Position in chronology
TCBI 2/1, 02
About this tablet
A labor roster from the Early Dynastic period (mid-third millennium BCE), probably from Zabalam in southern Iraq, now in the Banca d'Italia collection in Rome. Seven officials — among them a man named Ur-saman who holds the office of sukkal, 'vizier' — are each credited with a gang of workmen, and the scribe adds them up at the bottom: 215 men in all. It is one of the oldest surviving examples of the workforce accounting that Sumerian temple and palace institutions ran on, and the arithmetic still checks out: the broken sixth entry must have read 21 for the total to work.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Work-gang tally: Di-Utu, 35 men; the next supervisor (name lost), 30; Amar-šuba, 31; Ur-ildu, 26; [...]-zi, 36; Ur-saman the vizier, 21 (the figure is broken away but is required by the total); A-zu-zu, 36. Grand total: 215 men of the second grade. One name and one number are lost to damage, and the upper part of the tablet is too worn to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine35 male workers, second (grade) — Di-[Utu]; 30 [...]; 31 — Amar-šuba; 26 — Ur-ildu; 36 — [...]-zi; [21] — Ur-saman, the vizier (sukkal); 36 — A-zu-zu. Total: 215 male workers, second (grade).
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
3(u) 5(disz@t) gurusz#*-min* di-[utu] 3(u) [...] 3(u) 1(disz@t) amar#-szuba3 2(u) 6(disz@t) ur-ildu3 3(u) 6(disz@t) [...]-zi [...] ur-saman3 sukkal 3(u) 6(disz@t) a-zu-zu# szu-nigin2 3(gesz2) 3(u) 5(disz@t) gurusz min
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC) ?) — TCBI 2/1, 02. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Banca d'Italia, Rome, Italy (P382025) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-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.