Position in chronology
JCS 31, 174 F
Not yet translated
This tablet is catalogued with its transliteration and photographed, 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.
From the same catalogue range (near P112107)
Transliteration
1(disz) kusz gu4 niga 5(disz) kusz udu niga 1(disz) kusz masz2 1(disz) kusz sila4 ki nu-hi-lum-ta da-da-a su-si-ig szu ba-ti kusz gu4 udu ma2 an-na geme2-nin-lil2-la2-ka giri3 nu-ur2-iszkur sza3 unu-ga iti a2-ki-ti mu en-ubur-zi-an-na en nanna masz2-e i3-pa3
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — JCS 31, 174 F. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, California, USA (P112107) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from CDLI raw catalogue, no published translation. P-number P112107..
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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.