Position in chronology
Nisaba 17, 005a-d
About this tablet
This is a small Ur III-period administrative receipt from Girsu, part of a much larger dossier scattered today across several museum collections (a common fate for tablets separated from their original find-groups). It records a disbursement of grain and flour from a state granary to a man named Lu-saga, explicitly earmarked to support workers attached to 'various shrines.' Texts like this are the backbone of our knowledge of how the Ur III state fed its temple-linked labor force — mundane bookkeeping that, multiplied by thousands of similar tablets, reveals the scale of centralized redistribution in one of the world's first bureaucratic states.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a receipt: seven royal-measure gur of barley, plus some flour, were issued as ration-grain and formally withdrawn from the granary tied to the cultivated fields. A man named Lu-saga took delivery of it, on behalf of laborers working at several different temples. The transaction is dated to the harvest month, in the year the throne of Enlil was made.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine7 gur barley (royal measure) — flour, for KA (rations?) — barley of the šuku-rations, was withdrawn (booked out) from the granary of the cultivated land (uru11) — Lu-saga received (it), for the workers of the various shrines. Month: "Harvest" (sze-sag11-ku5). Year: "The throne of Enlil was fashioned."
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
7(asz) sze gur lugal zi3 KA-sze3 sze szuku-ra ba-zi i3-dub uru11-ta lu2-sa6-ga szu ba-ti mu# erin2# esz3# didli#-sze3# iti sze-sag11-ku5 mu gu-za en-lil2-la2 ba-dim2
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — Nisaba 17, 005a-d. 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: BM 088882 & BM 093364 & BM 093490 & BM 093494 & BM 093508 & BM 100380 & Cugnin 020 & Cugnin 021 & Cugnin 054 & SE 004 (British Museum, London, UK; private: Cugnin, France; Couvent Saint-Etienne, Jerusalem) — from Girsu (mod. Tello) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P127598). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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.