Position in chronology
JCS 32, 169 1
About this tablet
A fragmentary Sumerian tablet from the Akkadian period whose surviving lines invoke Utu, the sun god of justice, and contain what look like legal or wisdom formulas about obligations between people. The paired clauses — one man not returning what he owes, another man not supplementing what is due — mirror the parallel style found in Sumerian law collections and proverb texts, and hint that this may be a school copy of such a composition. The closing reference to a destiny being decided and something being 'brought out' under what sounds like a lament exclamation suggests a literary or judicial conclusion. The tablet is too heavily damaged to assign confidently to a specific genre, but it sits somewhere in the intersection of law, scribal education, and wisdom literature.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet opens with references to wooden objects — possibly writing boards or implements — and invokes the sun god Utu, by whose light the right path is made straight and just. It then lays out obligations between people: someone who fails to give back what they owe, someone who fails to make up the shortfall. What comes between these lines and the end is largely lost to damage. Where the text picks up again, it speaks of a term or period coming to a close, a fate being decided, a verdict cut and rendered — and it closes with what reads like a cry of distress as something is brought forth or issued. The broken passages before and after these sequences cannot be recovered.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineWood(en) ... not ... [...] Wooden [object], [its] face/front, [sign uncertain], ... not (At the) foot / path of the city The path(?) of Utu is made just [...] ...-[broken] A man [...] path(?) [...] to measure [...] vessel(?) Toward its throne dais(?) A man who does not return (what he owes to) a man A man who does not add (what is due) to a man [...] Wood(en) [...] ... [...] Wood(en?) binding [...] The term of office passes ... [...] [...] for its destiny, a judgment is rendered Alas — it was brought out [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
gesz la# [x x (x)] gesz gab2 RI x la gir3 iri#-na# gir3#? [(x)] utu si-sa2 [(x)] bi2#?-[x] lu2 [(x)] gir3#? [(x)] ag2 [(x)] ma#? gab2 bara2#-bi#-sze3#? lu2 lu2 nu-mu#-gi4-gi4-a lu2 lu2 la-ba-dah-he-a [...] gesz [...] x da# [...] gesz#? kesz2 [...] bala e#-da#-[x (x)] [(x)] x nam-bi-sze3 ku5-ra2# a a ba-ni-e3 [(x)]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — JCS 32, 169 1. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: MM 0440 (Montserrat Museum, Barcelona, Spain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/artifacts, P214891). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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.
Marks the boundary between proto-writing and writing. We can see signs being used systematically — but not yet phonetically. The leap to recording speech itself comes a few centuries later.
The earliest historical document in human history. Before this, we have lists, accounts, and dedications. Here, for the first time, a ruler tells us what happened — with names, places, and consequences.