Position in chronology
BM 022126
Not yet translated
This tablet is catalogued, 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.
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — BM 022126. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: BM 022126 (British Museum, London, UK) — from Girsu (mod. Tello) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P319808). source
Translation excerpted from CDLI raw catalogue, no published translation. P-number P319808..
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.