Position in chronology
FTP 037
About this tablet
A small grain-ration record from the ancient city of Šuruppak (modern Fara, southern Iraq), written around 2500 BCE during the Early Dynastic period. A temple or palace administrator logged disbursements of barley and semolina — measured in barig, roughly 36 liters each — to a handful of named individuals, including a cupbearer and a person whose name invokes the sacred underground waters of the god Enki. Tablets like this one are the everyday bookkeeping of a Sumerian city-state: who got grain, how much, and under what institutional label. Hundreds of similar lenticular tablets survive from Fara, together forming one of the earliest administrative archives in human history.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The record is a short ration list. Someone — whose name or number at the start is damaged — received one barig of barley; they are identified with the chariot depot (or a similar institution) and hold the title of cupbearer. Geszgal-si received two barig, with a further label that remains unclear. Lu2-ezen received one barig of semolina. One entry is completely lost. Finally, Ama-abzu-si received three barig of barley. The whole text is a routine institutional record: grain out, names attached, quantities noted.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[x] 1 barig of barley — [for] Ša3-gigir[?] (the chariot[-depot]?), the cupbearer; 2 barig — Geszgal-si, GAM-GAM; 1 barig of semolina — Lu2-ezen; [...] 3 barig of barley — Ama-abzu-si.
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
[x] 1(barig@c)#? sze sza3-gigir? sagi 2(barig@c) geszgal-si GAM-GAM 1(barig@c)#? dabin# lu2-ezen# [...] 3(barig@c) sze ama-abzu-si
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIa (ca. 2600-2500 BC)) — FTP 037. 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 (P222112) — 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.