Position in chronology
CBS 07280
About this tablet
A grain ration or allocation record from Nippur (ancient Sumer's great religious center, in what is now southern Iraq), dating to the Early Dynastic period, roughly 2500–2350 BCE. It lists quantities of grain — measured in large 'gur' units and the smaller 'barig' — dispensed to a series of named individuals, at least two of whom bear names containing the god Enlil and the title 'lugal' (great one / king), typical of the Nippur scribal and temple world. The varying amounts — Ur-Abu receives a full 2 gur while Lugal-shesh and Enlil-[name broken] each receive only 2 barig, roughly one-eighth as much — hint at a hierarchy of status or role among recipients. The tablet is fragmentary: the first and last lines are broken, and several personal names are only partially preserved.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet is too damaged at the top and bottom to read in full. Of what survives: someone received 2 gur of grain — possibly a person named Masz-da5, though one sign after the name is unclear; another entry records 1 gur and 2 barig for a person whose name is only partly legible. Ur-Abu received 2 gur; Lugal-shesh received 2 barig; and a person whose name began with Enlil also received 2 barig. A final entry is too broken to read. This is, in essence, a payroll ledger — grain going out to specific people in different amounts, dutifully recorded by a temple or institutional scribe at Nippur.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[broken] x [...] 2 gur — Masz-da5, [pa4?] [broken] 1 gur 2 barig — Sag-[x]-[(broken)] 2 gur — Ur-Abu 2 barig — Lugal-shesh 2 barig — Enlil-[broken] [broken] — [nesag?] [broken]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[n] x [...] 2(asz@c) masz-da5 pa4? [x] 1(asz@c) 2(barig@c) sag-x-[(x)] 2(asz@c) ur-ab-u2 2(barig@c) lugal-szesz 2(barig@c)# en-lil2#-[x x] [x] ne#-sag#? [x (x)]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — CBS 07280. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA (P262305) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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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.