Position in chronology
TMH 05, 144
About this tablet
An Early Dynastic account from Nippur, listing the yield of an orchard belonging to an overseer: timber, fruit (apples), reeds and other produce, each item counted out in the archaic number signs. The tablet is badly cracked and much of the total and the names at the end are lost. It is ordinary institutional bookkeeping — the kind of record that shows how mid-third-millennium Sumerian temples and estates tracked not just grain and animals but garden and grove produce as well.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Orchard account: 114 lengths of timber; roughly 20 of some wooden item (the entry is damaged); 33 apples; 25 long reeds; 8 of something now lost. All of it comes from the overseer's orchard. A subtotal follows — about 20 of something — but the figure and the line after it are broken away. The back of the tablet preserves only fragments: a household name, an unreadable sign group, and the personal name Mu-su, probably the official responsible.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine114 [ ]-beams, [x] 20(?) [x] wood-[...], 33 apples, 25 long reeds, 8 [...] — it is the orchard of the overseer (nu-banda). [Total(?):] 20(?) [...] [...] (reverse) the house of [...] ...-UD Mu-su.
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(gesz2@c) 5(u@c) 4(asz@c) []ur3 [x] 2(u@c)#? [x] gesz#-[x] 3(u@c) 3(asz@c) haszhur 2(u@c) 5(asz@c) gi-gid2? 8(asz@c) [...] kiri6 nu-banda3-kam [szu-nigin2?] 2(u@c)#? [...] [...] e2-x x-UD mu-su3
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — TMH 05, 144. 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 (P020558) — 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.