Position in chronology
MVN 03, 017
About this tablet
This small clay tablet is an Early Dynastic (roughly mid-third millennium BCE) storehouse inventory from Girsu, one of the great administrative cities of ancient Sumer. It records leather goods — sacks, a ball — and farm equipment, hoes and the toothed teeth of a field-harrow, being kept or delivered to a granary building, with a farmer named Puzur-Mama named at the end, likely as the responsible party or recipient. Texts like this are the bureaucratic backbone of early Sumerian institutions: the temple or palace household tracking its tools and materials down to the last item.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a storeroom tally. Ten leather sacks (of the 'lamsag' type) are logged as kept in the building known as the great granary. Also on hand: four hoes and forty-nine teeth for a field-harrow, stored in a place called the tilluba. One leather ball and three more items follow, but the tablet breaks off here and the next few lines are lost. What survives afterward is a fragmentary phrase and then a name — Puzur-Mama, described as 'the farmer' — apparently the person tied to this batch of tools and leather goods.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 lamsag-leather (sack), 10 (units) — in the house, the great granary that is built, [are on hand]. 4 hoes, 49 teeth of the field-harrow (GAN2-ur3) — in the tilluba(-storeroom) are on hand. 1 leather ball, 3 [...] [...] [...] its/that ...-ka he/it brought (na-i3-mi-ri) Puzur-Mama, the farmer.
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Spotted an error? Suggest a correction — confirmed corrections feed the engine's knowledge base.
Transliteration
1(asz@c) lam-sag kusz3 1(u) e2 ga2 mah-a du3-a-a# [mu-gal2] 4(asz@c) al 5(u@c) la2 1(asz@c) zu2 GAN2-ur3 til-lu-ub2-a mu-gal2 1(asz@c) ellag kusz3 3(disz@t) [...] [...] [...] bi#?-ka na i3-mi-ri puzur4-ma-ma engar-ra
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — MVN 03, 017. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Free Library of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA (P222199) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.