A reading, published with its checks still open. A Vigslist translation.
Seven line-tails — “… abundance and joy …”. The tails of a text in a favourable register: a shrine, abundance, joy — and nothing else the clay kept.
Published as a reading. No first-translation claim is made for this piece: a scholar’s unpublished English rendering stands on its record, and the credit question named in the notes below is still open.
Object: Ist Ni 09453, Arkeoloji Müzeleri, Istanbul. Old Babylonian, Nippur. CDLI P343591; copy ISET 1, pl. 170. CDLI class: ETCSL 7.99 Unidentified texts (witness) (CHECK) — assigned to no known composition. No image served anywhere — this reading rests on Peterson's transliteration alone.
Record state worked from: live eBL record Ni.9453 re-fetched 2026-10-22 via the Fragmentarium API; saved at . Transliteration by Peterson, entered 2023-04-13; revisions through 2025-06-09. Seven lines, all tails: every line is broken at the left, and most break again at the right.
Print status (dossier check, this wave): the record's only curated reference is COPY (Kramer, ISET 1, pl. 170); uncurated traces are index sightings only — Borger, HKL 2 (1975), p. 87, and Civil, Index to the Corpus of Sumerian Literature, pp. 164, 218, 247 (the standing index pages for this stretch of the shelf). No EDITION, no DISCUSSION typing, no identification in print or in either database. The bar on a first is Peterson's own #tr.en, not print: witness class, as labeled.
Method (drawer-class law): the renderings below are ours, built from Peterson's transliteration sign by sign. His #tr.en lines were compared only after each of our renderings was formed; agreements are recorded in §3. His notebook lines are never reproduced as our text.
What the fragment is: the tails of a text in a favorable register — a shrine, abundance, joy, a "thus" — and nothing else the clay kept. No genre, no god, no speaker can be named from what survives, and none is.
#tr.en exists on 3 lines (4′, 5′, 6′) — the same three lines this reading renders as phrases.Agreements (independently reached): all three rendered lines — 4′ "thus" (ur₅-bi, "in this way"); 5′ "shrine" (zag-ĝar); 6′ "abundance and joy" (he₂-ĝal₂, giri₁₇-zal). No divergences: on a tails-only fragment there was nothing to diverge over, and the agreement is recorded plainly rather than dressed as corroboration.
None. No ušumgal, no muš, no mušḫuššu, no bašmu, no serpent-god name stands on this fragment.
Witness reading, fragments class, drawer class, labeled from its first line. No first-translation claim is made or implied. The composition remains unidentified and unpublished; what is rendered here is everything the preserved tails honestly carry.
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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