Position in chronology
Nik 1, 056
About this tablet
This is a small cushion-shaped clay tablet from Girsu (ancient Tello) in southern Iraq, dating to the Early Dynastic period (roughly 2400 BCE), part of the well-known 'Nik 1' archive of temple administrative texts. It records monthly barley rations issued to a handful of named individuals — men and women who held no personal subsistence-field allotment and so depended on institutional grain distributions instead. An official named Shubur-tur, acting as manager (nu-banda3), oversaw the disbursement, and the tablet even notes it as the tenth such distribution. Texts like this are the backbone of what we know about labor, dependency, and household economy in the earliest Sumerian city-states.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet is a payroll slip for barley rations. Nin-ti-men received 2 barig; Nin-mar-lu-mu and Ur-e each got 1 barig 2 ban2; U-U received 2 barig; Nin-mudakush got 3 ban2 of regular barley plus another 2 barig of barley set aside for pigs. Altogether the rations added up to 2 gur, 1 barig, 1 ban2 by the standard measure. The text notes this grain was issued to people who had no farmland of their own to live off, under the supervision of the official Shubur-tur, and records that this was the tenth round of such payments.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine2 barig barley rations: Nin-ti-men. 1 barig 2 ban2: Nin-mar-lu-mu. 1 barig 2 ban2: Ur-e. 2 barig: U-U. 3 ban2: Nin-mudakush. 2 barig pig-barley (barley for the pigs): Nin-mudakush. Total: 2 gur 1 barig 1 ban2, by the standard gur (gur-saggal). Barley rations, barley allotted (as an issue), for the people who have no subsistence-field allotment (šuku). Shubur-tur, the manager (nu-banda3), disbursed to them: 1 (numeral-sign ASZxDISZ); it is the 10th (disbursement).
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
2(barig@c) sze-ba nin-ti-menx(|GA2xEN|) 1(barig@c) 2(ban2@c) nin-mar-lu2-mu 1(barig@c) 2(ban2@c) ur-e 2(barig@c) U2-U2 3(ban2@c) nin-mu-da-kusz2 2(barig@c) sze szah2 nin-mu-da-kusz2 szu-nigin2 2(asz@c) 1(barig@c) 1(ban2@c) gur saggal sze-ba sze gar lu2 szuku nu-gal2-ke4-ne szubur-tur nu-banda3 e-ne-ba 1(|ASZxDISZ@t|) 1(u) ba-am6
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — Nik 1, 056. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russian Federation (P221825) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.