Position in chronology
CUSAS 35, 209
About this tablet
A small Early Dynastic administrative tablet from Adab in southern Iraq, dating to roughly 2500–2350 BCE. It records the delivery of a large quantity of dates — approximately 1 gur and 2 barig, several hundred liters — entrusted to a boatman named Ur-[lu] for transport to an official known as the SAG-NAGAR, most likely a head carpenter or overseer of craftsmen. The transaction was authorized by a captain named Di-Utu, and dated to the Akiti festival month. It is the kind of terse, formulaic logistics record that kept Sumerian city-economies running: a named official, a named recipient, a commodity, a route, and a date — everything a supervisor needed to track goods moving through the system.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
One gur and two barig of dates — several hundred liters' worth — were handed over to a boatman named Ur-[lu] for delivery to the SAG-NAGAR official, and the transfer was duly recorded as completed. The disbursement came out of the 'house of the son' institution. A captain named Di-Utu was the officer of record responsible for the transaction. All of this took place in the month of the Akiti festival.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 gur, 2 barig of dates — to Ur-[lu], the boatman, [routed] toward the SAG-NAGAR [official] — was given. [House of the son:] Di-Utu, captain (nu-banda3). Month: Akiti.
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
1(asz@c) 2(barig@c) zu2#-lum# [gur] ur-[lu2] ma2-lah5-ra SAG-NAGAR-sze3 an-na-szum2 [e2-dumu] di-utu nu-banda3 iti a2-ki-ti#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — CUSAS 35, 209. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P252766) — 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.