Position in chronology
AAICAB 1/1, pl. 059, 1924-0555
About this tablet
A small administrative receipt from Puzriš-Dagan (modern Drehem, southern Iraq), dated to the Ur III period, around 2050–2000 BCE. Drehem was the royal livestock-distribution centre of the Third Dynasty of Ur, where animals were collected and disbursed for temple offerings and palace needs. This tablet records a named official, Inta'e, taking charge of two lambs handed over by another official, Abba-saqa, on the 28th day of an intercalary month in a year when a throne was made for the great god Enlil. Such records were generated in their thousands and represent the meticulous day-to-day bookkeeping of one of the ancient world's most bureaucratically sophisticated states.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Two lambs were transferred from Abba-saqa to Inta'e on the 28th day of the intercalary month that follows the Mekigal festival, in the year that the throne of Enlil was fashioned. Total received: 2.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine2 lambs — day 28, from Abba-saqa, Inta'e received [them]. Month: the extra month after the Mekigal festival, [Year:] the year the throne of Enlil was fashioned. (Total:) 2.
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Engine notes
read from photo5 uncertain terms ↓
- in-ta-e3-<a> i3-dab5 — The verb 'in-ta-e3' (literally 'he/she brought out from') with elided -a is restored by the editor; 'i3-dab5' means 'received/took charge of'. Together: 'Inta'e received [them] from Abba-saqa.' The personal name Inta'e (Akkadian Inta''e) is well attested at Drehem.
- iti diri ezem-me-ki-gal2 — An intercalary (diri = extra/leap) month appended to the festival month Ezem-mekigal. The '#' marks in the transliteration signal the editor's partial uncertainty about these sign readings; cannot fully verify from photo.
- mu gu-za en-lil2-la2 ba-dim2 — Year name: 'The year the throne of Enlil was fashioned.' This year name is attested for Amar-Suen year 3 or a related Ur III king; exact royal attribution depends on full archival context not present in this fragment alone.
- 2(disz) [trailing] — The final isolated '2' may be a check-sum, a running total, or a tablet-section marker. Its function is not entirely clear without the broader archival context.
- ab-ba-sa6-ga — Personal name, literally 'Abba-saqa' (Sumerian: 'the father is good/fine'). A known Drehem official name; the -ta suffix marks the ablative 'from Abba-saqa'.
Reasoning ↓
Photo examination: the tablet is shown in five views (obverse, reverse, and three edges), all with the museum number '1924.555' inked on the top edge. The clay surface is buff/tan and generally intact with some surface crazing and minor cracks. On the obverse (upper centre panel), I can make out clusters of wedge impressions consistent with the small number signs and the word-signs expected in lines 1–3; the wedges are shallow but legible under raking light. The reverse (lower centre panel) shows further cuneiform signs, consistent with the date formula lines 4–6. I cannot independently resolve every individual sign at this resolution — particularly the month name and year formula signs are too small to confirm sign by sign — so cross-check is partial. The transliteration is consistent with a standard Ur III Drehem animal-receipt formula, and the year name 'mu gu-za den-lil2-la2 ba-dim2' is attested elsewhere in the Ur III corpus (a year of Amar-Suen or Šu-Suen, depending on collation). The trailing '2(disz)' at the end is possibly a subtotal or check-number, as is common in such tablets. The '<a>' restoration in 'in-ta-e3-<a>' is a standard scribal elision in Drehem texts. No major discrepancies between photo and transliteration detected, though the intercalary month sign 'diri' and the '#' markers on 'ezem#' and 'us2#' indicate the editor's uncertainty about those signs, which I likewise cannot fully verify from the photo.
Generated by claude-sonnet-4-6 · prompt 2026-05-12/v4-interpretation · May 12, 2026 · 2754 in / 1104 out tokens
Transliteration
2(disz) sila4 u4 2(u) 8(disz)-kam ki ab-ba-sa6-ga-ta in-ta-e3-<a> i3-dab5 iti diri ezem#-me-ki-gal2 us2#-sa mu gu-za en-lil2-la2 ba-dim2 2(disz)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — AAICAB 1/1, pl. 059, 1924-0555. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format). [year-name] Dated to Ur-Nammu y14 — The throne of Enlil was fashioned based on canonical year-name formula in the transliteration.
Attribution
Image: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK (P142813) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-18/v5-modern-rendering).
Related tablets
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.