Position in chronology
WF 010
About this tablet
An Early Dynastic administrative tablet from Šuruppak (modern Fara, southern Iraq), dated to roughly 2600–2500 BCE. It records allocations of donkeys assigned to personnel groups identified as SZUL-SZUL — likely a collective category of 'young men' or junior workers — alongside a notation for an official responsible for disbursements. The lenticular (pillow-shaped) format is characteristic of quick, single-transaction records kept by temple or palace scribes at Šuruppak. Despite the brevity, it reveals the tight bookkeeping of the Early Dynastic economy: work animals and labor pools tracked together, signed off by a named or titled overseer.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Two donkeys are assigned to the yellow-green SZUL-SZUL group; the NE-LUM line provides a qualifier whose meaning is lost to us. Nine more donkeys go to a separate SZUL-category unit. An official — described as 'the man of the going-out' — oversees the disbursement. On the reverse, five members of the young-men's group are listed under a LUM-MA heading, and sixteen more SZUL-SZUL follow. The overall picture is a compact livestock-and-labor allocation slip from a Šuruppak storehouse; several key terms remain too archaic to translate with confidence.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine2 donkeys — [yellow-]green SZUL-SZUL [category] NE-LUM [uncertain qualifier] 9 donkeys — SZUL [category] lu2 [official] — mu-e3 [disbursement notation] 5 SZUL-SZUL lum-ma [uncertain qualifier] 16 SZUL-SZUL
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
2(asz@c) ansze-sig7-SZUL-SZUL NE-lumx(LAK218) 9(asz@c) ansze-SZUL lu2-mu-e3 5(asz@c) SZUL-SZUL lum-ma 1(u@c) 6(asz@c) SZUL-SZUL
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIa (ca. 2600-2500 BC)) — WF 010. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin, Germany (P010967) — 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.