Position in chronology
TMH 05, 149
About this tablet
A small clay tablet from Nippur, written some 4,500 years ago in the Early Dynastic period, recording a handover of valuables: a garment, copper, silver by weight, and a metal ring, passed from a man named Lugal-TAR to a man named Puzur-Mama, with the instruction that the goods be carried on to a third party. What makes it interesting is the language mix — the personal name Puzur-Mama, the verb "he gave to him" (i-na-šum), and the fraction word šanabe ("two-thirds") are all Akkadian, written on a tablet otherwise using Sumerian administrative formulas. It is a snapshot of the bilingual Sumerian-Akkadian world of mid-third-millennium Nippur, and of how ordinary business transfers were documented and, unusually, quoted as spoken instructions.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The opening lines are lost. What survives is an inventory: one bale of cloth, a quantity of aruda-copper, one mina of silver, another two-thirds of a mina (written with the Akkadian word for two-thirds), and one ring. Lugal-TAR handed all of this over to Puzur-Mama, telling him to take it on to Il. The scribe recorded not just the transfer but the verbal order attached to it.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[beginning broken] 1 neck-garment (bale of cloth), aruda-copper, 1 mina of silver, 2/3 (mina) of silver — (that is) šanabe, 1 ring: Lugal-TAR to Puzur-Mama gave (them). "Deliver (it) to the place of Il," he said to him.
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(asz@c) tug2 gu2 a-ru12-da uruda 1(asz@c) ku3 ma-na-kam 2/3(asz@c) ku3 sza-na-be6 1(asz@c) har lugal-TAR puzur4-ma-ma-ra i3-na-szum2 ki il2-sze3 de6-a i3-na-du11
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — TMH 05, 149. 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 (P020563) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.