Position in chronology
Amherst 035
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 P100873)
Transliteration
5(asz) 1(barig) 3(ban2) dabin gur lugal sza3-gal erin2# sze nu-tuku e2-ab i7 kun gub-ba ma2 ur-szu-ga-lam-ma ki nin-a-na-ta kiszib3 lugal-ezem iti diri sze-sag11-ku5 mu sza-asz-ru-um ba-hul lugal-ezem dub-sar dumu da-da
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — Amherst 035. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: A.1243_1982 (Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, Birmingham, UK) — from Girsu (mod. Tello) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P100873). source
Translation excerpted from CDLI raw catalogue, no published translation. P-number P100873..
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.