Position in chronology
TCBI 2/1, 47
About this tablet
A small Early Dynastic accounting tablet, probably from the Zabalam region of southern Iraq, roughly the mid-third millennium BCE. It records a delivery of fish — including fish taken from a "great canebrake," one of the reed marshes that fed the southern cities — booked in and formally registered under a temple administrator named Tibira, with a second name, Mutila, attached. The closing note, "2 years and 5 months," is the period the account covers. It is a plain piece of institutional bookkeeping: proof that temples in the earliest literate societies tracked marsh fisheries as carefully as grain.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Delivery: about 4 ban (roughly 40 liters) — one fish of the a-de'a kind, together with bundles and gagia, plus one fish of the SAGxTAG4 kind. Goods received and entered in the books. These are fish from the great reed marsh. Credited to Tibira, the temple administrator; also named, Mutila. The account covers two years and five months. Several of the numbers on the tablet are damaged and only partly legible.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine4 ban(?) — 1(?) fish, a-de'a-fish, bundle(s), gagia; 1 fish of the SAGxTAG4-type. Received. Registered (lit. "drawn/measured out"). It is fish of the great canebrake. (For) the temple administrator, Tibira; Mutila. 2 years (and) 5 months.
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
4(ban2@c)#? 1(disz@t)? ku6 a-de2 sa gagia 1(asz@c) ku6 |SAGxTAG4|-a il2# mu#-gid2# ku6 gesz-gi gal-kam sanga ti-bi2-ra-a mu-ti-la-a 2(asz@c) mu iti 5(asz@c)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC) ?) — TCBI 2/1, 47. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Banca d'Italia, Rome, Italy (P382055) — 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.