Position in chronology
BM 090715
About this tablet
A Middle Babylonian royal building inscription commemorating the restoration of the Ekišnugal, the great temple of the moon-god Sîn at the city of Ur in southern Iraq. An unnamed (or damaged) king, whose epithets include 'mighty king' and 'king of the four quarters,' claims to have rebuilt the ancient sanctuary after it had fallen into ruin. Inscriptions like this were typically pressed into clay tablets and deposited in temple foundations as a permanent record of a ruler's piety. The damaged opening lines mean the king's name cannot be securely identified from this fragment alone.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The mighty king, ruler of all four corners of the world, rebuilt the Ekišnugal — the ancient temple of the moon-god at Ur — which had stood since time immemorial and had then fallen into decay and ruin. He restored it for the god, returning it to its original site and relaying its foundations. The final line, recording what was done to the foundations, is too damaged to complete.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineThe mighty king, king of the four quarters (of the world), the Ekišnugal — the ancient temple — from time immemorial had been built, [then] had fallen into ruin; he rebuilt it [for him], to its [former] place he restored it; its foundations...
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Engine notes
read from photo5 uncertain terms ↓
- lugal# [kal-ga] — The royal name or epithet is broken; 'kal-ga' ('mighty') is a common epithet in such contexts and the restoration is conventional but not verified from the photo.
- lugal an ub-da limmu2-ba — Standard Sumerian formula for 'king of the four quarters' (Akkadian: šar kibrāt erbetti). Attribution to a specific king is impossible without the name.
- e2-kisz-nu-gal2 — The Ekišnugal: the temple of the moon-god Sîn at Ur. The Sumerian name means roughly 'house, the great light'; here rendered by its conventional proper name.
- ba-du3-a ba-til — Literally 'had been built, had ceased/ended'; idiom for a temple having fallen into disrepair or ruin. 'ba-til' can mean 'had been completed' in some contexts, but in restoration inscriptions the sense is typically deterioration/abandonment.
- suhusz-bi — 'Its foundations' — the line is cut off by the break; a following verb (likely 'he laid' or 'he made firm') is lost.
Reasoning ↓
The photograph shows a roughly square clay tablet, approximately 8–9 cm across by the scale bar, with the inscribed text contained within a ruled rectangular column in the upper-centre of the obverse. The surface is noticeably weathered and abraded, particularly in the lower half where the clay is bare and the museum accession number '90715' is stamped in modern ink. The ruled column preserves approximately nine to ten lines of cuneiform text; individual wedges are visible and relatively clear in the upper lines, becoming less distinct toward the bottom. Visually I can confirm the columnar layout and the presence of multiple lines consistent with a royal inscription. The sign sequence in line 1 is partially broken at left, consistent with 'lugal#' in the transliteration; 'an ub-da limmu2-ba' in line 2 is a well-known formulaic phrase for 'king of the four quarters' and the grouped signs in that line are plausible against the photo. 'e2-kisz-nu-gal2' (Ekišnugal, the Sîn temple at Ur) and the subsequent lines recording rebuilding and restoration follow a standard Middle Babylonian building-inscription template and align with what is legible. The final line 'suhusz-bi' ('its foundations') is presumably the beginning of a further clause now lost; the tablet is broken below this point. The break in the royal name at the start is a significant lacuna — cannot determine the king from the photo alone. Overall the photo reading is consistent with the supplied transliteration; no discrepancies noted beyond the expected lacunae.
Generated by claude-sonnet-4-6 · prompt 2026-05-12/v4-interpretation · May 12, 2026 · 3440 in / 1026 out tokens
Transliteration
lugal# [kal-ga] lugal an# ub-da# limmu2-ba e2-kisz-nu-gal2 e2 libir-ra u4-ul-li2-a-ta ba-du3-a ba-til mu-na-du3 ki-bi-sze3 bi2-in-gi4-a suhusz-bi
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Middle Babylonian (ca. 1400-1100 BC)) — BM 090715. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: British Museum, London, UK (P428301) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-18/v5-modern-rendering).
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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.