Position in chronology
SF 025
About this tablet
A personnel name-list from ancient Šuruppak (modern Fara in southern Iraq), written during the Early Dynastic period, roughly 2600–2500 BCE. It records a column of personal names — each entry almost certainly one individual attached to a temple or administrative institution — including people named after the goddess Inanna and the goddess Nisaba, the divine patroness of scribes and grain. The presence of 'Ur-Nisaba' (literally 'servant of Nisaba') on a tablet classified under the theme of writing raises the intriguing possibility that this list tracks scribal or literate personnel. The tablet is substantially damaged: the opening entry is lost, several names survive only in part, and the final lines are too broken to read with confidence.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet lists roughly ten named individuals, most likely staff of a temple or office at Šuruppak. After an opening entry that is now lost, we have: Ur-Inanna, Ku-lili, Si-du, a person whose name contains a damaged compound sign, Mes-abzu, Ur-Nisaba, Mes-pa, and Zu-lum (the middle part of that last name is restored from a damaged section). There is also at least one woman listed by a name that is partly broken, followed by someone whose name begins with Nu-. The final line is completely illegible. The rest is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] (illegible) Ur-Inanna Ku-lili Si-du [A?]-|SAGxHA|-NE Mes-abzu Ur-Nisaba Mes-pa Zu-[la?]-lum Woman-[...] Nu-[...] ([...]) [illegible]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] x ur-inanna ku-li-li si-du3 A#?-|SAGxHA|-NE mes-abzu ur-nisaba# mes-pa3 zu2#-[la2?]-lum munus-[x (x)] nu#-x [(x)] x
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIa (ca. 2600-2500 BC)) — SF 025. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin, Germany (P010603) — 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.
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.