Position in chronology
WF 080
About this tablet
A barley distribution record from the ancient city of Šuruppak (modern Fara, southern Iraq), dated to around 2500 BCE. A scribe tallied grain taken from institutional storage and disbursed to seven or eight named individuals — likely officials, administrators, or members of a temple household. The single largest allocation went to En-hegal, 'Lord of Abundance,' probably a senior official overseeing the store. Documents like this are among the earliest bookkeeping records in human history, capturing the tight grain management that kept Sumerian city-states functioning.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
From the communal grain store, En-hegal — 'Lord of Abundance' — received the lion's share: 5 gur and 3 barig of barley. Me-pa-e3 was given 2 gur (and possibly 2 barig more, though the scribe's notation is not fully legible here). Bil-a-nu-kusz2 and Adda each took 1 gur. Pa-nin-gal and Me-me together were allocated 2 gur and 2 barig between them. AN-nu-me and Amar-Isin each received 1 gur. All quantities were drawn from stored grain.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine5 gur 3 barig of stored barley — En-hegal; 2 gur [2 barig?] — Me-pa-e3; 1 gur — Bil-a-nu-kusz2; 1 gur — Adda; 2 gur 2 barig — Pa-nin-gal, Me-me; 1 gur — AN-nu-me; 1 gur — Amar-Isin.
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
5(asz@c) 3(barig@c) sze lid2-ga en-he2-gal2 2(asz@c) 2(barig@c)? me-pa-e3 1(asz@c) bilx(|PAP.GESZ.BIL|)-a2-nu-kusz2 1(asz@c) ad-da 2(asz@c) 2(barig@c) pa4-nin-gal me-me 1(asz@c) AN-nu-me 1(asz@c) amar-isinx(IN)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIa (ca. 2600-2500 BC)) — WF 080. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin, Germany (P011037) — 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.