Position in chronology
Nisaba 25, 10
About this tablet
A small, heavily worn Early Dynastic tablet from Ur, now in the British Museum. It appears to be an administrative record — possibly a personnel list or commodity account — mentioning a named official or title ('Pa-bilga'), a building or institution ('e2-gibil,' 'new/fresh house'), and numerical entries beside signs for a governor-type title (ensi) and a commodity or personnel category (SI). The tablet is too damaged to reconstruct its full administrative purpose, but it belongs to the early bureaucratic tradition of third-millennium BCE southern Iraq, where institutions at Ur tracked goods, animals, and workers on small hand-held clay tablets like this one.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The surviving lines read something like: '... SAR ... UR ... A ... Pa-bilga ... SI-A ... Amar-e2-gibil ... 1 [item/person] ... 1 SI ... [1?] governor.' The precise commodities or persons counted are too broken to recover. What remains is a fragment of an official record naming at least one person (Pa-bilga) and one institutional entity ('the new house'), with single-unit tallies beside a governing title. The rest of the tablet is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] SAR [...] UR[?] A [Pa]-bilx-[ga?] [...] SI-A[?] [Amar]-e2-gibil 1 [...] 1 SI[?] [1?] ensi
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] SAR [...] UR#? A [pa]-bilx(|NE.PAP.UET2_377|)#-[ga?] [...] SI-A#? [amar?]-e2#?-gibil 1(N01) [...] 1(N01) , SI#? [1(N01)?] ensix(|PA.SI|)#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — Nisaba 25, 10. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: British Museum, London, UK (P448997) — 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.