Position in chronology
FTP 083
About this tablet
An administrative allocation list from Šuruppak (modern Fara, southern Iraq), dating to roughly 2600–2500 BCE, near the end of the Early Dynastic period. It records quantities of some commodity — likely grain or another staple — distributed to a small roster of named individuals and institutions, among them a pig-keeper and a cook. The recipients include both personal names and household or estate designations, giving a glimpse into the layered staffing of a Sumerian institutional complex. This is the unremarkable daily paperwork of an ancient city-state: brief, functional, and completely devoid of ceremony, yet invaluable for showing who worked in the institution and how its resources were parcelled out.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Eight units of something — the commodity heading (gu2-u2) is unclear but likely a specific load or consignment type — are assigned to ki-ni-gi4. Thirty units go to the House of Ušumgal, and another thirty to Sud-Anzu, who is identified as a pig-keeper. Fifteen units are recorded for Ur-tur under what appears to be a sub-heading marking a separate class of delivery or receipt (gu2-szu-du8). Fifteen more go to Sud, and twelve to the cook of the House of Zi. What exactly is being distributed is not spelled out beyond the opening term; the scribe's original audience evidently knew the context and needed no reminder.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine8 (units), gu2-u2: ki-ni-gi4 30 (units): house of Ušumgal 30 (units): Sud-Anzu — pig-keeper (šušₓ) 15 (units): Ur-tur (gu2-szu-du8) 15 (units): Sud 12 (units): [house of] Zi — the cook
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
8(asz@c) gu2-u2 ki-ni-gi4 3(u@c) e2-uszum-gal# 3(u@c) sud3-anzu szusz3 1(u@c) 5(asz@c) ur-tur gu2-szu-du8 1(u@c) 5(asz@c) sud3 1(u@c) 2(asz@c) e2-zi# muhaldim
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIa (ca. 2600-2500 BC)) — FTP 083. 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 (P222159) — 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.