation engine — Fable 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
1(gesz2) 3(u) ninda gur# sza3-bi-ta# 4(disz) ninda# zi3 gur# 2(barig) 5(ban2) 4(disz) sila3 ninda [...] sza3 a2 u4 x x [...] x x 7(disz) sila3 ninda [...] x de2-a e2 [...] 3(ban2)# 8(disz) sila3 ninda x kas4 [...] gu4?-i3-li2 [...] ig-ru-um? [...]-ra [...] ninda x mu#-kux(DU)# 1(disz) [...] ru? iti# [gu4]-si-su
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Early Old Babylonian (ca. 2000-1900 BC)) — JANES 18, 46 13. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: OIM A30009 (Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA) — from Nippur (mod. Nuffar) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P200677). 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.