Position in chronology
MVN 11, B
Not yet translated
This tablet is catalogued with its transliteration and photographed, 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 P116234)
Transliteration
pisan-dub-ba tug2 ki-la2 tag-ga kiszib3 ur-sa6-ga muhaldim kiszib3 gu3-de2-a kiszib3 lugal-ki-gal-la kiszib3 lugal-gu2-gal# kiszib3 u3-ma-ni# kiszib3 lu2-nin-gir2-su dumu ARAD2-mu kiszib3 lu2-bi-mu kiszib3 ba-zi dumu szesz-<szesz?> nu-banda3 a-hu-um-dingir mu amar-suen lugal-ta mu hu-hu-nu-ri!(PA) ba-hul-sze3
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — MVN 11, B. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format). [year-name] Dated to Amar-Suen y1 — Amar-Suen became king based on canonical year-name formula in the transliteration.
Attribution
Image: Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA (P116234) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from CDLI raw catalogue, no published translation. P-number P116234..
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.