Position in chronology
Amherst 033
About this tablet
This is a routine Ur III administrative receipt from Girsu, recording a disbursement of six royal gur (a standard dry-volume measure) of barley to feed a work gang or troop of laborers. It names the source of the grain, the sealing official, the overseeing captain, and closes with the month and year date plus the scribe's name and patronymic — the ordinary bureaucratic paperwork that kept the Ur III state's massive labor and ration system running around 4,000 years ago.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Six gur of barley, measured by the royal standard, were issued to cover food rations for a group of workers. The grain came from Ur-gigir and the transaction was sealed by A-saga, with A-hu-a serving as the responsible captain. The transaction was dated to the month of Mušudu, in the year 'Šašrum was destroyed' — a year name commemorating a military campaign under king Šu-Sin. The document was drawn up by the scribe Nimgir-šakuš, son of Magure.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine6 gur (royal measure) of barley, for the provisions of the workers (erin2), from Ur-gigir, under seal of A-saga; captain: A-hu-a. Month: Mušudu. Year: 'Šašrum was destroyed.' Nimgir-šakuš(?), the scribe, son of Magure.
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Spotted an error? Suggest a correction — confirmed corrections feed the engine's knowledge base.
Transliteration
6(asz) sze gur lugal sza3-gal erin2-na-sze3 ki ur-gigir-ta kiszib3 a2-sa6-ga nu-banda3 a-hu-a iti mu-szu-du7 mu sza-asz-ru-um ba-hul nimgir#?-sza3-kusz2#? dub-sar dumu ma2-gur8-re
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — Amherst 033. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: A.1241_1982 (Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, Birmingham, UK) — from Girsu (mod. Tello) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P100871). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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.
A window into the world's first total state. The Ur III administration tracked every animal, every worker, every shekel — for a population in the millions. The level of paperwork was not exceeded until the modern era.