Position in chronology
Nisaba 25, 13
About this tablet
A small, heavily worn Early Dynastic administrative tablet from Ur, now in the British Museum, recording allocations or receipts of commodities — most likely beer and barley — against numerical notations using the archaic impressed-circle sign (N01@f). The entries mention what may be a storehouse or institutional building (E2), a place or origin marker (KI), and possibly natron or a plant commodity (NAGA). This is the kind of routine bookkeeping that underpins our understanding of how ancient Sumerian temples and institutions tracked goods and rations. The tablet is too damaged and fragmentary to reconstruct the full transaction, but it belongs to a well-known genre of proto-literate accounting records from southern Mesopotamia.
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 commodity allocations, each marked by a number: one unit of beer, another unit of beer, one unit of something from a highland or foreign source, two units of a plant substance (possibly natron or soapwort). Further entries, now partly lost, reference an institutional building — likely a storehouse — along with quantities of barley and other items whose labels are too worn to read. The bottom and top of the tablet are broken away, so the beginning and end of the full account are lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] 1(N01@f), beer? 1(N01@f), beer? 1(N01@f), x [mountain-provenance?] 2(N01@f), [category marker?] natron/soapwort? [...] [KU?] [EREN2?] [place-marker] 1(N01@f), [...] 2(N01@f), storehouse [...] 2(N01@f), [...] barley 1(N01@f), x 2(N01@f), x
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] 1(N01@f) , kasz#? 1(N01@f) , kasz#? 1(N01@f) , x kur#-dar#? 2(N01@f) , ME# NAGA#? [...] KU#? EREN2#? KI 1(N01@f) [...] 2(N01@f) , e2#-ak# [...] 2(N01@f) [...] sze# 1(N01@f) , x 2(N01@f) , x
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — Nisaba 25, 13. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: British Museum, London, UK (P449000) — 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.