Position in chronology
TMH 05, 025
About this tablet
A small personnel memo from Nippur in the Early Dynastic period (c. 2500 BCE), the era of the earliest Sumerian administrative archives in that city. It tracks a handful of workers, counted one at a time, and notes which official returned a man to the pool and which officials withdrew men from it. It is a glimpse of how labour was shuffled between supervisors in a temple or palace household long before the great Ur III bureaucracy.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
One man, A-ulgal, the inspector. One man, A-zuzu: Lugal-meše-gal sent him back. One man: Ur-Šulpa'e took him out. One man: Ur-Abzu took him out. One man: Nesag took him out. That is the whole record; the back of the tablet was left blank.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse, column i) 1 (man): A-ulgal, the inspector (lu₂-igi). 1 man: A-zuzu — Lugal-meše-gal returned (him). (column ii) 1 man — Ur-Šulpa'e took (him) out. 1 man — Ur-Abzu took (him) out. 1 man — Nesag took (him) out. (reverse uninscribed)
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
1(asz@c) a-ul4-gal lu2-igi 1(asz@c) lu2 a-zu5-zu5 lugal-me-sze3-gal2 ba-ta-gur 1(asz@c) lu2 ur-szul-pa-e3 ba-ta-e3 1(asz@c) lu2 ur-abzu-ke4 ba-ta-e3 1(asz@c) lu2 ne-sag ba-ta-e3
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — TMH 05, 025. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Hilprecht Collection, University of Jena, Germany (P020439) — 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.