Position in chronology
TMH 05, 128
About this tablet
A small clay account from Nippur, written roughly 2500 BCE, recording a payment of barley — fifteen lidga, a large capacity measure — handed over as the purchase price of a house. The parties are a woman named Nin-šita, wife of Giri-ni, and a man whose name (Ur-...) is now broken away; the grain itself is said to come from the é-luḫḫu, an institutional household. It is a rare early glimpse of real-estate being bought and sold with grain rather than silver, and of a woman appearing by name in the transaction.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Fifteen lidga of barley: Nin-šita, the wife of Giri-ni, of Du-barra, paid it out. The grain was the purchase price for the house, and it came from the é-luḫḫu household. It was received from Ur-[...], whose full name is lost, and the closing line — presumably repeating that the barley was measured out — is broken away.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine15 lidga of barley — Nin-šita, wife of Giri-ni, (of/at) Du-barra, measured out to him/her. It is the purchase price; it is (for) the house. The barley is [that] of the é-luḫḫu(-house). From Ur-[...] [he measured (it) out to him/her].
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(u@c) 5(asz@c) sze lid2-ga nin-szita dam giri3-ni du6-bar6-ra an-na-ag2 nig2-sa10 e2-kam sze e2-luh-hu-[kam?] ki ur-[...-ta] [an-na-ag2]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — TMH 05, 128. 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 (P020542) — 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.