Position in chronology
NRVN 1, 139
About this tablet
A short Ur III loan receipt from Nippur, written about 2026 BCE. A man named Lu-Suen borrows six gur of barley (roughly 1,800 liters) from Ur-Šulpa'e at the standard Sumerian interest rate of one-third — 1 barig 4 ban₂ of grain owed on every gur borrowed. The tablet is dated by month and by the year-name commemorating King Ibbi-Sin's destruction of Simurrum, a highland town in the Zagros, which places it in the third year of the last king of Ur. Documents like this are the ordinary credit paperwork of a Mesopotamian city, and they survive in the hundreds.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Lu-Suen has taken out a loan of six gur of barley — about 1,800 liters — from Ur-Šulpa'e. Interest is set at one barig four ban₂ for every gur borrowed, the customary one-third rate. The loan was made in the month of Šu-numun, in the year King Ibbi-Sin destroyed Simurrum.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine6 gur of barley, interest at 1 barig 4 ban₂ per 1 gur, from Ur-Šulpa'e Lu-Suen has received. Month: Šu-numun. Year: Ibbi-Sin the king destroyed Simurrum.
Our translation engine — Opus 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
6(asz) sze gur masz2 1(asz) gur 1(barig) 4(ban2)-ta ki ur-szul-pa-e3-ta lu2-suen szu ba-ti iti szu-numun mu i-bi2-suen lugal-e si-mu-ru-um mu-hul
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — NRVN 1, 139. 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). [year-name] Dated to Ibbi-Suen y1 — Ibbi-Suen became king based on canonical year-name formula in the transliteration.
Attribution
Image: Ist Ni 00253 (cast: CBS 09747 ?) (Arkeoloji Müzeleri, Istanbul, Turkey) — from Nippur (mod. Nuffar) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P122355). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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