Position in chronology
Nisaba 25, 18
About this tablet
A small Early Dynastic administrative tablet from Ur, now in the British Museum, recording livestock — sheep, goats, and young animals — associated with a large institutional storehouse. The entries likely reflect an intake, disbursement, or inventory count of animals belonging to a temple or palace estate. Tablets like this are the routine paperwork of the earliest Mesopotamian bureaucracies: brief, practical, and produced in large numbers by specialist scribes attached to major religious or administrative institutions. Though badly damaged, it offers a glimpse into the careful animal-by-animal accounting that kept these large organisations running around 2500–2300 BCE.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
A count of livestock linked to the great storehouse: one sheep classed as a calf of the great storehouse, some number of additional sheep (the exact count is broken), something compared to sweet nanna-du10, one goat described as 'mother of the storehouse,' and one sheep together with a she-goat in a category whose label is only partly legible. The rest of the tablet is too damaged to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our enginex calf(ren) 1 (head), sheep — calf(ren) of the great storehouse [...] sheep like sweet nanna[x]-du10 1 (head), goat — mother of the storehouse-si 1 (head), sheep (and) she-goat — |SU3-SU3-UN|-gi4
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
x AMAR 1(N01)# , udu amar-e2-gal# [...] udu# nannax(|SZESZ.NA|)#-du10-gen7 1(N01)# masz2 ama-e2-si 1(N01) , udu# ud5# |SU3-SU3-UN|-gi4#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — Nisaba 25, 18. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: British Museum, London, UK (P449005) — 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.