Position in chronology
CUSAS 26, 235
About this tablet
This is an accounting receipt from Ur in southern Iraq, written in Sumerian during the Akkadian (Sargonic) period, about 2300–2150 BCE, when the kings of Akkad ruled Mesopotamia. Large amounts of barley, hundreds of gur and so many tons of grain, are booked as rations. One lot went to a man whose name begins Ur-, and another went to a group called 'the men of the mar-za', probably a work team at an institutional establishment, possibly a boatyard. Like many administrative tablets it is short and damaged, but it shows how the state paid its dependent workers in grain.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Receipt: Ur-[...] (the rest of the name is lost) has taken delivery of 960 gur of barley, principal amount, properly checked, as barley rations. The purpose or recipient that followed is broken. A second lot of at least 600 gur of barley, also principal, has been received by the men of the mar-za. Next to it is a note of some number of minas, apparently at 10 each, but the exact figure is damaged.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse(?) 1. 16 (curved notation: 1 × 600 + 6 × 60 = 960) gur of barley, cap[ital], in order, 2. barley rations [......]: 3. Ur-[......] 4. [has] received. 5. 1(× 600) [+ n] gur of barley, capital; 6. [n+]1 mina(s), 10 each(?): 7. the men of the mar-za 8. have received. (The transliteration supplied ends here)
Our translation engine — Opus 5.5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
1(gesz'u@c) 6(gesz2@c) gur sag#-[gal2] si-sa2 sze-ba# [x x?] ur-[x x]-ke4 szu [ba]-ti# 1(gesz'u@c) [n] sze# gur# sag#-gal2 n 1(disz) ma-na 1(u)-ta lu2 mar-za-ke4-ne szu ba-ti
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC) ?) — CUSAS 26, 235. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: British Museum, London, UK (P467742) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5-5 (2026-09-20/v8-evolved).
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Related sources
One of the earliest specimens of human writing. Not literature, not law — accounting. The need to keep track of grain in a temple bureaucracy is what pushed marks-on-clay into a system that could one day carry epics.
A window into the world's first total state. The Ur III administration tracked every animal, every worker, every shekel — for a population in the millions. The level of paperwork was not exceeded until the modern era.