Position in chronology
AuOr 32, 175-176
About this tablet
This is a small Ur III-period administrative tablet from the livestock and fowl bureau at Puzriš-Dagan (Drehem), the great state redistribution center near Nippur where herds and flocks belonging to the crown were received, tallied, and disbursed. It records a handful of birds and a young pig set aside as food for a woman of high rank ('my lady' — likely the queen or a similarly titled figure), plus two more birds that died and were delivered as carcasses to the palace. Ur-lugal-edina, the official who signed off on the transaction, and the precise dating (17 days into a named month, in the year after the sack of Urbilum) let historians pin this everyday bookkeeping entry to a specific moment in the reign of king Šu-Suen, one of the last strong rulers of the Ur III state.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet logs a small delivery of animals at the Drehem livestock office. Four creatures — a small duck, a goose, a dove, and a small male marsh-raised pig — were designated as food for 'my lady,' probably the queen or another high-ranking woman. Separately, one more small duck and one more goose died and their carcasses were sent to the palace. The entry is dated to the 17th day of the month and formally recorded as an expenditure, under the authority of the official Ur-lugal-edina. The month was 'ki-siki-Ninazu,' and the year is identified as the one following the year in which the city of Urbilum was destroyed — placing this record in the reign of king Šu-Suen of the Third Dynasty of Ur.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 small duck, 1 goose, 1 turtledove/pigeon, 1 small male marsh-pig (reared in the reed-thicket) — food(-consumption) for my lady; 1 small duck, 1 goose, died (were slaughtered), brought into the palace. From (the beginning of) the month, 17 days had passed — (this is a) booked expenditure. (Responsible official:) Ur-lugal-edina. Month: "ki-siki-Ninazu", year following: "Urbilum was destroyed."
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
1(disz) uz-tur 1(disz) ir7 1(disz) tu-gur4 1(disz) szah2-NE-tur-nita2-gesz-gi nig2-gu7 nin-ga2-sze3 1(disz) uz-tur 1(disz) ir7 ba#-usz2 [e2]-gal#-la ba-an-kux(KWU636) [iti]-ta# u4 1(u) 7(disz)# ba-zal zi#-ga ur#-lugal-edin-na [iti ki]-siki# nin-a-zu mu# us2-sa ur-bi2-lum ba#-hul#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — AuOr 32, 175-176. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: SCSU — (Special Collections, Southwestern University, Georgetown, Texas, USA) — from Puzriš-Dagan (mod. Drehem) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P467836). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-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.