Position in chronology
CUSAS 03, 0419
About this tablet
A small receipt from Garšana, a private estate in southern Iraq, dated to about 2030 BCE under King Šu-Suen of Ur. It records that a man named Apilum took delivery of a quantity of lard, issued from the stores of the official Iškur-illat, as provisions for the men who hauled boats along the canals. The final word marks the tablet as an archival duplicate — a glimpse of how the estate's bookkeepers kept their records in multiple copies.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Receipt: an unspecified amount of lard, the allotment for the boat-haulers. Apilum received it; it was charged against Iškur-illat's account. Month of the wool-work festival of Ninazu, in the year King Šu-Suen of Ur destroyed the land of Zabšali. This is a copy.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[... (quantity)] of lard (pig fat), [the requisition (nig₂-dab₅)] for the boat-towers (those who tow the boats); [A]pilum received it; from Iškur-[illat] it was expended. Month: "Wool-work of Ninazu" (ki-siki Ninazu, 4th month of the Umma calendar). Year: "Šu-Suen, king of Ur, destroyed the land of Zabšali" (Šu-Suen year 7). Copy.
Our translation engine — Fable 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
[...] i3-szah2 [nig2-dab5] ma2 gid2-e-ne [a]-pi#-lum-ma szu# ba-an-ti ki iszkur#-[illat-ta] ba-zi iti ki-siki nin-a-zu 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, 0419. 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 49-08-009 (Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA) — from Garšana (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P323434). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-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.