Position in chronology
CUSAS 03, 0326
About this tablet
A short administrative note from Garšana, a private estate town in southern Iraq whose archives belonged to the general Šu-Kabta and his wife Simat-Ištaran, written about 2036 BCE. It tallies mud bricks — 240 apiece — credited to three named men, Šarrum-bani, Puzur-Išum and Ahuni, part of the enormous brick accounting that accompanied the building works at Garšana. The date formula names the second year of King Šu-Suen of Ur, when he set up a great commemorative stele for the gods Enlil and Ninlil at Nippur. The middle of the tablet is broken, so the remaining entries and the total are lost.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Brick count: 240 bricks to Šarrum-bani's account, 240 to Puzur-Išum, 240 to Ahuni. Several more entries follow but the tablet is broken here; one damaged line seems to note that the bricks were carried. The record is dated to the month of Akiti in the year King Šu-Suen of Ur set up the great stele for Enlil and Ninlil. A final note at the bottom, partly lost, appears to concern goods still to be delivered.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine240 bricks — Šarrum-bani; 240 (bricks) — Puzur-Išum; 240 (bricks) — Ahuni; [...] [...] [...] carried(?) [...] Month: Akiti. Year: Šu-Suen, king of Ur, erected the great stele for Enlil and Ninlil. "to be delivered"(?) [...]
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
4(gesz2) sig4 szar#-ru-um-ba-ni 4(gesz2) puzur4-i-szum 4(gesz2) a-hu-ni [...] [...] [...] ga6#? [...] iti a2-ki-ti# mu szu-suen lugal uri5-ma-ke4 na-ru2-a-mah en-lil2 nin-lil2-ra mu-ne-du3 ga-ga# [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — CUSAS 03, 0326. 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 48-12-047 (Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA) — from Garšana (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P329454). 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.