Position in chronology
CUSAS 35, 120
About this tablet
A grain distribution record from Early Dynastic Adab (modern Bismaya, southern Iraq), probably around 2500–2350 BCE. A temple or palace scribe tallied measured rations of barley — in the capacity units barig and asz — allocated from the city's chief granary to five named individuals. The closing formula marks the transaction as completed and certified, possibly as a dedication connected to the sky-god An. This is exactly the kind of workaday accounting document that Sumerian city-state granaries produced in the thousands: small, practical, and precious precisely because of its ordinariness.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
From the chief granary: [some number plus] 2 barig of barley for Enlil-la. [A quantity of] 2 asz for Ur-ga. [A quantity] for Sag-zi. 2 asz for Ur-eš-peš. [A quantity of] 2 barig for Ur-dingir. The leading numbers on most lines are too damaged to read. The record closes with the standard certification: it has been given.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[n+] 2 barig, granary barley — [for] Enlil-la; [n+] 2 asz — Ur-ga; [n+] — Sag-zi; 2 asz — Ur-eš-peš; [n+] 2 barig — Ur-dingir. (From the) head granary: it has been given.
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[n] 2(barig@c) guru7 gur [x? ]en-lil2-la2 [n] 2(asz@c)# ur-ga2 [n] sag-zi 2(asz@c) ur-esz5@t-pesz [n] 2(barig@c)# ur-dingir guru7#-sag-ga2 an#-na-szum2-ma-am3
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — CUSAS 35, 120. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P252711) — 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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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.