Position in chronology
TCBI 1, 009
About this tablet
A land register from Adab (modern Bismaya) in southern Iraq, written roughly 2500 BCE. Each line pairs a measured field area — reckoned in bur, eše and iku, the standard Sumerian surface units — with the name of the man who held or worked it: Me-su, Nigar, Ur-sag-utu, and others whose names are now broken. Documents like this are the backbone of early Mesopotamian estate administration, the tax and allotment paperwork that let a city-state's institutions know exactly who farmed which plot. The lower half of the tablet was left blank and the reverse has eroded, so the account is incomplete.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
A field ledger: just under two eše (about 11 iku) assigned to Me-su; one eše to Nigar; two eše and two iku to Ur-sag-utu; one bur to a man whose name ends in -tir; a further plot, one iku short of the stated total, again to Me-su; and another entry of two and a half iku. The last line is broken beyond reading, and the back of the tablet is too worn to make out anything continuous.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine2 eše minus 1 iku of field — Me-su; 1 eše — Nigar; 2 eše 2 (iku) — Ur-sag-utu; 1 bur — ...-tir; [n] minus 1 iku — Me-su; ... [field], 2 1/2 iku of field; ... ... ... (the remaining signs are illegible) (Reverse: surface eroded; a few faint wedges survive in the upper part, no continuous text recoverable.)
Our translation engine — Opus 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
2(esze3) la2 1(iku) GAN2 me-su 1(esze3) nigar 2(esze3) 2(disz@t) ur-sag-utu 1(bur3) x-tir n la2 1(iku) me-su x (GAN2#) 2(iku@t) 1/2(disz) GAN2 x x x
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — TCBI 1, 009. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Banca d'Italia, Rome, Italy (P382262) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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.