Position in chronology
OSP 1, 125
About this tablet
A compact personnel roster from Early Dynastic Nippur, the holiest city of ancient Sumer and seat of Enlil, king of the gods. The tablet counts five individuals — a senior official whose name or title invokes Enlil, a scribe, and three others identified by compound designations that are most likely personal names or institutional roles. Such one-person-per-line tallies are the workaday record-keeping of Sumerian temple administration, written around 2500 BCE. The presence of a scribe (dub-sar) on the list itself is a small reminder that the people doing the counting were counted too.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The list records five people, each tallied individually. First: one official named (or titled) Lugal-en-il₂, designated a mu₆-sub₃. Then: one scribe, one bara₂-gan-nu-di, one niĝ-iri-a-zi, and one niĝ-lum-ma. The remaining lines are intact but the compound names of the last three individuals resist confident translation — they are most likely personal names, possibly with professional or institutional overtones, that meant something precise to the Nippur clerk who wrote them down.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[1] Lugal-en-il₂, the mu₆-sub₃ official; 1 scribe; 1 bara₂-gan-nu-di; 1 niĝ-iri-a-zi; 1 niĝ-lum-ma.
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)] lugal#:en#-il2 mu6-sub3 1(asz@c) dub-sar 1(asz@c) bara2-gan-nu-di 1(asz@c) nig2-iri-a-zi 1(asz@c) nig2-lum-ma
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIa (ca. 2600-2500 BC)) — OSP 1, 125. 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 (P010536) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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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.
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.