Position in chronology
Nisaba 25, 05
About this tablet
A small, heavily fragmented Early Dynastic tablet from Ur, held at the British Museum (U.30721). The tablet appears to be a scribal exercise or administrative list, featuring repeated sign combinations — NI, NA, DUB ('tablet'?), DAḪ ('to add/supplement'), and LAL ('to hang/subtract/balance') — that suggest either a sign-list practice tablet or an accounting entry involving tallies of commodities or records. The repetition of signs like NI and NA in sequence is characteristic of early scribal school exercises at Ur, where apprentices copied signs in runs. Its exact subject matter cannot be determined with confidence given the fragmentation, but the presence of DUB ('tablet') and LAL ('balance/deduction') hints at meta-administrative or scribal training content.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet records a series of entries built around repeated signs — NI, NA, MA, AN, ŠEŠ — followed by references to tablets (DUB), possibly a fire or fuel commodity (NE), an action involving NIM and GI₄, a horn or filling entry (SI), a mother or origin term (AMA), additions (DAḪ), and finally a balancing or subtraction entry: DAḪ NI DUB LAL₃. Much of the middle section is too damaged or broken to read. What survives reads less like a narrative and more like a running ledger or sign-practice list — entries being added and balanced, with several lines now lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineNI NI MA NI AN NA NA NI NA NI NI ŠEŠ [x] DUB [...] DUB NE AK NIM GI₄ [x] SI [...] AMA [...] DAḪ [...] DAḪ NI DUB LAL₃
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
NI NI# MA# NI# AN NA NA NI NA NI NI SZESZ# x DUB [...] DUB NE# AK NIM GI4 x SI [...] AMA# [...] DAH# [...] DAH# NI DUB# LAL3#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — Nisaba 25, 05. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: British Museum, London, UK (P448992) — 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.