Position in chronology
CUSAS 03, 1144
About this tablet
A receipt from the Ur III estate of Garšana in southern Iraq, dated to the reign of Šu-Suen (c. 2030 BCE). The administrator Ilī-ašranni issues a quantity of flour, and a man named Iškur-illat signs for it. The final word marks the tablet as a duplicate kept for the archive — a small glimpse of how a large private estate tracked its food stores, dated by a military campaign against the eastern land of Zabšali.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Iškur-illat received one gur of flour and two barig of coarse dabin-flour from Ilī-ašranni, the chief administrator of the household. Dated in a festival month (the name is broken) of the year Šu-Suen, king of Ur, destroyed the land of Zabšali. This tablet is a copy.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 gur of [flour], 2 barig of dabin-flour, from Ilī-ašranni, the chief household administrator, Iškur-illat received. Month: Festival of [...]. Year: Šu-[Suen], king of Ur, destroyed the land of Zab[šali]. 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
1(asz) [zi3] gur# 2(barig) dabin ki i3-li2-asz-ra-ni szabra-ta iszkur-illat szu ba-ti iti ezem-[...] 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, 1144. 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 48-06-018 (Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA) — from Garšana (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P322607). 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.