Position in chronology
OrAnt 16, 292 6
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 P124616)
Transliteration
2(asz) gu2 siki-gi# na4 KA-nu-[ta] a2 lu2 hun-ga2#-[sze3] a-sza3 bad3 [x] e2# na-ra-am-i3-li2 [x] e2 x-sze3 ba-an-kux(KWU147) mu ki-masz ba-hul#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — OrAnt 16, 292 6. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA (P124616) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from CDLI raw catalogue, no published translation. P-number P124616..
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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.