Position in chronology
TMH 05, 137
About this tablet
A small Early Dynastic accounting tablet from Nippur, roughly 2400 BCE, now in the Hilprecht Collection at Jena. It records barley — measured in the large 'lidga' capacity unit — handled under an operation called ha-ri and credited against two named fields, one belonging to Zur-zur and one to Lu-ḫegal, with the second field's quantities broken out day by day (59 on the first day, 65 on the second). It is the kind of routine harvest-season bookkeeping that Sumerian estates produced in bulk: quantities, the field they came from, and the day the work was done.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Barley account: 47 lidga of grain, processed as ha-ri, taken in for |ZI&ZI.ŠÈ|. That amount belongs to Zur-zur's field. Then, from Lu-ḫegal's field: 59 units of ha-ri barley on day one, and 65 on day two. Several of the technical terms — including ha-ri itself and the commodity abbreviation in line one — are archaic and their exact sense is no longer certain, but the structure is a straightforward two-field, two-day tally.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse 47 lidga of barley — ha-ri — brought in for |ZI&ZI.ŠÈ|. [The field] of Zur-zur. 60 less 1 (= 59) barley, ha-ri: day 1. 65: day 2. The field of Lu-ḫegal.
Our translation engine — Opus 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Spotted an error? Suggest a correction — confirmed corrections feed the engine's knowledge base.
Transliteration
4(u@c) 7(asz@c) sze lid2-ga ha#-ri |ZI&ZI.SZE3| ku4 [GAN2] zur-zur-kam 1(gesz2@c) la2 1(asz@c) sze ha-ri u4 1(disz@t)-kam 1(gesz2@c) 5(asz@c) u4 2(disz@t)-kam GAN2 lu2-he2-gal2-kam
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — TMH 05, 137. 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 (P020551) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
Related tablets
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.