Position in chronology
JANES 18, 46 15
About this tablet
An Old Babylonian administrative account from Nippur, the great religious center of southern Mesopotamia, dating to roughly 1900–1600 BCE. It tallies foodstuffs — bread, oil-bread, flour, and apparently apples — along with textiles, disbursed to or handled by two named individuals, Sag-Nanna and Ennum-Suen. Tablets like this are the everyday receipts of temple and household economies, and though damaged, it shows the careful quantity bookkeeping that underpinned Mesopotamian institutional life.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a damaged supply account. It opens with a large count — 365 of something, plus 4 more, now broken off — then lists one loaf of oil-bread, an allotment reckoned per garment, about 30 liters of apples, a counted quantity of bread, roughly 6 gur and 9 sila of bread, a barig and a sila of oil-bread, and 6 sila of flour apiece. The goods are booked under two men, Sag-Nanna and Ennum-Suen. The last lines, including the year-date that would tell us exactly when this was written, are broken away.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) 365 (6 sixties 5), 4 [...] 1 oil-bread [...] [...] per garment (tug2-ta), [... two illegible signs] 3 ban (c. 30 liters) of apples(?), ... bread, counted(?), 6 (gur) 9 sila of bread, 1 barig 1 sila (c. 61 liters) of oil-bread, 6 sila of flour each(?), (for/of) Sag-Nanna, (and) Ennum-Suen(?). ... [three illegible signs] [...] Year: [...] (year-name 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
6(gesz2) 5(disz) 4(disz) [...] 1(disz) ninda i3 [...] [...] tug2-ta [... x x] 3(ban2) haszhur? U ninda szid? 6(asz) 9(disz) sila3 ninda 1(barig) 1(disz) sila3 ninda i3 6(disz) sila3 zi3-ta? sag-nanna en-nu-um-suen? x x x [...] mu# [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Early Old Babylonian (ca. 2000-1900 BC)) — JANES 18, 46 15. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: OIM A30008 (Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA) — from Nippur (mod. Nuffar) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P200679). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
Related tablets
Related sources
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.