Position in chronology
TCBI 2/1, 11
About this tablet
A small round ledger tablet from the Early Dynastic period, probably from Zabalam in southern Iraq, listing barley issued to five members of a household or temple staff. Each entry pairs a measured amount of grain with a title or a personal name: an overseer, a scribe, two named men, and a fisherman. The scribe himself draws the second-largest share, and the fisherman the smallest — a compact snapshot of how rank translated into rations in a Sumerian institution some 4,500 years ago.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Barley issued: 1 barig 4 ban (roughly 100 liters) to the overseer; 2 barig to the scribe; 1 barig each to Bara-sag-nudi and Ur-nirah; and 4 ban to the fisherman. That is the whole document — a five-line grain payout list, with no date, seal, or summary total preserved on the surviving surface.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 barig 4 ban₂ of barley — the overseer (nu-banda₃); 2 barig of barley — the scribe; 1 barig of barley — Bara-sag-nudi; 1 barig of barley — Ur-nirah; 4 ban₂ of barley — the fisherman.
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
1(barig) 4(ban2@c) sze nu-banda3 2(barig@c) sze dub-sar 1(barig@c) sze bara2-sag3-nu-di 1(barig@c) sze# ur#!*-nirah 4(ban2@c) sze szu-ku6
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC) ?) — TCBI 2/1, 11. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Banca d'Italia, Rome, Italy (P382016) — 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.