An Old Babylonian lament from Nippur, in its first published English translation
The gala was Sumer's professional lamentation singer — the man whose office was to sing the grief of the city, to stand in the temple and carry its sorrow in song so the gods would relent. The speaker lists a gala's office among his own losses — on the natural reading of that line, this tablet is a gala singing about himself.
His world has been taken apart piece by piece, and the song is the inventory of what is gone: his priesthood, his singer's office, his champion, his right hand, his left hand. In the last five lines of the obverse, each entry closes with a refrain — may I […] for you — and breaks off. The verb at the heart of the refrain is lost in all five lines where the refrain survives. It is marked lost there, five times, rather than guessed once.
The tablet is Old Babylonian, from Nippur, and sits today in Istanbul (museum number Ni 03074). Samuel Noah Kramer copied it by hand in Istanbul in 1937–38; the copy was published in 1944. No edition and no translation ever followed, in any language. In 2023–25 the Assyriologist Jeremiah Peterson transliterated it inside the eBL database, unpublished work that sat in the database the way things sit in a scholar's drawer. In 2025 Peterson mentioned the tablet once in print, in an article about another song: one sentence, observing that Ninsubur appears with Inana in a mourning ritual in "the fragmentary and currently to my knowledge unplaced context of Ni 3074." Unplaced is the tablet's whole scholarly story — nobody has identified what composition this is. We translated from Peterson's transliteration, and he is credited below.
Brackets and gaps are exactly what they look like: places where the tablet is broken. Nothing has been filled in. In two lines the last sign of the word "my" is a modern restoration; the dossier marks which ones.
[…] — (traces only)
[My] office of […] — (the office's name is lost)
[My] office of […] — (lost)
My […] office […] — (lost)
My office of gudu₄-priest [ … ]
My office of gala, the lamentation singer [ … ]
My kur-ma-ra(?) one [ … ] — may I […] for you [ … ]
My […] of the dagger(?) [ … ] — may I […] for you [ … ]
My champion [ … ] — may I […] for you [ … ]
My right hand [ … ] — may I […] for you [ … ]
My left hand [ … ] — may I […] for you [ … ]
On the reverse the cast changes. The singer's losses give way to the divine household:
The vizier of An [ … ]
The servant, at the planted(?) tree [ … ] — (Peterson's alternative reading: ḫenbur, a reed)
The Lady of Heaven [ … ]
[ … ] wood/tree [ … ] — (fragment)
[ … ] wood/tree [ … ] — (fragment)
[ … ] wood/tree [ … ] — (fragment)
[ … ] wood/tree [ … ] — (fragment)
[ … ] — (not construable)
The servant [ … ] the woman(?) [ … ]
The Lady of Heaven [ … ]
[ … ] — (traces only)
The Lady of Heaven is Inanna under her Eme-sal name. She is named twice — the second naming rests on a partly restored sign — in lines too broken to carry more than her name. The vizier is not anonymous either: Peterson, who transliterated the tablet, reads the reverse's figures as Ninsubur, the vizier (sukkal) of An, together with Inanna in a mourning ritual, and takes "the servant" of lines 2 and 9 as a writing of Ninsubur's name, (Nin)šubur. That identification is his, published in 2025. The lines themselves are too broken to carry the scene further.
The tablet carries 22 lines. Fifteen of them carry a translation, in whole or in the part that survives; seven are fragments — traces, a bare repeated sign, or nothing that can be construed. The composition has no name and no known duplicate. If a second copy ever surfaces and identifies it, this translation's standing changes to a witness translation, and the record will say so.
The tablet is held by the Istanbul Archaeology Museums (Ni 03074). Hand copy: Samuel Noah Kramer, Sumerian Literary Texts from Nippur 45 (1944). Transliteration: Jeremiah Peterson (eBL project, 2023–25), unpublished. This translation was made from that transliteration; it has not been collated against the original tablet, and museum-grade photography of Ni 03074 is the verification step that remains open. The full working dossier — print-status check, transliteration, and every rejected reading with its reasons — 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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