Position in chronology
JANES 18, 48 20
About this tablet
A small receipt from Nippur in the early Old Babylonian period: someone received bread and barley rations, plus an extra allotment, from a person whose name is broken away. What makes this scrap of accounting valuable is its date formula — the year is named after a diplomatic marriage in which the king of Isin, Iddin-Dagan, gave his daughter in marriage to the king of Anshan in distant Iran. Even the most mundane paperwork thus carries a datestamp recording international politics around 1970 BCE.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Receipt: three loaves of bread and a barley ration, with an extra allowance on top, were handed over — the recipient acknowledged getting them from a man whose name begins Sag-... but is otherwise lost. A line or two in the middle is broken away. Dated to the sixth month, the 'work of Inanna' month, in the year remembered as the one when the king of Anshan married the king's daughter. The details of the quantities and the missing names are too damaged to recover.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine3 (units of) bread [...] barley rations ... [...] (two signs illegible) additional [...] from Sag-[...] [...] (Break) he [rec]eived. Month: kin-Inanna (VI). Year: the king of Anshan took (in marriage) the daughter of the king [...] (year name of Iddin-Dagan of Isin).
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
3(disz) ninda [...] sze-ba x x [...] diri x [...] ki sag-[...] [...] szu ba#-[ti] iti kin-inanna# mu dumu-munus lugal [...] lugal an!-sza-na x [...] ba-an-tuku#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Early Old Babylonian (ca. 2000-1900 BC)) — JANES 18, 48 20. This record has no stored scholarly English translation; the existence of published translations has not been checked; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: UM 55-21-104 (University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA) — from Nippur (mod. Nuffar) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P200663). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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