Index of English Translations of Sumerian Clay 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.
“Because to the land of the Amorites three times she fled.”
Three lines, then a break. A slave woman called Ali-ahi has run away to the land of the Amorites, and not once but three times.
The tablet comes from Nippur, in what is now southern Iraq. It belongs to the Ur III period, roughly 2100 to 2000 BC. If it ever had a date, it was on the part that is lost.
What survives
“Ba-bur: Ali-ahi, slave woman of Lugal-inimgina, because to the land of the Amorites three times she fled.”
Her name is Akkadian: Ali-ahi, “Where is my brother?”. Her owner, Lugal-inimgina, has a Sumerian name. She is a geme, a slave woman who belonged to him.
“Three times”, a-ra2 3, is written as a number. The verb, ba-zah3, “she fled”, is the ordinary word for running away, the same word that marks runaways throughout this series.
The first word
The tablet opens with ba-bur2. The verb bur2 means “to release” or “to loosen”, so the word could mean “she was released” or “it was released”. It could also be part of a heading, or of a name. We cannot tell which. Whatever decision the tablet recorded about her is on the broken part, so we leave the word open.
The land of the Amorites
Kur mar-tu is “the land of the Amorites”. The word kur means both “land” and “mountains”, and is often used of foreign country. The Amorites were peoples living beyond Sumer to the west. By the time of the Ur III kings they had become such a force that Šu-Suen built a long wall between the Tigris and the Euphrates to hold them off.
So Ali-ahi’s flights were not to the next village. They were toward foreign country, outside the cities of Sumer. Here we are speculating, but running in that direction three times suggests she had somewhere, or someone, to go to. The tablet does not say.
What the tablet doesn’t tell us
We don’t know what happened to her. The rest of the front is broken away, and the back is blank.
We don’t know whether she was caught each time, or came back of her own accord.
We don’t know why she fled, or what “the land of the Amorites” meant on the ground: a region, a settlement, or simply a direction.
And we don’t know when this happened, beyond the dynasty.
Runaways in the record
Runaway slaves and workers are among the most common human stories on Ur III tablets. J. N. Reid has studied how owners and the state tracked runaways and paid fugitive-catchers to bring them back. Earlier in this series, Twice She Ran followed Geme-Baba, who fled twice and then had to swear by the king that she would not flee again.
Ali-ahi ran three times. The scribe wrote down her flights as the reason for something. Here we are speculating, but a sale, a release or a penalty would each explain why the record was made. The tablet breaks before it tells us.
The tablet in full (our translation)
Front: Ba-bur (released? meaning uncertain): Ali-ahi, slave woman of Lugal-inimgina, because, to the land of the Amorites, three times she fled. [The rest is broken.]
Back: blank.
How we read it
Key lines in transliteration: a-li2-a-hi geme2 lugal-inim-gi-na, “Ali-ahi, slave woman of Lugal-inimgina”; mu kur mar-tu-sze3, “because, to the land of the Amorites”; and a-ra2 3(disz) ba-zah3-a, “three times she fled”.
Uncertain: the first word, ba-bur2; and everything after the break.
Our confidence: medium. The surviving clause is clear; its context is lost.
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 (NATN, 1982, hand copies of Ur III tablets from Nippur in the Penn Museum). Dates use the conventional middle chronology and are approximate.
For the full description of sources, method, uncertainties, dating conventions, limitations, and how to report corrections, see About the Translations and Methodology.