Position in chronology
CUSAS 03, 0909
About this tablet
A small receipt from Garšana, a estate town in southern Iraq, written in the reign of Šu-Sin around 2030 BCE. It records a single goatskin — from a grain-fattened billy goat, so a good hide — handed over by a man named Iškur-illat to a leatherworker called Ana'aḫ-ilī, son of Sa'ba. The Garšana archive is famous for documenting a working household in extraordinary detail, down to individual craftsmen and the raw materials they drew, and this tablet is one such transaction slip.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Receipt: one hide from a grain-fed adult male goat, issued by Iškur-illat and taken in by Ana'aḫ-ilī. Dated to the month of Akiti, in the year the great processional barge was built for the gods Enlil and Ninlil. The recipient is identified at the end as Anna'aḫ-ilī the leatherworker, son of Sa'ba — the man who would actually work the skin.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 hide of a grain-fed full-grown male goat, from Iškur-illat, Ana'aḫ-ilī has received. Month: Akiti. Year: "The magnificent barge for Enlil and Ninlil [he] fashioned." (seal/attribution:) Anna'aḫ-ilī, leatherworker, son of Sa'ba.
Our translation engine — Opus 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Spotted an error? Suggest a correction — confirmed corrections feed the engine's knowledge base.
Transliteration
1(disz) kusz masz2-gal niga ki iszkur-illat-ta a-na-ah-i3-li2 szu ba-ti iti a2-ki-ti mu ma2-gur8-mah en-lil2 nin-lil2-ra [mu]-ne#-dim2 an-na-ah-i3-li2 aszgab dumu sa2-ba
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — CUSAS 03, 0909. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format). [year-name] Dated to Amar-Suen y8 — The great barge for Enlil and Ninlil was fashioned based on canonical year-name formula in the transliteration.
Attribution
Image: CUNES 49-02-004 (Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA) — from Garšana (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P323227). 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.