Position in chronology
CUSAS 03, 0319
About this tablet
A brick-production tally from Garšana, a private estate town in southern Iraq run by the princess Simat-Ištaran and her husband, the general and physician Šu-Kabta, around 2035 BCE. Each line credits a named workman with the number of mud bricks he made or hauled — Taribu with 840, Zabukua with 660, and four more men whose totals are lost in the break. The tablet is dated to the month of the Akiti festival in the third year of King Šu-Sîn of Ur, and belongs to the enormous construction archive of Garšana, one of the fullest records of an ancient building project ever recovered.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Brick count for the crew: Taribu, 840; Zabukua, 660; then Menazi, Šu-Mama, Naya and Šulanum, whose figures are broken away, plus at least one further entry now lost. The record is dated to the month of Akiti in the year King Šu-Sîn of Ur set up the great stele for Enlil and Ninlil — his third regnal year.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine840 bricks — Ta-ri-bu; 660 (bricks) — Za-bu-ku-a; [n (bricks)] — Me-na-zi; [n (bricks)] — Šu-Mama; [n (bricks)] — Na-a-a; [n (bricks)] — Šu-la-num; [n ...]; [Month:] Akiti. [Year:] Šu-Sîn, king of Ur, erected the great stele for Enlil and Ninlil (= Šu-Sîn year 3).
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
1(gesz'u) 4(gesz2) sig4 ta-ri#-bu 1(gesz'u) 1(gesz2) za-bu#-ku-a [n] me#-na-zi [n] szu#-ma-ma [n na]-a-a [n] szu#-la-num2 [n ...] [iti a2]-ki-ti [mu] szu-suen lugal uri5-ma-<ke4> na-ru2#-[a-mah] en-lil2 nin-[lil2-ka] mu-ne-du3
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — CUSAS 03, 0319. 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 48-02-236 (Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA) — from Garšana (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P322502). 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.