Position in chronology
TMH 05, 136
About this tablet
A small barley-disbursement account from Early Dynastic Nippur, roughly the middle of the third millennium BCE. It lists named men — two barbers, a carpenter, a musician, and others — each credited with a quantity of grain measured in lidga, the large capacity unit of the period, and closes with a grand total. Documents like this are the payroll records of a temple or palace household: they show us the actual craftsmen and attendants who were fed by the institution, and preserve their names. The reverse of the tablet is blank and heavily worn; seal impressions survive on the edges.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Barley issued, measured in lidga: ten to Lugal-sisa the barber; ten to Nin-danir; ten to Sag-gaga the carpenter; fifteen to Zamu the singer; ten to A-zuzu; four lidga apiece to Puzur-ra; and ten to A-zuzu the barber. The scribe's closing total is 129 lidga of barley — which is more than the surviving entries add up to, so some lines may have been lost or counted differently. The back of the tablet carries no writing.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine10 lidga of barley — Lugal-sisa, the barber. 10 — Nin-danir. 10 — Sag-gaga, the carpenter. 15 — Zamu, the musician. 10 — A-zuzu. 4 lidga of barley each — Puzur-ra. 10 — A-zuzu, the barber. Total: 129 (2 gešʾu 10 minus 1) lidga of barley.
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) sze lid2-ga lugal-si-sa2 szu-i 1(u@c) nin-da-nir 1(u@c) sag-ga2-ga2 nagar 1(u@c) 5(asz@c) za3-mu nar 1(u@c) a-zu-zu 4(asz@c) sze lid2-ga-ta# puzur4-ra 1(u@c) a-zu5-zu5 szu-i szu-nigin2 2(gesz2@c) 1(u@c) la2 1(disz@t) sze lid2-ga
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — TMH 05, 136. 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 (P020550) — 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.