Position in chronology
Orient 55, 170 no. 18
About this tablet
A small loan document from Nippur, written about 2030 BCE. A temple gatekeeper named Ubar, who guarded the doorway of the goddess Ninlil's sanctuary, borrowed one shekel of silver — a modest but real sum, roughly a month's wages for a hired man — from a merchant called Lugal-kuzu. The tablet is dated to the day, and the borrower's own seal, naming him and his office, was rolled across it as his signature. Texts like this show how ordinary temple staff in the Ur III empire used private merchants as bankers.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Ubar, the gatekeeper of the Ninlil temple, borrowed one shekel of silver at interest from the merchant Lugal-kuzu and confirms receipt of it. The transaction was recorded on the 8th day of the third month, in the year King Šu-Suen sacked the land of Zabšali. The seal impressed on the tablet reads simply: "Ubar, doorkeeper of Ninlil."
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 shekel of silver, as an interest-bearing loan, from Lugal-kuzu the merchant, Ubar, doorkeeper of Ninlil, has received. Month: "Bricks" (month III), the 8th day having passed. Year: Šu-Suen the king destroyed the land of Zabšali. (seal inscription) Ubar, doorkeeper of Ninlil.
Our translation engine — Opus 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
1(disz) gin2 ku3-babbar ur5-sze3 ki lugal-ku3-zu dam-gar3-ta u-bar i3-du8 nin-lil2-la2 szu ba-ti iti sig4 u4 8(disz) ba-zal mu szu-suen lugal-e ma-da za-ab-sza-li mu-hul u-bar i3-du8 nin-lil2-la2
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — Orient 55, 170 no. 18. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format). [year-name] Dated to Šu-Suen y6 — Land of Zabšali destroyed based on canonical year-name formula in the transliteration.
Attribution
Image: WCMA 20.1.16 (Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, USA) — from Nippur (mod. Nuffar) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P424383). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.