Position in chronology
OSP 1, 144
About this tablet
A small livestock account from Early Dynastic Nippur, one of the oldest cities of Sumer, written roughly 4,400 years ago. A scribe is recording young lambs — several noted as female and apparently still suckling — each entry paired with the name of the person responsible for or receiving the animal. It is the everyday paperwork of a temple or estate flock, and though badly worn, it shows the accounting habits that made large-scale herding possible in early Mesopotamia.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a running tally of lambs, each line naming the person they were assigned to. Some number of suckling lambs went to a man called Ur-...damu; one female suckling lamb to Gegesi; another female suckling lamb to someone whose name is lost. Several entries in the middle are too damaged to read. The list resumes with one animal for a man named Ur-something, and two more for another Ur-named individual. The rest is broken away.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[x ... lamb(s)], suckling(?), (for/of) Ur-[...]damu; 1 female lamb, suckling(?), (for/of) Gegesi; 1 female lamb, suckling(?), ... [...] [...] [...] ... [...] 1 ... [...] (for/of) Ur-[...]; 2 ... [...] (for/of) Ur-[...].
Our translation engine — Fable 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
[x sila4?-x] GAB@90 ur-[]da-mu 1(asz@c) sila4?-munus GAB@90 ge6-ge-si 1(asz@c) sila4?-munus GAB@90 x [...] [...] [...] x [...] 1(asz@c) x [...] ur-x [...] 2(asz@c) x [...] ur-x [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — OSP 1, 144. 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 (P221641) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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.
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.