Position in chronology
DMNS A554.05
About this tablet
A labor account from Umma in southern Iraq, drawn up in the fifth year of King Šu-Suen (about 2033 BCE). It tallies the workdays of female laborers — women in state or temple service — assigned to the barley harvest, to stacking the cut sheaves, and to maintenance work on the local irrigation system: the weir belonging to the lumaḫ-priest and the sluice gate, where earth had to be moved. The tablet was sealed by an official named Lu-gina, whose seal impression served as the ancient equivalent of a signature. Records like this one show how tightly the Ur III bureaucracy measured human labor, counting it in units of one worker for one day.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Labor summary: 378 woman-days spent cutting barley; 592 woman-days stacking the cut sheaves; 90 women working at the weir belonging to the lumaḫ-priest; 75 women on sa-du₈ duty; and 66 woman-days hauling earth from the sluice gate. The foreman's name is damaged and can no longer be read. Certified under the seal of Lu-gina. Dated to the year following the one in which King Šu-Suen built the Amorite wall.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine378 female-worker days, harvesting barley; 592 female-worker[-days], stacking sheaves; 90 female workers, at the weir of the lumaḫ-priest; 75 female workers, [doing] sa-du₈-work; 66 female-worker days, earth [taken] from the regulator (sluice); overseer: ...-IM(?)-...; under the seal of Lu-gina. Year after: "Šu-Suen the king built the Amorite wall."
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
6(gesz2) 1(u) 8(disz) geme2 u4 1(disz)-sze3 sze gurx(|SZE.KIN|)-a 9(gesz2) 5(u) 2(disz) geme2 u4 [1(disz)-sze3] zar3 tab-ba 1(gesz2)# 3(u)# geme2 kun-zi-da lu2-mah 1(gesz2)# 1(u)# 5(disz)# geme2 sa-du8 [ak] 1(gesz2) 6(disz) geme2 u4 1(disz)-sze3 kab2-ku5-ta sahar szu [ti-a] ugula x-IM?-x kiszib3 lu2-gi-na mu us2-sa szu-suen lugal-e bad3 mar-tu mu-du3
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — DMNS A554.05. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format). [year-name] Dated to Šu-Suen y2 — Year after: Šu-Suen became king based on canonical year-name formula in the transliteration.
Attribution
Image: DMNS A554.05 (Denver Museum of Natural Science, Denver, Colorado, USA) — from Umma (mod. Tell Jokha) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P393173). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.
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.