Position in chronology
TMH 05, 087
About this tablet
A fodder account from Early Dynastic Nippur, roughly 2500 BCE: a temple or estate administrator tallies the barley issued to feed the household's animals — 65 sheep, 26 goats, and 110 ducks — and totals it at the end. The scribe dates it by month and by a year-name, one of the oldest dating conventions in history. It is a vivid glimpse of how carefully even bird-feed was audited in one of Sumer's great cities.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a feed ledger. Sixty-five sheep were allotted 16 lidga-measures and 1 barig of barley; twenty-six goats got 6 lidga and 2 barig; and a flock of 110 ducks received 5 lidga. The bottom line: 27 lidga and 3 barig of barley disbursed in all — and the arithmetic checks out exactly. The clerk dated the account to the 'Emmer' month, in the year remembered for the a-SI-A-ab event (whose meaning is now lost to us).
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine65 sheep, — their barley (fodder): 16 lidga (and) 1 barig of barley; 26 (male) goats, — their barley: 6 lidga (and) 2 barig of barley; 110 ducks, — their barley: 5 lidga of [barley]. Its grand total: 27 lidga (and) 3 barig of barley. Month: "Emmer" (iti ziz2-a). Year in which the a-SI-A-ab was carried out.
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(gesz2@c) 5(asz@c) udu sze-be6 1(u@c) 6(asz@c) 1(barig@c) sze lid2-ga 2(u@c) 6(asz@c) masz2 sze-be6 6(asz@c) 2(barig@c) sze lid2-ga 1(gesz2@c) 5(u@c) uz sze-be6 5(asz@c) [sze] lid2-ga gu2-an-sze3-be6 2(u@c) 7(asz@c) 3(barig@c) sze lid2-ga iti ziz2-a mu a-SI-A-ab al-ak
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — TMH 05, 087. 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 (P020501) — 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.