Position in chronology
TMH 05, 076
About this tablet
A small administrative tablet from Nippur in southern Iraq, from the later Early Dynastic period (mid-third millennium BCE), recording the assignment of four plow oxen. The animals are allocated to a field, to the 'great storehouse,' to hired laborers, and to a named individual, and the record is dated by month (the Gusisu festival, a plowing festival of the Nippur calendar) and by a year-name referring to the king building a palace. It is a snapshot of how draft animals — the tractors of the ancient world — were tracked and distributed by temple or palace administrators at one of Sumer's holiest cities.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a receipt for oxen: one ox went to work the field of U-...-ba-ki, one ox to the main storehouse, some to hired workers (the details are broken), and two oxen to a man whose name begins Da-, also connected with the storehouse. An official named Eneda-... handed them over. The clerk dated it to the month of the Gusisu festival — plowing season — in the year when the king built the palace. Several lines are damaged, so parts of the names and one entry are lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 ox — the field of U-...-ba-ki(?); 1 ox — the great storehouse (ganun-mah); hired laborer(s) [...]; 2 oxen — Da-[...]; the great storehouse [...]; Eneda-[...] gave (them) to him. Month: Festival of Gusisu (ezem-gu4-si-su). Year(?): Zur-zur [...] ... (when) the king built the palace.
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) gu4 GAN2 u2-x-ba-ki? 1(asz@c) gu4 ganun-mah#? lu2 hun-ga2# [...] 2(asz@c) gu4 da-[...] ganun-mah# [...] e-neda-[...] an-na-[szum2] iti ezem-gu4#-[si-su] mu#? zur-zur [...] x e2-gal lugal in-du3-a
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — TMH 05, 076. 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 (P020490) — 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.