Position in chronology
Hattori diss. p. 280, N 1192
About this tablet
This is a small, badly broken Ur III administrative tablet from Nippur, essentially a fragmentary list of personal names ending with the classifying term 'merchant' (dam-gar3). Such lists were common bureaucratic tools of the Ur III state — rosters of individuals grouped by occupation or obligation, likely used to track merchants involved in some transaction or account now lost to the break. Only a handful of names and name-fragments survive, so the specific purpose of the list cannot be recovered.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives is the tail end of a list of people's names — a man named Lu-Enlila appears twice, another person's name ends in '-Suen,' and one man is identified as 'son of Ur-[...].' Most of the entries in between are too damaged to read. The list closes with the word 'merchant(s),' suggesting the whole roster was classifying these individuals under that occupation, but the context — what they owed, delivered, or were being counted for — is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[Lu]-Enlila [...]-...-ga [...]-daga [...]-Suen [...]-... [...]-... [...]-... Lu-[Enlila?] Da?-[...] son of Ur-[...] merchant(s)
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
[lu2?]-en-lil2#-[la2?] [...]-x-ga [...]-da-ga [...-]suen# [...]-x [...]-x [...]-x lu2-[en-lil2-la2?] da?-[x] dumu ur-[...] dam-gar3
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — Hattori diss. p. 280, N 1192. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: N 1192 (University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA) — from Nippur (mod. Nuffar) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P276343). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-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.