Position in chronology
RIME 3/2.01.01.26, ex. add17
About this tablet
A royal building inscription of Ur-Namma, founder of the Third Dynasty of Ur (around 2100 BCE), the king best known today for the world's earliest surviving law code. In it he dedicates two public works to Enlil, chief god of the Sumerian pantheon: the rebuilding of the god's temple and the digging of a canal named En-erin-nun, which supplied the offerings for the god's table. Such inscriptions were stamped or written on bricks and foundation objects in many copies — this is one of dozens of surviving duplicates, a piece of state propaganda literally built into the fabric of the city.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Ur-Namma, king of Ur and ruler of Sumer and Akkad, dedicates this work to Enlil, king of all the lands and his divine master. He rebuilt Enlil's temple, and he also dug the canal called En-erin-nun — the waterway that carried the food offerings destined for the god. In short: the king announces, in the god's honor, a temple restoration and an irrigation project rolled into one act of royal piety.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineFor Enlil, king of all the lands, his master, Ur-Namma, king of Ur, king of Sumer and Akkad, built his temple for him, (and) dug for him the En-erin-nun canal, his canal of food offerings.
Our translation engine — Fable 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
en-[lil2] lugal kur-kur-[ra] lugal-a-ni ur-[namma] lugal uri5-ma lugal ki-en-gi ki-uri-ke4 e2-a-ni mu-na-du3 i7 en-erin2-nun i7 nidba-ka-ni mu-na-ba-al
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — RIME 3/2.01.01.26, ex. add17. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: NM 35.0061 (Nicholson Museum, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P418024). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-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.
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.
The earliest historical document in human history. Before this, we have lists, accounts, and dedications. Here, for the first time, a ruler tells us what happened — with names, places, and consequences.