A Sumerian catalogue of birds from Nippur — a witness reading
This page is a witness reading, not a first translation. The distinction matters, and it is stated here at the top: the Assyriologist Jeremiah Peterson transliterated this tablet inside the eBL database, and his own unpublished English renderings stand on the database record for nine of its ten lines. The renderings printed below are ours, made from his transliteration sign by sign and compared with his only afterward. Where the two differ, the working dossier records the difference and the reason.
The tablet is Old Babylonian, from Nippur, and sits today in Istanbul (museum number Ni 13193). Its only copy is no. 92 of Samuel Noah Kramer's third Istanbul copy volume, which was never published. No photograph of the tablet exists in any database. What survives on it is one column of a descriptive catalogue of birds, feature by feature — a beak a sculptor did not make, green eyes, a slender beak, crushing teeth. Catalogues of this kind belong to the šikinšu tradition, the listing of creatures by their form and nature. It is the same world as Nanše and the Birds, where the goddess Nanše sorts her birds by their forms, and the predator section of Home of the Fish.
Peterson, who knows this corpus well, could not place the text. His note on the record offers two named compositions to compare it with, and then a third option, in his own words: "possibly an unknown šikinšu type text." The comparison was run here against the openly reachable corpora. The cast overlaps — the kišibar bird named in line 5′ also stands in Home of the Fish's predator section, and line 9′'s bird sits beside that section's uburri — but no line of this tablet matches any line of any known composition, in the ETCSL corpus or anywhere in the full CDLI text archive. Peterson's third option stands as he left it.
One print citation touches the tablet: a discussion in Civil's The Farmer's Instructions (p. 100 n. 18), citing line 6′ of this column. It is a footnote, not an edition. It has not been read from this desk, and nothing in this reading rests on it; it is named here because it exists.
Every line is broken at the left. Brackets and gaps are exactly what they look like: places where the tablet is broken. Nothing has been filled in.
[…] a beak(?) that a sculptor did not [ … ]
[…] the face of the šu-ur₃ bird [ … ]
[…] eyes that do not open, green, a face [ … ]
[…] the …-bird [ … ] — a man [ … ] does not know
[…] the kišibar(?) bird [ … ]
[…] raised(?) [ … ], a slender beak [ … ]
[…] — (fragment: no construable text)
Now [ … ]
[…] the …buru bird [ … ] a beak [ … ]
[…] crushing teeth [ … ]
Three renderings deserve a note. In line 3′ we render the verb literally, "eyes that do not open"; Peterson renders "do not see," and the ancient lexical tradition is on his side — it equates this very phrase with the Akkadian for "not seeing." The sense is the same. In line 1′ the verb after "did not" is gone entirely; Peterson supplies "[fashion?]" as a conjecture, and we leave the gap open rather than borrow it. In line 5′ the question mark after kišibar is Peterson's own — the first sign of the bird's name carries his questioned reading in the transliteration.
The column carries 10 lines. None renders in whole; nine render in the part that survives; one is a fragment with nothing that can be construed. Nothing has been invented. If Peterson publishes his edition, or a duplicate ever places this text in a known composition, this page's standing will be updated to say so.
The tablet is held by the Istanbul Archaeology Museums (Ni 13193). Hand copy: Samuel Noah Kramer, ISET 3, no. 92 (unpublished). Transliteration: Jeremiah Peterson (eBL project, 2024), unpublished, with his working English renderings on the record for nine of the ten lines. This witness reading was made from that transliteration; it has not been collated against the original tablet, and no photograph of the tablet is available to collate against. The full working dossier — identification check, transliteration, and every divergence from Peterson's renderings with its reason — accompanies this article and is available to any scholar who wants to check the work.
Nuvira Technologies conducts this research with AI assistance, cross-verified against the primary sources to scholarly integrity standards. Uncertain readings are marked; broken lines are left broken.
— Richard Vigslist, Founder, Nuvira Technologies
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