Position in chronology
Drehem Cattle-Distribution Tablet
Translation · reference
Scholar-verifiedOne grain-fed bull, two sheep — royal delivery — from Drehem — month of the festival of An.
Source: BDTNS / CDLI lemmatization
Translation · AI engine
text-only1 prime-quality ox, 2 sheep — delivery for the king — from Drehem — month of the Festival of An
3 uncertain terms ↓
- mu-DU — The logogram MU.DU (or mu-túm) in Ur III administrative texts is conventionally read as 'delivery' or 'brought in' — referring to animals delivered into the Drehem redistribution system. Some readings distinguish mu-DU (delivery) from zi-ga (disbursement); the exact administrative nuance here is uncertain without fuller document context.
- niga — Conventionally 'prime quality' or 'finest grade' for livestock, but the precise grading criteria are not fully understood; occasionally read as a personal name in other contexts, though the animal-grading interpretation is standard here.
- iti ezem-an-na — The 'month of the Festival of An' is attested in the Ur III calendar, but its exact position within the 12-month year varies by city and regnal year, so the absolute date cannot be pinned down from this line alone.
Reasoning ↓
No photograph was available for this tablet; translation proceeds from transliteration alone (Layer 2 only). The line is a standard Ur III administrative entry of the type abundantly attested at Puzriš-Dagan (Drehem): a commodity count, a disposition or transaction term, a responsible party or destination, a provenance, and a date by month. The key interpretive decision is mu-DU, which in this administrative context most plausibly reads as a delivery receipt term (conventionally 'mu-DU = mušbala / incoming delivery'), though some scholars treat it as simply 'brought/delivered'; the glossary gloss 'logogram MU' is minimal and does not resolve the precise administrative function. The animal designations (gud niga = prime ox; udu = sheep) and the month name (iti ezem-an-na) are well-attested in the Drehem corpus; see Sigrist, 'Drehem' (1992) and the BDTNS/CDLI databases for parallel texts. Confidence is medium rather than high because mu-DU carries genuine interpretive ambiguity and the text cannot be verified against a primary image.
Generated by claude-sonnet-4-6 · prompt 2026-05-11/v2 · May 11, 2026 · 924 in / 598 out tokens
Why it matters
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.
Transliteration
1 gud niga, 2 udu, mu-DU lugal — Drehem-ta — iti ezem-an-na
Scholarly note
One of tens of thousands of nearly identical tablets from a single century. Drehem was the empire's livestock clearing-house. The bureaucracy is staggering.
Attribution
Image: Yale Babylonian Collection.
Translation excerpted from BDTNS / CDLI lemmatization.
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.
Part of the earliest known body of international diplomatic correspondence. Akkadian, written in cuneiform on clay, was the lingua franca of Late Bronze Age statecraft — used between Egypt, the Hittites, Mitanni, Babylon, Assyria, and the Levantine vassals.