Position in chronology
FTP 025
About this tablet
A barley ration list from ancient Šuruppak (modern Fara, southern Iraq), dating to the Early Dynastic period, roughly 2600–2400 BCE. A scribe recorded fixed grain allocations — measured in 'ban' units of approximately six to ten liters each — disbursed to a small group of named individuals. The names are characteristically Sumerian and theophoric: Ur-Sud invokes the goddess Sud (later Ninlil); Ur-Abzu invokes the sacred underground freshwater realm of Enki. The lower half of the tablet is broken away, erasing at least three further recipients. Thousands of similar tablets survive from Šuruppak, making this one data-point in the city's vast bureaucratic grain economy.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The commodity is barley. Ur-Sud gets one ban; Lugal-ana, Adda-tur, and Ur-Abzu each get two ban. After that the tablet breaks — two lines are gone entirely. Three partial entries survive at the bottom: one ban for someone whose name is lost, two ban for someone else whose name is illegible, and two ban for a third person whose name has broken away. The rest is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 ban of barley — Ur-Sud 2 ban — Lugal-ana 2 ban — Adda-tur [2] ban — Ur-Abzu [...] (line broken) [...] (line broken) 1 ban — [name lost] 2 ban — [sign(s) unread, name lost] 2 ban — [name lost]
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
1(ban2@c) sze# ur-sud3 2(ban2@c) lugal-a2#-na 2(ban2@c) ad-da-tur 2(ban2@c)#? ur#-abzu# [...] [...] 1(ban2@c) [...] 2(ban2@c) x [x] 2(ban2@c) [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIa (ca. 2600-2500 BC)) — FTP 025. 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 (P222099) — 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.
Marks the boundary between proto-writing and writing. We can see signs being used systematically — but not yet phonetically. The leap to recording speech itself comes a few centuries later.
The earliest historical document in human history. Before this, we have lists, accounts, and dedications. Here, for the first time, a ruler tells us what happened — with names, places, and consequences.