Position in chronology
JANES 18, 48 24
About this tablet
A small administrative receipt from Nippur, written during the reign of Iddin-Dagan of Isin (early second millennium BCE). It records four sheep, already cooked, delivered in connection with a man named Inim-Enlila, evidently for a meat allotment tied to a temple household. The dating formula is the well-known Isin year-name commemorating Iddin-Dagan's installation of a high priest for Nin-Isina, the healing goddess of Isin — so this scrap of butcher's paperwork is also a dated historical anchor.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Receipt: four sheep, cooked, credited to Inim-Enlila, at Nippur. Delivery, issued for a meat allocation, apparently to the house of Gissu — the next line is lost. Dated to the eighth month, day 12, in the year Iddin-Dagan installed the high priest of the goddess Nin-Isina. Several lines in the middle of the tablet are broken and cannot be read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine4 sheep, cooked (al-še₆), (from/for) Inim-Enlila, [in] Nippur. [De]livery. For ... meat. [...] the house of Gissu(?) [...] [Month:] Apin-du'a (eighth month), [...] day 12. [Year:] "Iddin-Dagan the king elevated the lumaḫ-priest of [the goddess] Nin-Isina."
Our translation engine — Opus 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
4(disz) udu al-sze6 inim-en-lil2-la2 [sza3] nibru [mu]-kux(DU) x uzu-sze3 [x] e2-gissu#? [...] [iti] apin-du8-a [...] u4 1(u) 2(disz)-kam [mu] i-din-da-gan lugal#-e lu2-mah []nin-isin2?-na mu-un-il2
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Early Old Babylonian (ca. 2000-1900 BC)) — JANES 18, 48 24. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format). [year-name] Dated to Iddin-Dagan y1 — Iddin-Dagan became king based on canonical year-name formula in the transliteration.
Attribution
Image: OIM A29999 (Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA) — from Nippur (mod. Nuffar) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P200685). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.