Position in chronology
AAICAB 1/3, pl. 224, Bod S 186
Not yet translated
This tablet is catalogued with its transliteration, but no published translation exists yet. Our translation engine works through the untranslated corpus every night, oldest first — this page will update the day its turn comes. If you are a specialist and can read it, we would love your help.
The world it comes from
A bureaucratic golden age, the Code of Ur-Nammu.
Transliteration
2(asz) 4(barig) 2(ban2) sze gur lugal la2-ia3 sze zi-ga nibru-ka ARAD2-ra sa12-du5-me su-su-dam mu sa12-du5#-ka-sze3 kiszib3 ka-gu-na i3-gal2 iti dal mu an-sza-an ba-hul ka-gu-na dub-sar dumu ur-[...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — AAICAB 1/3, pl. 224, Bod S 186. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format). [year-name] Dated to Šulgi y35 — Anšan destroyed based on canonical year-name formula in the transliteration.
Attribution
Image: Bod S 186 (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK) — from Umma (mod. Tell Jokha) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P249090). source
Translation excerpted from CDLI raw catalogue, no published translation. P-number P249090..
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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.