Position in chronology
MVN 05, 043
About this tablet
A small livestock receipt from Umma in southern Iraq, written under the Third Dynasty of Ur (about 2040 BCE). It records a single dead or slaughtered nanny-goat entering the books as an incoming delivery, handed over from a man named Ur-Utu and certified with the seal of the scribe Lu-kalla, son of Ur-E'e the chief herdsman. Dated to the month of harvest in the year after En-unugal was installed as high priest of Inanna, it is one of tens of thousands of such notes produced by the Ur III bureaucracy, which tracked even the carcass of one goat.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Received: one nanny-goat, dead. Booked as an incoming delivery under Gula, transferred from Ur-Utu, and certified by the seal of Lu-kalla. Dated to the harvest month in the year following the installation of En-unugal as priest of Inanna. The seal on the tablet reads: Lu-kalla, scribe, son of Ur-E'e, chief herdsman — the last lines partly restored from the standard form of his seal.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 nanny-goat, dead (slaughtered); delivery; Gu-la; from Ur-Utu; under seal of Lu-kalla. Month: "Harvest" (šeš-sag-kud). Year after: "En-unugal was installed (as en-priest) of Inanna." (Seal inscription:) [Lu-kalla], [the scribe], son of Ur-[E'e, the chief herdsman].
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) ud5 ba-usz2 mu-kux(DU) gu-la ki ur-utu-ta kiszib3# lu2-kal-la iti sze-sag11-ku5 mu us2-sa en-unu6-gal inanna ba-hun [lu2-kal-la] [dub-sar] dumu ur-[e11-e szusz3]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — MVN 05, 043. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format). [year-name] Dated to Amar-Suen y5 — Year after: En-unugal of Inanna installed based on canonical year-name formula in the transliteration.
Attribution
Image: Anonymous 114263 (private: anonymous, unlocated) — from Umma (mod. Tell Jokha) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P114263). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.
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.