Position in chronology
Nik 1, 100
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 the mid-third millennium BCE. It is a terse bookkeeping note recording a delivery of barley — 147 gur, a standard grain measure — drawn from a specific field described as 'good' and 'small,' passed between two named officials, an overseer and an estate manager. Tablets like this one, part of the Nikolski (Nik 1) archive now in the Hermitage Museum, are the everyday paperwork of a temple or palace household economy, tracking grain in and out under the responsibility of named administrators.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
A shipment of 147 gur of barley (measured by the standard 'saggal' gur) is recorded under the responsibility of the overseer Lumma-šatam. The grain came from the 'good, small' field. Šubur, the manager, handled the transfer — he handed it over to him. One transaction total.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine147 gur barley (saggal-measure) — Lumma-šatam, the overseer; barley from the good, small field — Šubur, the manager (nu-banda3): he transferred (it) to him: 1.
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
2(gesz2@c) 3(u@c) la2 3(asz@c) sze gur saggal lum-ma-sza3-tam ugula sze? GAN2 sa6-ga tur-ra-ta szubur nu-banda3 mu-na-bala 1(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — Nik 1, 100. 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 (P221869) — 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.