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.
“They are runaways from the bala. Ur-Nungal must repay it.”
Six lines and a seal. Three women who worked in the mill-house have run away, their missing work has been priced in silver, and a named man must pay.
It comes from Umma, in what is now southern Iraq, around 2030 BC, the eighth year of King Šu-Suen, the year he “made the great barge for Enlil and Ninlil”.
A month of work, priced
“3 women of the mill-house, for 30 days; their silver: 1½ shekels. They are runaways from the bala.”
The e2-kikken, “mill-house”, was where grain was ground into flour, much of it by women. Earlier in this series, Forty-Two Women of Nippur showed an Umma mill balancing its books on 42 women.
Three women for thirty days make ninety workdays. At 1½ shekels of silver, each workday is valued at one sixtieth of a shekel. That is three grains of silver, about a seventh of a gram.
Bala-ta zah3-me, “they are runaways from the bala”: the women fled from their turn of service. The bala was a system of rotating obligations in the Ur III state. Here it seems to mean a stretch of labour they owed.
The scribe who pays
“Ur-Nungal must repay it”: ur-{d}nun-gal-ke4 su-su-dam. The tablet is sealed with his own seal: “Ur-Nungal, scribe, son of Lugal-emahe.”
So the person liable for the women’s lost work is a scribe, and he sealed the record of his own debt. He was presumably responsible for them, as their supervisor or as the official who had to deliver their labour. Here we are speculating. The tablet does not give his role.
What the tablet doesn’t tell us
We don’t know the women’s names. Unlike many ration lists, this note counts them but does not name them.
We don’t know whether they were caught, whether they came back, or where they went.
We don’t know whether Ur-Nungal really paid in silver, or whether the silver figure was a way of entering the shortfall in his account. Ur III bookkeepers regularly converted labour, grain and silver into one another, as R. K. Englund has shown.
And we don’t know why three women ran at once.
Who pays when workers run
Runaways appear across this series, usually as names with “fled” beside them. What is unusual here is the bill. In Counted Short, an Umma bookkeeper records runaway workers as a shortfall. This tablet goes one step further: it turns the shortfall into silver and names the man who owes it.
Here we are speculating, but the arrangement suggests why supervisors cared when their workers fled. Absent workers still had to be accounted for, and someone had to make good the loss.
The tablet in full (our translation)
Front: 3 women of the mill-house, for 30 days; their silver: 1½ shekels. They are runaways from the bala. Ur-Nungal must repay it.
Back: Year: Šu-Suen the king made the great barge for Enlil and Ninlil.
Seal: Ur-Nungal, scribe, son of Lugal-emahe.
How we read it
Key lines in transliteration: 3(disz) geme2 e2-kikken, “3 women of the mill-house”; ku3-bi 1(disz) 1/2(disz) gin2, “their silver: 1½ shekels”; bala-ta zah3-me, “they are runaways from the bala”; and su-su-dam, “must repay”.
Uncertain: what bala means here exactly; and Ur-Nungal’s role.
Our confidence: high. The note is short and formulaic.
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 (SAT 3, 2000, transliterations of Yale tablets). Dates use the conventional middle chronology and are approximate.
Further reading
- CDLI artifact page for P145060
- J. N. Reid, “Runaways and Fugitive-Catchers during the Third Dynasty of Ur” (2015)
- R. K. Englund, “Equivalency Values and the Command Economy of the Ur III Period in Mesopotamia” (2012)
- CDLI Wiki, “The Province of Umma”
- Wikipedia, “Shu-Sin”
- Wikipedia, “Third Dynasty of Ur”
- ePSD2, the electronic Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary