Position in chronology
FTP 021
About this tablet
An Early Dynastic administrative tablet from Šuruppak (modern Fara, southern Iraq), dating to around 2600–2500 BCE, recording disbursements of livestock — primarily sheep of specific quality or grade categories — connected to Enlil, the most powerful god of the Sumerian pantheon, and to a named temple building. The upper portion of the tablet has broken away, taking the account's opening with it. What survives is characteristic Fara-period paperwork: small counted batches of animals assigned to divine institutions, with a personal name — 'An-na-sum,' meaning 'Gift of An,' a typical Sumerian theophoric name — marking one transaction. The last readable line gives a partial running total of twelve.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Three 'gaba' sheep and one 'URUDU' sheep are disbursed — attributed to An-na-sum ('Gift of An') and recorded under Enlil's authority. A separate entry assigns further URUDU-type sheep to a temple called the House of the Sud-Anzu. The account then notes two more items under Enlil's name again, and the total reaches twelve — though what exactly is being totaled is lost at the broken edge. The top of the tablet is missing entirely, so we are reading only the middle and lower portions of the original account.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] [...] ox/bull(?) 3 gaba-sheep 1 URUDU-sheep — An-na-sum Enlil [...] URUDU-sheep Temple of Sud-Anzu(?) 2 [...] [En]lil 12 [...]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[...] [...] gu4? 3(asz@c) udu-gaba 1(asz@c) udu URUDU an#-na#-sum# en-lil2 [...] udu-URUDU e2-sud3#-anzu2#? 2(asz@c) [...] []en-[lil2] 1(u@c) 2(asz@c) [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIa (ca. 2600-2500 BC)) — FTP 021. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA (P222095) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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.