Position in chronology
TMH 05, 074
About this tablet
A small administrative tablet from Nippur, written in the Early Dynastic period (mid-third millennium BCE), recording allotments of farmland measured in the standard Sumerian area units bur3 and eše3. The recipients include named individuals, temple officials (an en-priest and a lagar-priest), and a builder — a snapshot of how a city institution parcelled out its fields among personnel. Such land-allotment lists are among our earliest windows into how Mesopotamian temples paid their staff not in wages but in the right to farm plots of institutional land.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a land-allocation ledger. Lugal-kišigal receives about 3 bur3 of farmland (roughly 19 hectares); Ur-Numušda gets a smaller parcel of at least 1 eše3, though the exact figure is partly broken. An entry for the en-priest follows, its number lost. The lagar-priest is allotted 1 bur3, a man named Atu gets 2 eše3, and 3 units go to the builder (or building crew). The final line labels the whole as a particular field, whose name is partly damaged — something like 'the field of U-...-ba'. The reverse is uninscribed.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine3 bur3 of field — Lugal-kišigal; [...] 1 eše3 — Ur-Numušda; [...] — the en (lord/priest); 1 bur3 — the lagar (priest); 2 eše3 — Atu; 3 (units) — the builder(s); field of u₂-...-ba.
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
3(bur3@c) GAN2 lu:gal-kiszi17-gal [x] 1(esze3@c) ur-nu-musz#-da [x] en 1(bur3@c) lagar 2(esze3@c) a-tu 3(asz@c) szitim GAN2 u2-x-ba
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — TMH 05, 074. 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 (P020488) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-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.