Position in chronology
CUSAS 35, 399
About this tablet
A small Early Dynastic administrative tablet from roughly 2600–2350 BCE, probably from Umma in southern Iraq, listing five entries of food and drink disbursements: a batch of fine bread, three varieties of beer measured in sila (roughly liter-sized portions), and an aromatic plant ingredient. The fleeting mention of a weaver as a recipient in one entry places this record inside the provisioning system of a temple or palace workshop, where craftspeople drew their daily rations in kind rather than in coin. The tablet is tiny — barely five centimeters wide — yet its five terse lines capture the everyday bookkeeping that kept an ancient Mesopotamian institution fed and watered.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Forty portions of good-quality UD-bread; seven sila of [vessel-type] beer for the weaver; three sila of aromatic [herb] drink flavored with u2-u2-la plant; five sila of DIN-SZE barley beer; ten sila of fine (or thin) beer. Five lines, five commodities — a storeroom clerk's complete record of provisions going out the door, covering solid food and at least three distinct varieties of beer in the space of a palm-sized clay tag.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine40 [loaves of] ninda-UD bread, fine quality 7 [vessels of] |UKKENxGUG2| beer, [measured in] sila — [for] the weaver 3 [vessels of] szim-[x] aromatic, [measured in] sila — u2-u2-la [plant] 5 [vessels of] DIN-SZE beer, [measured in] sila 10 [measures of] fine beer, [in] sila
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
4(u@c) ninda-UD sa6-ga 7(asz@c) |UKKENxGUG2| kasz sila3 usz-bar 3(asz@c) szim-x sila3 u2-u2-la 5(asz@c) DIN-SZE kasz sila3 1(u@c) kasz sig15 sila3
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC) ?) — CUSAS 35, 399. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P252803) — 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.