Position in chronology
JANES 18, 49 26
About this tablet
A small delivery receipt from Nippur, written during the reign of Iddin-Dagan of Isin (early second millennium BCE). It records nine sheep, prepared as cooked meat, handed over from an establishment called É-gissu in the ninth month of the year. Documents like this were the routine bookkeeping of temple and palace kitchens: every animal that came in for a meal or an offering had to be entered, dated, and credited to the supplier. The year is named after a religious event — the king's installation of the chief lumaḫ-priest of the healing goddess Nin-Isina — which is how Mesopotamian scribes kept a calendar before numbered years.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Received: nine sheep, cooked. (Two further lines are too broken to read.) The transaction took place in Nippur, and the animals came from the É-gissu establishment. Entered as a delivery, in month nine (Gan-gan-e), in the year that King Iddin-Dagan installed the lumaḫ-priest of the goddess Nin-Isina.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine9 sheep, cooked; [...] x [...] within Nippur. From (the household of) É-gissu: delivery. Month: gan-gan-e₃ (month IX). Year: Iddin-Dagan the king elevated the lumaḫ-priest of 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
9(disz) udu al-sze6-ga2# [...] x [...] sza3 nibru ki e2-gissu#-[ta] mu-kux(DU)# iti gan-gan-e3 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, 49 26. 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 A29998 (Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA) — from Nippur (mod. Nuffar) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P200687). 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.