Position in chronology
HSS 10, 194
About this tablet
A badly damaged administrative tablet from Gasur — the Old Akkadian-period town that centuries later became Hurrian Nuzi, in northern Iraq. The surviving entries count personnel: male workers (guruš) and groups of female workers (geme) listed under partially preserved personal names, with the final line locating the account 'in Gasur' itself. It belongs to the earliest archive from this site, showing a Sargonic-era bureaucracy tracking its labor force person by person.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Only scraps of this personnel ledger survive. The top lines are too broken to read. Then come entries for male laborers, followed by a run of names whose beginnings are lost — someone ending in -guš, another in -kiḫi, another in -ḫi. A subtotal records at least four female workers, then another name ending in -silatum, a damaged entry, and a further group of five female workers. The account closes with its location: these people were counted at Gasur. In short: a headcount of men and women on a work roster at Gasur, most of the details now lost to damage.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. [...] ... [...] 2. [...] ... ... [...] 3. [...] ... ... 4. [...] male worker(s) 5. [...]-gu-uš (personal name, broken) 6. [...]-ki-ḫi (personal name, broken) 7. [...]-ḫi (personal name, broken) 8. [...]-... (broken) 9. [...]-... (broken) 10. [n +] 4 female workers 11. [...]-silatum (personal name, broken) 12. [n] ... ... (broken entry) 13. [n +] 5 female workers, 14. in Gasur.
Our translation engine — Fable 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
[...] x [...] [...] x x [...] [...] x x [...] _gurusz#_ [...]-gu#-usz [...]-ki-hi [...]-hi [...]-x [...]-x [n] 4(asz@c) _geme2_ [...]-si11-la-tum [n] x nisz2-be [n] 5(asz@c) _geme2_ in# ga-sur2#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Old Akkadian (ca. 2340-2200 BC)) — HSS 10, 194. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA (P213459) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-09-20/v8-evolved).
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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.