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.
“Šagul, man of Irisagrig, stole them.”
The “them” are two donkeys, and the line comes from a small tablet found at Ur, in what is now southern Iraq. It was written around 2037 BC, in the year King Šu-Suen came to the throne. In about a dozen short lines it records a theft, a confession, a debt in silver and a man who stood guarantee.
What makes the donkeys unusual is whose they were. They seem to carry a brand, and the name in it is Nanna, the moon god of Ur.
A theft in a dozen lines
The tablet opens with the animals: “2 donkeys”, followed by a short phrase that seems to describe a mark on them. As copied, it reads za3 “10” of Nanna. The tablet’s editor suggests that za3 might be read za3-šu4, and zag-šuš means “brand”. Read that way, these are donkeys branded as Nanna’s. We can’t explain the “10”.
Then the thief. “Šagul, man of Irisagrig, stole them.” Irisagrig was another town of the Ur III state, but the record itself comes from Ur.
Next comes ka-ga-na ba-an-gi-in, literally “by his mouth he made it firm”. The verb gin means “to be firm, true”. In plain English, he confessed.
The bill, and a broken line
“As compensation for the loss” comes next. The Sumerian word, ibiza, means “financial loss”. Then “[x] mina(s) of silver”. A mina was 60 shekels, about half a kilo. But the number in front of the word is broken off, so we don’t know how much Šagul owed, and we won’t guess.
The first line on the back is lost entirely. After it comes the hardest phrase on the tablet: ARAD2 bi2-du11, “‘slave’, he declared”.
Finally, “Ṣilla-Adad, the šuš, stood as his guarantor.” The dictionary gives šuš as “a high official” or “(horse) groom”. “Groom” would suit a case about donkeys, but “official” is just as possible. The last line places it all “in the village of the shepherds”.
What the tablet doesn’t tell us
This tablet has more holes than most, so it’s worth marking them one by one.
We don’t know how much silver was owed. The number is broken.
We don’t know what “slave” refers to. It might mean that Šagul said he would become a slave if he could not pay. It might equally be a statement about someone named in the lost line just before. We can’t tell, and we won’t present either reading as fact.
We don’t know why Šagul took the donkeys, or what he did with them.
We don’t know what happened next. The tablet doesn’t say whether Šagul paid, or whether Ṣilla-Adad had to pay for him. No court or judges are named either. What survives is a confession, a debt in silver and a guarantor, written down in a shepherds’ village.
The moon god’s animals
Nanna, known in Akkadian as Sin, was the moon god. “The main cult center of Sin was Ur”, where he was the city’s tutelary deity, and he was “closely associated with cattle herding”.
So “donkeys of Nanna” are most naturally animals belonging to the god’s household at Ur. That is our inference: the tablet itself never uses the word “temple”.
The date adds a detail worth noticing. The kings of the Third Dynasty of Ur “believed themselves to be appointed to their position by Sin”, and this record is dated to the very year Šu-Suen became king. We are only pointing out a coincidence, not a connection: in the year a new king took a throne that Ur’s kings believed the moon god had given them, a man from Irisagrig owned up to taking two of the moon god’s donkeys.
The tablet is one small example of a large and well-studied genre. Ur III legal records have been collected by specialists, and a 2023 volume, Judicial Decisions in the Ancient Near East, gives many comparable cases in new translations.
The tablet in full (our translation)
Front: 2 donkeys, with the brand (?) “10” of Nanna: Šagul, man of Irisagrig, stole them. By his own mouth he confirmed it. As compensation for the loss, [x] mina(s) of silver
Back: […] (one line broken). “Slave”, he declared (?). Ṣilla-Adad, the šuš (official or groom), stood as his guarantor. In the village of the shepherds. Year: Šu-Suen became king.
How we read it
Key lines in transliteration: sza3-gul lu2 iri-sa12-rig7{ki}-ke4 / ba-an-zuh ka-ga-na ba-an-gi-in, “Šagul, man of Irisagrig, stole them; by his own mouth he confirmed it”, and s,e-la-{d}iszkur szusz3 / szu du8-a-ni in-gub, “Ṣilla-Adad, the šuš, stood as his guarantor”. Zuh is “to steal”.
Uncertain: the brand in the first line (za3 1(u) {d}nanna), which depends on the editor’s alternative reading; the amount of silver, which is broken; the lost first line of the back; ARAD2 bi2-du11, “‘slave’, he declared”, our weakest reading; and Ṣilla-Adad’s title.
Our confidence: medium. Theft, confession and guarantor are clear; the brand, the sum and the “slave” line 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 hand copy in UET 3, 1937). Caveats: Ur III legal records were collected in A. Falkenstein’s Die neusumerischen Gerichtsurkunden (1956), and many are translated in WAW 43 (2023); we have not checked those books’ indexes for this tablet. CDLI also links the tablet to two databases, BDTNS and the Electronic Babylonian Library, which we did not check. Dates use the conventional middle chronology and are approximate.
Further reading
- CDLI artifact page for P136341
- SBL Press, “Judicial Decisions in the Ancient Near East” (2023)
- Wikipedia, “Sin (mythology)”
- 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: A. Falkenstein, Die neusumerischen Gerichtsurkunden (1956), and the Oracc metrology tables.