Position in chronology
FTP 072
About this tablet
A beer distribution record from ancient Šuruppak (modern Fara, southern Iraq), dating to approximately 2600–2400 BCE in the Early Dynastic period. It registers several quantities of beer — measured in sila, roughly a liter per unit — drawn from or associated with a place or institution called Zaningata, with a person named Ur-ni named at the close, most likely as the responsible official. Beer was the everyday wage-good and ration currency of the Mesopotamian institutional economy, and tablets like this were its routine paperwork. Several lines are too damaged to recover in full.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Thirteen sila of beer; then three sila of beer — both from the Zaningata storehouse or institution. A further two sila appears in a partially damaged entry, followed by a line that is too broken to read, and then seventeen sila of beer in a line that is itself partially damaged. The name Ur-ni closes the record, most likely as the official responsible for this allocation. Two entries in the middle are lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine13 sila of beer; 3 sila of beer — [from/at] Zaningata: [x] 2 sila of beer, [x x] AN[...], 17 sila of beer — Ur-ni.
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
1(u@c) 3(asz@c) kasz sila3 3(asz@c) kasz sila3 za3-nin-ga2-ta [x] 2(asz@c) kasz sila3 [x x] AN# 1(u@c) 7(asz@c) kasz sila3# ur2-ni
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIa (ca. 2600-2500 BC)) — FTP 072. 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 (P222148) — 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.