Position in chronology
MCS 5, 59 HSM 7970*
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 P112799)
Transliteration
5(u) 5(asz) 3(barig) 5(disz) 5/6(disz) sila3 sze gur lugal a2 lu2 hun-ga2 sahar zi-zi-de3 ki a-da-lal3 szabra-ta lu2-nanna nu-banda3-gu4-ke4 in-zi a-sza3 ma-da umma iti ezem-an-na mu# ha#-ar#-szi ba-hul
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — MCS 5, 59 HSM 7970*. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format). [year-name] Dated to Šulgi y26 — Harši destroyed based on canonical year-name formula in the transliteration.
Attribution
Image: Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA (P112799) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from CDLI raw catalogue, no published translation. P-number P112799..
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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.