Position in chronology
CUSAS 03, 1283
About this tablet
A small receipt from Garšana, a private estate and garrison town in southern Iraq during the Ur III period (around 2038 BCE). It records that a man named Isu-arik took delivery of three axes, each weighing two minas (roughly a kilogram apiece), from Šu-Adad. It is dated by the year Šu-Suen destroyed Zabšali, a land in the Iranian highlands, and is explicitly marked as a duplicate of the original record.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Isu-arik received three axes, each weighing two minas, from Šu-Adad. Recorded in the month of Ubi-gu, in the year Šu-Suen, king of Ur, destroyed the land of Zabšali. This document is a copy.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine3 axes, 2 minas (weight) each, from Šu-Adad Isu-arik received. Month: Ubi-gu (u5-bi-gu7). Year: "Šu-Suen, king of Ur, destroyed the land of Zabšali." 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
3(disz) ha-zi-in 2(disz) ma-na-ta ki szu-iszkur-[ta] [i]-su2#-[a-ri-ik] szu# ba#-ti# iti u5-bi-gu7# 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, 1283. 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 48-06-035 (Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA) — from Garšana (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P322624). 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.