Position in chronology
SAA 11 086. Fragment Concerned with Sheep Theft(?) (ADD 1067)
Translation — scholar edition
SAA 11(1) 27 minas of sil[ver] (2) 600 (homers) of grain ... (Break) (r 1) [x+]60 [...], (r 2) 5 — persons, (r 3) 3, (compensation) for blood(shed) (r 4) 215 sheep [...] (r 5) Total: Ahheša[ya].
State Archives of Assyria, volume 11 — scholar edition (ORACC).
Transliteration
27 MA*.NA* ⸢KUG*⸣.[UD] / 06*-me ŠE*.PAD*-MEŠ* ⸢x x x⸣ [x] / [x]-⸢me⸣-60 ⸢x⸣ [x x] / ⸢05⸣ LÚ.a-me-lu-⸢tú⸣ / 03 ša da-mi* / 02-me-15* UDU-MEŠ / PAB mŠEŠ-MEŠ-⸢ša*⸣-[a]
Scholarly note
Neo-Assyrian administrative record (provincial or military), edited by F.M. Fales & J.N. Postgate (SAA 11, 1995). ORACC text P335882.
Attribution
Image: Adapted from F. Mario Fales and J. Nicholas Postgate, Imperial Administrative Records, Part II: Provincial and Military Administration (State Archives of Assyria, 11), 1995. Lemmatised by Mikko Luukko, 2017, as part of the research programme of the Alexander von Humboldt Chair in the Ancient History of the Near and Middle East at LMU Munich (Karen Radner, Humboldt Professorship 2015). The annotated edition is released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license 3.0. Please cite this page as http://oracc.org/saao/P335882/..
Translation excerpted from Fales, F.M. & Postgate, J.N. 1995. Imperial Administrative Records, Part II: Provincial and Military Administration. SAA 11. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. https://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/saao/saa11/P335882/.
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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.
A window into the world's first total state. The Ur III administration tracked every animal, every worker, every shekel — for a population in the millions. The level of paperwork was not exceeded until the modern era.