Position in chronology
Nisaba 25, 59
About this tablet
A small administrative tablet from Ur, dating to the Early Dynastic period (roughly 2900–2350 BCE), recording quantities of commodities or rations against a series of entries whose commodity labels or recipient names are mostly damaged or illegible. The closing line — '6 (large units), barley available' — is a typical summary or total formula found on archaic Mesopotamian accounting tablets. This is the everyday bookkeeping of one of the world's earliest cities: a scribe at Ur carefully tallying allocations, probably of grain rations, in a terse numerical shorthand that predates fully readable prose.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet lists a series of allocations, each noted as 3, 4, 2, or 1 unit(s), followed by identifiers — names, categories, or commodity labels — that are now too worn to read. One entry mentions a 'UR' (a dependent worker or servant category), another a sign compound that may indicate a personnel class. The final line gives the grand total or available stock: 6 large units of barley. The middle portion, including details for most individual entries, is too damaged to recover.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine3 [rations/units], [...] 3 [rations/units], [...] 3 units, x x 4 units, x x 2 units, x x 2 units, [...] 2 units, x x x UR 1 unit, |ŠEŠE+IB| 1 unit, x 1 unit, x 1 unit, GAL x 1 unit, x 2 units, x 6 (large units), barley available
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
3(N01@f)# , [...] 3(N01@f)# , [...] 3(N01@f) , x x 4(N01@f) , x x 2(N01@f)# , x x 2(N01@f)# , [...] 2(N01@f)# , x x x UR# 1(N01@f)#? |SZESZ+IB|# 1(N01@f)#? , x 1(N01@f)#? , x 1(N01@f)#? , GAL x 1(N01@f)#? , x 2(N01@f)# , x 6(N14@f) , sze gal2
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED I-II (ca. 2900-2700 BC)) — Nisaba 25, 59. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: British Museum, London, UK (P449046) — 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.