Position in chronology
Nik 1, 299
About this tablet
This is a small Early Dynastic administrative tablet from Girsu (ancient Tello), part of the Nikolski collection now in the Hermitage Museum. It records the weighing of goods — likely wool or wool-related items — against an official stone weight-standard, naming an individual, Ur-šul, associated with two separate weighed lots (13 minas, then 9 minas), the second explicitly marked as 'the second.' Such texts are the routine bookkeeping of Early Dynastic temple or palace households in southern Iraq, around the mid-third millennium BCE, tracking textile materials by weight rather than by count.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The beginning of this record is lost. What survives says: one lot weighs 13 minas, checked against the standard stone weight used for the wool ration, and it belongs to a man named Ur-šul. A second item — two units of something called 'ḫazi,' the rest of that word broken away — weighs 9 minas (literally '10 minus 1'), again checked against the wool-ration weight-stone, and is recorded as 'the second' entry, once more under Ur-šul's name. The tablet breaks off before and after this passage, so we don't know the full transaction or its total.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(Break — beginning missing) Its weight: 13 mana(-weight) — weighed out from/against the stone-weight of the wool ration. Ur-šul. 2 ḫa-zi [......] (goods/items, name broken) Its weight: 10 minus 1 (= 9) mana(-weight) — weighed out from/against the stone-weight of the wool ration. The second (entry). Ur-šul. (Break — remainder missing)
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
[...] ki-la2-bi 1(u@c) 3(asz@c) ma-na na4 siki-ba-ta [gin2] ur-szul 2(asz@c) ha-zi [x x x] ki-la2-bi 1(u@c) la2 1(asz@c) ma-na na4 siki-ba-ta gin2 2(disz@t)-kam-ma-ka ur-szul [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — Nik 1, 299. 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 (P222068) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-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.