Position in chronology
TMH 05, 110
About this tablet
A small bun-shaped clay tablet from Nippur, roughly 2400 BCE, recording the issue of two garments from the royal household to a man named Lugal-Enlile, who then wore them. The scribe dated it by month — the harvest month — and by a year-name commemorating Il, the chief administrator of the nearby town of Iri-sagrig. It is an ordinary wardrobe receipt, but it preserves a rare Early Dynastic year-formula and shows how textiles moved out of the palace stores to individual officials.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Issued from the king's stores: one bar-dul cloak and one aktum textile. Lugal-Enlile took them and put them on. Dated to the harvest month, in the year Il, the temple administrator of Iri-sagrig, took up his post (the final verb is partly damaged).
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 bar-dul₅ garment, 1 aktum-textile, from the king (ki lugal-ta): Lugal-Enlile clothed himself (in them). [Month:] še-sag₁₁-ku₅ (the harvest month). Year: Il, the temple administrator (sanga) of Iri-sagrig, to[ok office / was seized].
Our translation engine — Opus 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) bar-dul5 1(asz@c) tug2 aktum ki lugal-ta lugal-en-lil2-le mu-mu4 [iti] sze-sag11-ku5 mu IL2 sanga iri-sa12-rig7 al-[dab5?]-a
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — TMH 05, 110. 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 (P020524) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-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.