Position in chronology
AAICAB 1/1, pl. 059, 1924-0555
About this tablet
A small clay receipt from Puzriš-Dagan (modern Drehem), the great livestock clearing-house of the Ur III state, dated to the reign of Amar-Suen (about 2044 BCE). It records two lambs handed over on the 28th day of an intercalary month by Abbasaga — the chief officer of the animal depot, whose name appears on thousands of such tablets — and taken in charge by an official named Intae'a. The total, "2," is repeated on the edge so the figure could be checked without untying the tablet from a bundle. Documents like this are the daily bookkeeping of one of the most tightly administered economies of the ancient world.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Two lambs, released on the 28th of the month from Abbasaga's stock and signed for by Intae'a. Dated to the extra (leap) month that followed the month of the Mekigal festival, in the year the throne of Enlil was made. Total: 2 head.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine2 lambs; the 28th day; from Abbasaga; Intae'a received (them). (reverse) Month: the intercalary month following "Festival-of-Mekigal"; year: the throne of Enlil was fashioned. (edge) 2.
Our translation engine — Opus 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Spotted an error? Suggest a correction — confirmed corrections feed the engine's knowledge base.
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-opus-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.
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.