Position in chronology
OSP 1, 119
About this tablet
A broken Early Dynastic land-accounting tablet from Nippur, in southern Iraq, roughly the mid-third millennium BCE. It records surveyed field areas in the old Sumerian units bur3, eše3 and iku, with a summary line ('their total'), a plot identified by its position along an embankment or watercourse, and at least one holder named by office — the 'chief cupbearer', a high palace or temple functionary. Texts like this are the raw bookkeeping of Sumerian land tenure: who held how much ground, measured out in units still built on the amount a team could plough.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The running total comes to 5 bur3 and 2 iku of field, plus a further 1 eše3 and 3 iku; the entries that followed each figure are broken off. One parcel is described as lying along the embankment of MUNUS-U8-DI. Another block is credited to the chief cupbearer, and a further 2 eše3 of field is entered. The last line begins with a name or word ending in -ga, but the rest of the tablet is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineTheir total: 5 bur3 2 iku of field [...] 1 eše3 3 iku of field [...] field on the bank (gu2) of MUNUS-U8-DI [...] chief cupbearer [...] 2 eše3 of field [...] [...]-ga [...] (The right-hand portion of every line is broken away; the reverse is uninscribed or wholly effaced.)
Our translation engine — Opus 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
szu#-nigin2-be6 5(bur3@c) 2(iku@c) GAN2 [...] 1(esze3@c) 3(iku@c) GAN2 [...] GAN2 gu2 MUNUS-U8-DI [...] sagi-gal [...] 2(esze3@c) GAN2 [...] [x]-ga [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — OSP 1, 119. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA (P221626) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-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.