Position in chronology
CUSAS 26, 253
About this tablet
A small bookkeeping note from Ur in the Sargonic (Old Akkadian) period, around the 23rd century BCE. It lists deliveries under named people and dates them by month: fattened sheep, and two boatloads of food offerings, probably for the cult of the moon-god Nanna, patron of Ur. The months named, Šesagku and Akiti, belong to the local calendar of Ur, where the Akiti was one of the great festivals of the year. It is a glimpse of the routine provisioning that kept a major temple city's offerings running.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The first line is broken apart from a few signs. Next come some grain-fed sheep, apparently taken from a field holding, entered under Abzu-kiduga, together with two boatloads of food offerings, in the month of Šesagku. Then three grain-fed sheep are entered under Nanna-ramugi, in the month of Akiti.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse(?) 1. [...] x AN x 2. [n sheep(?)] grain-fed, 3. [(x)] cut off from the field(?); 4. Abzu-kiduga. 5. 2 boats (of) food offerings; 6. [month] Šesagku. 7. 3 grain-fed sheep; 8. Nanna-ra[mu]gi. 9. [month] Akiti.
Our translation engine — Opus 5.5. 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
[...] x AN x [n udu?] niga [(x)] a#?-sza3-ta ku5-a abzu-ki-du10 2(asz@c) ma2 nidba# [iti] sze-sag11-ku5 3(asz@c) udu niga nanna-ra-[mu]-gi4 [iti a2]-ki-ta
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC) ?) — CUSAS 26, 253. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: British Museum, London, UK (P467762) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5-5 (2026-09-20/v8-evolved).
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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.