Position in chronology
OIP 014, 060
About this tablet
This is a small Early Dynastic administrative tablet from Adab (modern Bismaya), recording an allocation of personnel and copper tools. Two officials, Ur-Suen and Ur-lam, each received a bundle of resources — hired laborers, servants, and copper implements called ha-buda — for work under the local institution's authority. Tablets like this are the everyday bookkeeping of a third-millennium BCE household or temple economy, tracking who was given what for labor or production.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Thirty hired workers and nine servants, along with ten copper ha-buda tools, were handed over to Ur-Suen. Separately, twenty-nine copper ha-buda tools were given to Ur-lam. The tablet is a short account balancing out labor and equipment issued to two named men, most likely for a work project overseen by an Adab household or institution.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine30 hired workers (lu2-hun-ga2), 10 less 1 (= 9) servants (ARAD2), 10 copper ha-buda-implements (ha-bu3-da uruda) — (for) Ur-Suen: was given. 30 less 1 (= 29) copper ha-buda-implements — (for) Ur-lam: was given.
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
3(u@c) lu2-hun-ga2 1(u@c) la2 1(asz@c) ARAD2 1(u@c) ha-bu3-da uruda ur-suen an-na-szum2 3(u@c) la2 1(asz@c) ha-bu3-da uruda ur-lam an-na-szum2
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — OIP 014, 060. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA (P222247) — 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.