Position in chronology
CUNES 51-04-018
About this tablet
This is a badly damaged Ur III period tablet, likely a fragment of an administrative or legal document — perhaps a witness list or a short personal letter — naming several individuals. The names that survive are theophoric or heroic in character, invoking the storm-god Iškur, the hero-king Gilgamesh, and the god Erra, which was common practice in personal naming across Mesopotamia. Too little of the tablet survives to say with certainty whether this was a receipt, a list of witnesses, or an epistolary fragment, but the presence of the letter-opening formula 'u3-na-a-du11' ('speak to him') suggests it may preserve the remains of a short administrative letter or memorandum.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives is a fragmentary list of names, opening with a man named Ibni-Iškur and a stock phrase used at the start of short administrative letters ('tell him...'). The next several lines are too broken to read in full, but they seem to include other people's names — one connected to Gilgamesh, another to the god Erra — followed by a numbered entry for a person called '1 KA-...-um' and another, 'Dingir-sudan.' The tablet ends with a partly broken reference to someone's father, '...son of Bak-...-gi4.' The overall content and purpose of the document cannot be reconstructed from what remains.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. Ibni-Iškur 2. — u3-na-a-du11 ("speak to him!" / letter-formula: "has been told") 3. [......]-dub-ba (broken; possibly "tablet-" related) 4. [...]-[x]-Gilgamesh (broken; contains the divine/heroic name Gilgamesh) 5. [...]-[x]-Erra (broken; contains the name/element Erra) 6. [......]-x (broken, illegible) 7. x x-za (broken, illegible) 8. 1 KA-x-x-um (a personal name, largely broken) 9. 1 Dingir-sudan (personal name) 10. x-ru-x (broken; "ru" tentatively "given/deposited") 11. son of Bak-x-gi4
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Spotted an error? Suggest a correction — confirmed corrections feed the engine's knowledge base.
Transliteration
ib#?-ni-iszkur u3#-na-a-du11 [...]-dub-ba [x]-x-gilgamesx(|BIL3.MES.GA|) [...]-x-er3-ra [...]-x x x-za 1(disz) KA-x-x-um 1(disz) dingir-su-dan x-ru-x dumu ba-ak-x-gi4
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — CUNES 51-04-018. This record has no stored scholarly English translation; the existence of published translations has not been checked; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CUNES 51-04-018 (Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA) — from uncertain (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P325423). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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