Position in chronology
SF 004
About this tablet
An Early Dynastic administrative list from Šuruppak (modern Fara, southern Iraq), dated to around 2500 BCE and now held in the Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin. Each surviving entry pairs the numeral '1' with a named person, cultic title, or institutional recipient — almost certainly a personnel roster or allocation record spanning several temple offices. Two of the named figures are the healing goddess Nintinugga ('Lady who revives the dead') and Ninnigar, the goddess of weaving, suggesting the recipients are officials or dedicants of their shrines; one entry assigns its unit explicitly 'to the palace,' showing the list bridges temple and royal administration. This kind of methodical, one-line-per-recipient tablet is among the earliest surviving evidence of organized institutional bookkeeping in Mesopotamia.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet records eleven individual assignments, each of one unit: one to Nintinugga, one to Ninnigar, one to AMA-[...]-GAN — then a line too broken to read — one to NAM-A-[...], one to NAM-NUN, one to the palace, one to KISAL-SI, one to En-zida, and one to Amar-MI-ZA. The final line is also lost. Whether these are people receiving a single ration each, or institutions being allocated one item apiece, the scribe is working through a fixed roster of recipients drawn from temple offices and the royal household, ticking off each with an identical count of one.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 — Nintinugga [1] — Ninnigar [1] — AMA-[x]-GAN [...] — x (broken) [1] — NAM-A-[x-(x)] (uncertain) [1] — NAM-NUN 1 — for the palace (e₂-gal) 1 — KISAL-SI 1 — En-zida 1 — Amar-MI-ZA [...] — x (broken)
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
1(asz@c) nin-tin-ug5#-ga [1(asz@c) ]nin-nigar# [1(asz@c) ]AMA-[(x)]-GAN [...]-x [1(asz@c) ]nam2#?-a?-[x-(x)] [1(asz@c)] nam2-nun 1(asz@c) e2-gal#-sze3 1(asz@c) KISAL-si 1(asz@c) en-zi-da 1(asz@c) amar-MI-ZA [...]-x
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIa (ca. 2600-2500 BC)) — SF 004. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin, Germany (P010569) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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.