Position in chronology
TMH 05, 142
About this tablet
A small clay accounting tablet from Nippur, written about 2500 BCE, tallying timber. A scribe lists three lots of beams — 940, 480 and 180 pieces — sums them, and books the whole stock against a reed-orchard and a man named Enlil-alsa. It is the sort of routine inventory that kept an Early Dynastic city's building programs supplied: even the roof-beams of Nippur were counted, totalled and signed off in writing.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Timber account: 940 roof-beams, 480 ubil-timbers, and 180 assigned to the É-me-sig building. Grand total: 1,620 beams, charged to the reed-orchard. Issued to Enlil-alsa. (The scribe's stated total runs twenty higher than the individual entries add up to — either a slip of the stylus or an item we can no longer read.)
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse 940 (1 geš'u 6 geš minus 20) roof-beams (ur₃), 480 (8 geš) ubil-timbers, 180 (3 geš) for the É-me-sig, Total: 1,620 (2 geš'u 7 geš) roof-beams — (of/for) the reed-orchard (kiri₆-gi₄). En-lil₂-al₆-sa₆ — it was given to him (an-na-šum₂).
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
1(gesz'u@c) 6(gesz2@c) la2 2(u@c) ur3 8(gesz2@c) u2-bil2 3(gesz2@c) e2-me-sig szu-nigin2 2(gesz'u@c) 7(gesz2@c) ur3 kiri6-gi4 en-lil2-al6-sa6 an-na-szum2
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — TMH 05, 142. 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 (P020556) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-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.