Position in chronology
RIME 1.14.20.01, ex. 70
About this tablet
A fragment of a stone vessel dedicated at Nippur by Lugalzagesi, king of Uruk and Umma around 2350 BCE — the last great Sumerian ruler before Sargon of Akkad conquered him. His famous vase inscription, known from dozens of such fragments, proclaims his god-given titles and boasts that under his rule the cities of Sumer flourished in peace. This piece preserves scraps of his titulary (raised by Ningirima, mistress of Uruk; chief steward for the gods) and of the celebrated passage describing Larsa, Utu's beloved city, rejoicing.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives on this chip of stone are phrases from a royal proclamation. The king describes himself as one nurtured by Ningirima, the mistress of Uruk, and as chief steward serving the gods. After a gap that once named the great god Enlil, the readable text picks up in the middle of a boast about the kingdom's golden age: Larsa, the city the sun-god Utu loves best, shouted for joy. The rest of the passage — where other copies say Uruk passed its days in celebration and Ur lifted its head high like a bull — is broken away here.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[... (cared for by the goddess Nin)]girima, mistress of Uruk, chief steward for the [god]s, [... En]lil ... [...] Larsa, the beloved city of Utu, [raised a cry of] jubilation.
Our translation engine — Fable 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
[...]-girimx(|A.BU.HA.DU|)# nin unu-ga-ka agrig#-mah [x]-re#-ne-ra [...]-lil2# mu#-[...] larsa#[] iri ki-ag2# utu-ke4# a-ne hul2-[x]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — RIME 1.14.20.01, ex. 70. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA (P265198) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-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.
Marks the boundary between proto-writing and writing. We can see signs being used systematically — but not yet phonetically. The leap to recording speech itself comes a few centuries later.
The earliest historical document in human history. Before this, we have lists, accounts, and dedications. Here, for the first time, a ruler tells us what happened — with names, places, and consequences.