Position in chronology
TCBI 2/1, 22
About this tablet
A small clay account tablet from the Early Dynastic period, probably from Zabalam in southern Iraq, some 4,500 years ago. It tracks amounts of flour measured in the standard capacity units — gur, barig, ban2 — set against numbers of months, and closes by naming the man responsible, Šubur. The bottom line labels the grain as flour 'held in reserve,' which suggests this is a stock or ration-provisioning record rather than a payment receipt. Only the front is written; the back was left blank, and a crack and a broken corner have taken part of the first entry away.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Flour account. An opening quantity in gur (the figure is broken away), covering eleven months; 2 barig 4 ban2 for three months; 3 gur less 1 barig 2 ban2 for one month. This is flour held in reserve. Responsible: Šubur. The reverse of the tablet was left blank.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[n] gur of flour — month(s): 11. 2 barig 4 ban2 — month(s): 3. 3 gur less 1 barig 2 ban2 — month(s): 1. [Flour] held in reserve. Šubur. (Reverse: uninscribed / surface eroded.)
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
[x] zi3# gur# iti 1(u) 1(disz@t) 2(barig@c) 4(ban2@c) iti 3(disz@t) 3(asz@c) la2 1(barig@c) 2(ban2@c) iti 1(disz@t) [zi3 bar]-ra-gal2 szubur
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC) ?) — TCBI 2/1, 22. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Banca d'Italia, Rome, Italy (P382028) — 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.