A witness reading. A Vigslist translation.
A Nippur witness of the Fable of the Crane and the Raven — a documented partial: an identified Old Babylonian fragment from Nippur whose photograph did not yield a certifiable sign-by-sign reading, printed as a documented account of the object.
A witness reading. Tier W — witness reading only, documented partial. No composition claim is made for this tablet, and no first-translation claim of any kind attaches to it. The composition is served with a transliteration and a line-by-line English translation from a third witness, UET 6, 0199 (Ur), and its standing print edition is Alster, Wisdom of Ancient Sumer (CDL Press, 2005), as “The Goose and the Raven” — in the Ur witness’s served text the first bird, kur-gi₄, is translated “goose.” The CDLI catalogue title for this tablet is “Fable of the Crane and the Raven”; the two titles name one composition, and the difference is recorded rather than smoothed over. No line of this witness reached a certifiable sign-by-sign reading from the photograph, so no sign value is printed for this tablet. Whether this tablet stands among the further witnesses in Alster’s source list was not verified, and no claim is made either way. This witness is not restored from the Ur witness or from Alster anywhere on this page.
One fragment: UM 29-13-329, Penn Museum, Philadelphia — Nippur, Old Babylonian (ca. 1900–1600 BC). CDLI number: P255302. CDLI condition note: “chip, center”; genre comment: “Fable of the Crane and the Raven; 17 lines.” Neither this tablet’s record nor its pair’s carries an inscription text: this record’s only reference is a museum photo catalogue entry. A broad area at the left of the principal face is uninscribed broken surface carrying the museum ink registration “29-13-329” — the one verbatim reading certified for this tablet, and it is modern ink, not cuneiform. The inscribed surface survives as a strip along the right of that face and as a densely written narrow face.
Ruled registers run the length of the surviving strip in a small, dense Old Babylonian hand. In the lower half of the strip the sign forms are deeply impressed and individually separable — the best-preserved zone on the tablet, and a reader with the object or with raking-light imaging will read it. From the flat-lit photograph the forms separate but their values do not certify: the strip preserves only a slice of each line’s width, the hand is small, and the candidate values for the recurring forms differ by interior wedges the photograph does not resolve. Every candidate value considered was left out for that reason. The blocker is not resolution — the photograph is large — but surface state and flat frontal light. The tablet is flagged first for re-reading under raking light or from the object.
Counts: 17 line positions — 0 whole, 0 part, 17 fragments, 0 invented. The line total is the CDLI catalogue count, carried as such; the strip’s registers are consistent with it, but the slice preserved is too narrow for an independent recount, and none is claimed. Dragon scan: not decidable from the photograph. No ušum, ušumgal, muš, mušmaḫ, mušḫuššu, or bašmu reading is claimed for this witness, and absence is not claimed either — a scan requires a transliteration, and none exists for this witness.
Lines 1–17: ruled registers with dense sign forms across the surviving width of the strip. (Fragments — sign forms visible, no value certified; no line is transliterated and no line is assigned a place in the composition.) End of the inscribed area as photographed.
Witness reading only, documented partial, UM 29-13-329. No sign value is printed for this tablet, because none was certified. Published 2026-10-23. A Vigslist translation.
Built 2026-10-23 from the Second Collection of the Vigslist translations program (October 23, 2026).
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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