Position in chronology
CUSAS 03, 0874
About this tablet
A small Ur III receipt from Garšana, a private estate town in southern Iraq, dated to the seventh year of King Šu-Suen (c. 2030 BCE). Two hides of grain-fattened sheep are handed over by an official named Iškur-illat to a leatherworker, Anah-ilī, and booked against the standing allotment of a woman called Nin-su'anna. The tablet is sealed by the recipient, whose seal gives his profession and his father's name — Anah-ilī, leatherworker, son of Saba. It is exactly the kind of everyday workshop paperwork that made the Ur III bureaucracy famous: raw material issued, recipient named, month and year recorded.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Receipt: two hides from grain-fed sheep, charged to Nin-su'anna's regular allotment. Issued by Iškur-illat and received by Anah-ilī. Month of Akiti, in the year King Šu-Suen destroyed the land of Zabšali. Sealed by Annah-ilī, leatherworker, son of Saba.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine2 hides of grain-fed sheep, regular provision (sá-du₁₁) of Nin-su'anna; from Iškur-illat Anah-ilī received. Month: Akiti. Year: Šu-Suen, the king, destroyed the land of Zabšali. (Seal:) Annah-ilī, leatherworker, son of Saba.
Our translation engine — Opus 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
2(disz) kusz udu niga sa2-du11 nin-su4-an-na ki iszkur-illat-ta a-na-ah-i3-li2 szu ba-an-ti iti a2-ki-ti mu szu-suen lugal-e ma-da za-ab-sza-li mu-hul an-na-ah-i3-li2 aszgab dumu sa2-ba
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — CUSAS 03, 0874. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format). [year-name] Dated to Šu-Suen y6 — Land of Zabšali destroyed based on canonical year-name formula in the transliteration.
Attribution
Image: CUNES 49-15-076 (Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA) — from Garšana (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P324082). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.