Position in chronology
OSP 1, 153
About this tablet
A small, battered roster of personnel from Nippur in southern Iraq, written in the Early Dynastic period (mid-third millennium BCE). A scribe is counting men by name — Ur-sag, Ad-da, Ur-dubla and others — each preceded by a tally mark, and closing with a grand total of twenty-five. It is a piece of everyday labor bookkeeping from one of Sumer's great religious centers, showing how early administrators tracked their workforce person by person.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a headcount list. It names the men one by one: Ur-sag and Aš-ne (their numbers are broken away), two men under Lu-..., then one each for Ad-da, Ur-dubla, and several others whose names are partly lost — including a Lu-... and Ur-ešlila. Two lines in the middle are too damaged to read. At the end the scribe adds it all up: twenty-five men in total. A routine personnel tally from the administration at Nippur.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[x] Ur-sag, [x] Aš-ne, 2: Lu-[...], 1: Ad-da, 1: Ur-dub-[la], [...]-ka(?) [...], [...]-a-bu-[...], 1: Lu-...-[...], 1: Ur-eš-[lila], 1: Lu-...-il. [Its total:] 25 (men).
Our translation engine — Fable 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
[x] ur#-sag [x] asz-ne2 2(asz@c) lu2#-[...] 1(asz@c) ad-da# 1(asz@c) ur-dub-[la2] [...]-ka? [...] [...]-a-bu#-[...] 1(asz@c) lu2-x-[(x)] 1(asz@c) ur-esz3-[lil2-la2] 1(asz@c) lu2-x-[(x)]-il [szu-nigin2-be6] 2(u@c)# 5(asz@c)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — OSP 1, 153. 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 (P221648) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-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.