Position in chronology
NATN 169
Translation — curated editorial
EditorialEditorial entry — translation cited from: CDLI raw catalogue, no published translation. P-number P263321.
Transliteration
lu2#-inim-ma-bi-me iti NE-NE-gar-ra [mu en] inanna unu [masz2]-e# i3#-pa3# u2-a-mu# [x] dumu pu-szu?-[...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — NATN 169. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA (P263321) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from CDLI raw catalogue, no published translation. P-number P263321..
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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.
Marks the boundary between proto-writing and writing. We can see signs being used systematically — but not yet phonetically. The leap to recording speech itself comes a few centuries later.
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