Position in chronology
TMH 05, 055
About this tablet
A small Early Dynastic account from Nippur, roughly 2500 BCE, listing payments in silver — four, three, one and five shekels — each tied to a plot of land or a commodity: seed for a field, a field belonging to a stone-cutter, malt, and a quantity of barley measured in the large lidga unit. It is among the earliest records of silver being reckoned against agricultural goods and fields, showing how a temple or estate at Nippur kept track of value in both metal and grain. Several line names and signs are damaged, so the exact people and places remain uncertain.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Four shekels of silver: seed for the field of ...-gar, the plot of Mu-nu(?). Three shekels of silver: the plot beside the wood (or a place named here, but the signs are unclear). One shekel of silver: the lapidary's field. Five shekels of silver: malt. Then barley — a figure that is partly lost, plus two lidga-measures.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine4 shekels of silver, seed for the field (of) ...-gar; the field of Mu-nu(?); 3 shekels of silver, beside the wood(?) ... (place?); 1 shekel of silver, the field of the lapidary (zadim); 5 shekels of silver, malt, malt; barley: (n) (and) 2 lidga-measures.
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
4(asz@c) ku3 gin2 numun GAN2 x-gar GAN2 mu?-nu 3(asz@c) ku3 gin2 da gesz? u3? ki? 1(asz@c) ku3 gin2 GAN2 zadim 5(asz@c) ku3 gin2 munu4 munu4 sze (n) 2(disz@t) lid2:ga
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — TMH 05, 055. 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 (P020469) — 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.