Position in chronology
Orient 55, 170 no. 18
Not yet translated
This tablet is catalogued with its transliteration, but no published translation exists yet. Our translation engine works through the untranslated corpus every night, oldest first — this page will update the day its turn comes. If you are a specialist and can read it, we would love your help.
The world it comes from
A bureaucratic golden age, the Code of Ur-Nammu.
From the same catalogue range (near P424383)
Transliteration
1(disz) gin2 ku3-babbar ur5-sze3 ki lugal-ku3-zu dam-gar3-ta u-bar i3-du8 nin-lil2-la2 szu ba-ti iti sig4 u4 8(disz) ba-zal mu szu-suen lugal-e ma-da za-ab-sza-li mu-hul u-bar i3-du8 nin-lil2-la2
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — Orient 55, 170 no. 18. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format). [year-name] Dated to Šu-Suen y6 — Land of Zabšali destroyed based on canonical year-name formula in the transliteration.
Attribution
Image: WCMA 20.1.16 (Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, USA) — from Nippur (mod. Nuffar) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P424383). source
Translation excerpted from CDLI raw catalogue, no published translation. P-number P424383..
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.