Position in chronology
CUSAS 35, 182
About this tablet
A small livestock-accounting tablet from Adab (modern Bismaya, southern Iraq), dating to the Early Dynastic III period, roughly 2400–2350 BCE. It records 18 sheep — counted in the subtraction notation standard for the period (20 minus 2) — belonging to or disbursed from the household of 'the son,' a designation that likely identifies a specific institutional estate. Several officials are listed: a farmer, an overseer (nu-banda3), and an intermediary named Giri-gen-na through whose hands the animals apparently passed, all within a named month of the local calendar. Tablets like this were the everyday paperwork of Sumerian temple and palace estates, tracking flocks animal by animal under named responsible parties.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
From the household of 'the son': 18 sheep of the HAR type, recorded in the month of Ab-e3-zi-ga. The opening lines are too damaged to read. The responsible parties listed are Ur-[ga2], a farmer; Di-Utu; and a military-administrative overseer — with the transfer routed through Giri-gen-na. The final line is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...]-x [x]-ba [House] of the son it is: 18 sheep (HAR-type) Month: Ab-e3-zi-ga [...] [...] Ur-[ga2] Farmer [x?] Di-Utu Overseer (nu-banda3) Via Giri-gen-na [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...]-x [x]-ba [e2]-dumu-kam 2(u@c)# la2 2(asz@c) udu-HAR iti# ab#-e3#-zi#-ga# [...] [...] ur-[ga2] engar [x?] di#-utu# nu-banda3 giri3-gen-na [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — CUSAS 35, 182. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P252762) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
Related tablets
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.