Position in chronology
CUSAS 03, 0070
About this tablet
A small Ur III labor record from Garšana, a private estate town in southern Iraq around 2035 BCE, whose archive was excavated by looters and later published from the Cornell collection. It logs a crew of men and women under the foreman Ba-zi assigned to grinding malt — the crushed sprouted barley that brewers turned into beer — with the transaction routed through an official named Iškur-illat and recorded by the scribe Puzur-Ninkarrak. The worker totals and the full year-name are broken away, but the dating formula places it in the reign of Šu-Sin. Documents like this show how meticulously a Mesopotamian estate tracked even a single day's labor in its brewery.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
A work detail of men and women — the numbers are lost — was put to grinding malt under the foreman Ba-zi. The assignment was handled by Iškur-illat and entered into the books by the scribe Puzur-Ninkarrak, at Garšana. It is dated to the month of the Šulgi Festival in a regnal year of King Šu-Sin, though the rest of the year-name is broken off.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[n] male workers, [n] female workers, [foreman]: Ba-zi, employed to grind [malt], [via Iškur]-illat [and] Puzur-Nin[kar]rak, the scribe. [In Gar]šana. [Month:] "Festival of Šulgi." [Year:] Šu-Sin, the king, [...]
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
[n] gurusz [n] geme2 [ugula] ba-zi [munu4] al#-nag4-[ga2]-de3# gub-ba [giri3 iszkur]-illat [u3] puzur4-nin-[kar]-ke3 dub-sar [sza3 gar-sza]-an-na [iti ezem-]szul-gi [mu szu]-suen lugal-e [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — CUSAS 03, 0070. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format). [year-name] Dated to Šu-Suen y1 — Šu-Suen became king based on canonical year-name formula in the transliteration.
Attribution
Image: CUNES 49-02-024 (Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA) — from Garšana (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P323247). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-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.