Position in chronology
Orient 55, 170-171 no. 19
About this tablet
A small flour-disbursement receipt from Nippur, the religious capital of Sumer, written about 2035 BCE. Two measures of flour — roughly ten liters each of fine flour and barley meal — leave the account of an official named Lugal-dumu-ze and go to the elders attached to the temple of Enlil, Sumer's chief god. The scribe dates it precisely: the fifteenth day of the fifth month, in the year King Šu-Sin built the temple of the god Šara at Umma. It is the kind of routine ledger entry, one of thousands, by which the Ur III state fed its temple personnel and kept track of every liter.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Issued: ten liters of fine flour and ten liters of barley meal, for the elders of Enlil's temple. Drawn from the stores held by Lugal-dumu-ze; expenditure recorded. Dated the fourteenth day of the month NE.NE.gar, in the year King Šu-Sin of Ur built the temple of Šara at Umma. The purpose of the elders' allotment is described by a phrase — 'barley-assent' — whose exact sense is no longer clear.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 ban₂ of fine flour (eša), 1 ban₂ of barley meal (dabin) — (for) the elders, the barley-assent(?), of the temple of Enlil; from Lugal-dumu-ze, [dis]bursed. Month: NE.NE.gar, the 14th day having passed. Year: Šu-Sin, king of Ur, built the temple of Šara in Umma.
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(ban2) esza 1(ban2) dabin ab-ba sze se-ge4 e2 en-lil2-ka ki lugal-dumu-ze2-ta [ba]-zi iti NE#-NE-gar u4 1(u) 4(disz) ba-zal mu szu-suen lugal uri5-ma-ke4 e2 szara2 umma-ka mu-du3
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — Orient 55, 170-171 no. 19. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format). [year-name] Dated to Šu-Suen y1 — Šu-Suen became king based on canonical year-name formula in the transliteration.
Attribution
Image: WCMA 20.1.17 (Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, USA) — from Nippur (mod. Nuffar) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P424384). 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.