Position in chronology
WF 021
About this tablet
An administrative record from Šuruppak (modern Fara, southern Iraq), dating to the Early Dynastic period, roughly 2600–2400 BCE. It is a donkey-allocation list: each entry pairs a quantity with a named individual and sometimes their institutional title — herald, scribe — in the compact shorthand typical of Fara bureaucracy. The closing phrase 'new tablet' functions as a colophon, marking this as a freshly inscribed record, possibly a clean copy of an earlier account. Such documents are among the oldest surviving examples of literate administration anywhere on earth.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Two donkeys are allocated to the son of Hax-NE. Two more — drawn from a secondary or supplementary lot — go to the herald Nag-su. A further two are recorded for AK-dingir, also under the name Nag-su, and one donkey is assigned to Utu-šita, a scribe. Another scribe, Lu-zi, is listed as well. The tablet closes with the notation 'new tablet,' indicating this is a freshly written record.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine2 donkeys — son of Hax-NE; 2 from the flank — herald Nag-su; 2 — AK-dingir / Nag-su; 1 — Utu-šita, scribe; Lu-zi, scribe. New tablet.
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 dumu hax(|SAGxHA|)-NE 2(asz@c) za3-ta nimgir nag-su 2(asz@c) AK-dingir nag-su 1(asz@c) utu-szita dub-sar lu2-zi3@t dub-sar dub gibil
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIa (ca. 2600-2500 BC)) — WF 021. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin, Germany (P010978) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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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.