Index of translations of Sumerian tablets
Sumerian clay tablets that, as far as we could check, had no published English translation. We translate them ourselves. The page linked above is the index of the series. A new tablet is a new row there, not a list copied into every story.
All translations are new and unofficial, made from transliterations on the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI), and may contain errors. Tablet images are credited to the holding institutions and CDLI. Dates use the conventional middle chronology and are approximate.
One sentence decided this case. A man named Ṣill-Adad stood up and declared: (he) is a slave of the palace.
The man he meant had just been bought, in Umma, in what is now southern Iraq, in the second year of King Amar-Suen (around 2045 BC). The buyer could not establish otherwise, and he handed the slave back. The scribe summed it all up in eight lines, listed three witnesses, and filed it under a label any lawyer would recognise: di til-la, “case closed”.
A purchase with a question mark
The tablet opens with the buyer: “Ki’ag, son of Abba-saga, the physician”. The Sumerian doesn’t make clear whether “the physician” (a-zu) is Ki’ag or his father, so he may be a physician himself or a physician’s son.
He “bought 1 male slave”. The seller is harder to pin down. The line reads “the wife of Šara-andul, slave(?) of Muni-mah”. The most natural reading is that the wife of Šara-andul sold him, and that someone in the chain was connected to a man called Muni-mah. But the words could be arranged differently, and we haven’t been able to settle it. No price is given.
The claim, and what could not be proved
Then comes the claim. “Ṣill-Adad declared: ‘(He) is a slave of the palace.’”
The next line is the legal hinge: nu-un-da-ge-en8, “it could not be established against him”. The subject isn’t written. Because Ki’ag then gives the slave up, the most likely reading is that Ki’ag couldn’t refute the palace claim. “Ki’ag returned the male slave into his hand.”
Three witnesses are named: Šara-bansa, Ašne’u (an uncertain reading) and Lu-igisasa. The tablet ends with “completed case of the citizens of Umma” and the year name “Amar-Suen the king destroyed Urbilum”.
What the tablet doesn’t tell us
We don’t know who Ṣill-Adad was. The tablet gives him no title, so we can’t say whether he spoke for the palace or for himself.
We don’t know why the slave might have belonged to the palace. The tablet does not say he had run away from it, and it does not say the sale was a fraud.
We don’t know into whose hand the slave went. It might be Ṣill-Adad’s, the palace’s, or even the seller’s.
And we don’t know whether Ki’ag got his money back. The record is silent either way.
The palace as an owner
In the Ur III state, the palace (e2-gal, literally “big house”) was the largest owner of dependent labour. Historian R. K. Englund describes the state’s dependent workers as “much comparable to chattel slaves but were inalienable wards to the state”. In other words, the state’s own people were not supposed to be on the market at all. A claim that a privately bought slave really belonged to the palace was therefore a serious one.
Here we are speculating, but if a claim in the palace’s name came up, a private buyer may have had little hope unless he could prove his title. That may be what happened to Ki’ag. Or perhaps he simply had no paperwork to show. We don’t know.
Has this tablet been translated before?
Di til-la records like this are the classic court documents of the Ur III period. L. E. Culbertson studied about 370 of them from Umma and Lagaš, and found “not a centrally legislated, uniformly applied body of laws”. The British Museum “houses an important group of Ur III court records from the provincial administration of Umma”, and M. Molina has catalogued and studied them.
So this tablet may well have been translated or discussed in Culbertson’s dissertation or in Molina’s work. We were not able to check either for this specific tablet. If you want to read professionally translated cases of this kind, B. Lafont’s chapter “Sumerian Judicial Decisions” in Judicial Decisions in the Ancient Near East (2023) has a section on “Affairs concerning Slaves”.
The tablet in full (our translation)
Front: Ki’ag, son of Abba-saga, the physician, from the wife of Šara-andul, slave(?) of Muni-mah, bought 1 male slave. Ṣill-Adad declared: “(He) is a slave of the palace.” It could not be established against him; (so) Ki’ag returned the male slave into his hand.
Back: Šara-bansa, Ašne’u(?), Lu-igisasa: they are the witnesses. Completed case of the citizens of Umma. Year: Amar-Suen the king destroyed Urbilum.
How we read it
Key lines in transliteration: ARAD2 e2-gal-kam bi2-du11, “he declared: (he) is a slave of the palace”, and ki-ag2-e sag-nita2 szu-na ba-an-gi4, “Ki’ag returned the male slave into his hand”. Gi4 is “to return”.
Uncertain: the seller’s line (dam {d}szara2-an-dul3 ARAD2 mu-ni-mah-sze3), which can be read more than one way; who “could not establish” what; whose “hand” the slave went to; whether “the physician” is Ki’ag or his father; and the witness name Ašne’u, which the editor reads by correcting a sign.
Our confidence: medium. The outcome is clear; the details are not.
This translation is new and unofficial, made from the CDLI transliteration, and may contain errors. “Untranslated” means we found no translation on CDLI or in the tablet’s publication history (a transliteration catalogue, BPOA 1, 365, 2006). Important caveat: the British Museum’s Umma court records have been catalogued by M. Molina and studied by L. E. Culbertson (2009), and either may already contain a translation of this tablet. We have not checked them, nor the concordance of WAW 43. Dates use the conventional middle chronology and are approximate.
Further reading
- CDLI artifact page for P200714
- L. E. Culbertson, Dispute Resolution in the Provincial Courts of the Third Dynasty of Ur (2009)
- M. Molina, “Court records from Umma” (2010)
- B. Lafont, “Sumerian Judicial Decisions”, in Judicial Decisions in the Ancient Near East (SBL Writings from the Ancient World 43, 2023)
- R. K. Englund, “Equivalency Values and the Command Economy of the Ur III Period in Mesopotamia” (2012)
- Wikipedia, “Third Dynasty of Ur”
- ePSD2, the electronic Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary
- Oracc, Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses
Also useful, and not linked here because we have not pinned a stable page: CDLN 2015:6, “A legal text at the Russell Library, Maynooth University”, which summarises recent work on Umma court records.