Position in chronology
CUSAS 03, 0314
About this tablet
A badly broken administrative tablet from Garšana, a private estate-town in southern Iraq run by the general Šu-Kabta and his wife Simat-Ištaran, dated to the first year of King Šu-Suen (c. 2037 BCE). What survives is a column of large round numbers — 3,600, 1,200, 600, 480 and so on — each once followed by a name or category now lost; totals on this scale in the Garšana archive normally count mud bricks or bundled labor days. Only the date at the foot of the tablet is fully legible, and it preserves one of the best-known Ur III year-names, commemorating Šu-Suen's dedication of a great stele to the gods Enlil and Ninlil at Nippur.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet is a numbered list, most of it lost. What can still be read are the quantities: 3,600 in the first entry, then a heading referring to a "group of ten," then 480 for someone whose name begins ša-, 360 for someone beginning bi-, then 1,200, 120, 240, 600, 440, 300 and 240. The items being counted, and the people they were charged to, are gone with the broken surface. The dating formula at the end survives: the month of the Ninazu festival, in the year that Šu-Suen, king of Ur, erected the great stele for Enlil and Ninlil.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] 3,600 [...] nam-10 (the "group/office of ten") [...] 480 ša-[...] 360 bi-[...] 1,200 [...] 120 [...] 240 [...] 600 [...] 440 [...] 300 [...] 240 [...] [...] [Month: festival(?) of] Ninazu. [Year:] Šu-Suen, king of Ur, built the great stele for Enlil and Ninlil.
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
[...] 1(szar2) [...] nam-1(u) [...] 8(gesz2) sza-[...] 6(gesz2) bi-[...] 2(gesz'u) [...] 2(gesz2) [...] 4(gesz2) [...] 1(gesz'u) [...] 7(gesz2) 2(u) [...] 5(gesz2) [...] 4(gesz2) [...] [...] [iti ezem?-]nin-a-zu [mu szu]-suen lugal-[uri5]-ma-<ke4> na-ru2-a-[mah ]en-lil2 nin-lil2-[ra] mu-ne-du3
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — CUSAS 03, 0314. 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 49-12-057 (Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA) — from Garšana (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P323812). 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.