Position in chronology
Aleppo 138
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 P100470)
Transliteration
1(u) sa kid gi-sa ra ma2-gur8 szara2-ka-sze3 3(u) sa kid szer7-um e2-kas4-sze3 ki ur-szul-pa-e3-ta kiszib3 nam-sza3-tam lu2-he2-gal2 iti nesag mu us2-sa gu-za en-lil2-la2 ba-dim2 lugal-he2-gal2 dub-sar dumu [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — Aleppo 138. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format). [year-name] Dated to Ur-Nammu y15 — Year after: The throne of Enlil was fashioned based on canonical year-name formula in the transliteration.
Attribution
Image: National Museum of Syria, Aleppo, Syria (P100470) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from CDLI raw catalogue, no published translation. P-number P100470..
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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.