Position in chronology
CUSAS 03, 0354
About this tablet
A short labor account from Garšana, a small estate town in southern Iraq, written in the reign of King Šu-Suen (about 2035 BCE). It records a single day's earth-moving job: four men, each assigned a quota of 10 gín of soil and each paid 6 liters of barley, digging out dirt and piling it up at a quay. Such tablets are the payroll slips of Ur III bureaucracy — they let us reconstruct daily wage rates, work quotas, and the construction projects of a provincial estate. The scribe notes at the end that this tablet is a copy of another document.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Work order: each man is assigned a quota of 10 gín of earth, and four men worked one day at a rate of 6 liters of barley apiece. The soil they dug out was piled up at the Ki-mura quay. The consignment is credited to Dingir-su-dan (Ilšu-dan), the foreman, and entered as an expenditure. Dated to the month of Ezem-mah in the year King Šu-Suen of Ur destroyed the land of Zabšali. This tablet is a copy of an earlier record; its opening line is broken away.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] Work-assignment: [per workman, 10] gín each; its workmen: 4, for 1 day; hired at 6 sila of barley each. Earth excavated, heaped up at the quay of Ki-mura. Delivery of Dingir-su-dan (Ilšu-dan), the overseer; booked out (as an expenditure). Month: Ezem-mah. Year: Šu-Suen, king of Ur, destroyed the land of Zabšali (Šu-Suen year 7). Copy (duplicate tablet).
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
[...] a2 [gurusz-a 1(u)] gin2-ta gurusz-bi 4(disz) u4 1(disz)-sze3 sze 6(disz) sila3-ta ba-hun sahar zi-ga kar-ki-mu-ra si-ga mu-kux(DU) dingir-su-dan ugula ba-zi iti ezem-mah mu szu-suen lugal uri5-ma-ke4 [ma]-da za-ab-sza-li mu-hul gaba#-ri
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — CUSAS 03, 0354. 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 50-03-058 (Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA) — from Garšana (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P324758). 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.