Position in chronology
CUSAS 03, 0408
About this tablet
A small Ur III administrative note from Garšana, a private-estate town in southern Mesopotamia known from the archive of the general Šu-Kabta and his wife Simat-Ištaran. It records the issue of barley rations to a group of scribes, debited against the account of an official named Iškur-illat. The date formula is the first year of King Šu-Sîn of Ur (c. 2037 BCE), named after the great stele he had made for 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
Barley rations for the scribal staff, drawn from the stores held by Iškur-illat and expended here at Garšana. The opening of the tablet, which would have given the amounts, is broken away, as is a line before the date. Dated to the year King Šu-Sîn of Ur had the great stele made for Enlil and Ninlil — his first regnal year.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] Barley rations of the scribes, from Iškur-illat withdrawn (expended); within Garšana. [...] [Year:] Šu-[Sîn, king] of Ur, [fashioned] the great stele for [En]lil and Ninlil.
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
[...] sze-ba dub-sar-e-ne ki iszkur-illat-ta ba-zi sza3 gar-sza-an-na [...] [mu] szu-[suen lugal]-uri5[-ma-ke4] na-ru2-a-mah [en]-lil2 nin-lil2-ra mu#-ne-[dim2]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — CUSAS 03, 0408. 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 49-08-010 (Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA) — from Garšana (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P323435). 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.