Position in chronology
CUSAS 03, 1276
About this tablet
A receipt from Garšana, a private estate-town in southern Iraq run by the general Šu-Kabta and the royal princess Simat-Ištaran, dated to the seventh year of King Šu-Sîn of Ur (about 2030 BCE). It records the handover of more than eighteen thousand bundles of cut reed — the ordinary building and fuel material of Mesopotamia — delivered in bales of fifteen and of twenty, from a man named Pušu-kīn to the estate's chief administrator, Iškur-illat, with a barge foreman named Bēlī-ilī acting as the conveying agent. The final word, gaba-ri, tells us this is not the original document but an archival duplicate, one small piece of the meticulous bookkeeping that the Ur III state and its estates produced by the tens of thousands.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Received: 10,910 bundles of reed, baled fifteen bundles to the bale, and a further 7,340 bundles, baled twenty to the bale. Supplier: Pušu-kīn. Received by Iškur-illat, the estate manager. Delivered under the charge of Bēlī-ilī, foreman of the tow-barge crew. Dated to the month of the Gazelle-feast, in the year King Šu-Sîn destroyed the land of Zabšali. This document is a duplicate copy.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine2 šar 1 šar 1 geš 50 bundles of reed, NE(-type) — (10,910 bundles), in bales of 15 bundles each; 2 šar 2 geš 20 bundles of reed, [NE(-type)] — (7,340 bundles), in bales of 20 bundles each; from Pušu-kīn Iškur-illat, the chief household administrator (šabra), has received. Via Bēlī-ilī, foreman of the towed barge (crew). Month: "Gazelle-feast" (maš-da-gu₇). Year: Šu-Sîn, the king, destroyed the land of Zabšali. (= Šu-Sîn year 7) Copy (gaba-ri).
Our translation engine — Opus 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
2(szar2) 1(szar2) 1(gesz2) 5(u) sa gi NE gu-nigin2 1(u) 5(disz) sa-ta 2(szar2) 2(gesz2) 2(u) sa gi# [NE] gu-nigin2 2(u) sa-ta ki pu-szu-ki-in-ta iszkur-illat szabra# szu ba-an-ti giri3 be-li2-i3-li2 ugula ma2 gid2-[da] iti masz2-da3-gu7 mu szu-suen lugal-[e] ma-da za-ab-[sza]-li mu-hul gaba-ri
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — CUSAS 03, 1276. 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 48-06-024 (Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA) — from Garšana (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P322613). 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.