Position in chronology
Orient 55, 157 no. 2
About this tablet
A fodder account from the Sumerian city of Umma, written about 2042 BCE under the Ur III kings. It records the barley needed to fatten 185 sheep that had been contributed to the bala, the rotating tax-and-service obligation each province owed the crown: one liter of grain per animal per day for a thirty-day month, totaling 5,550 liters. The official Lugal-azida is named as the responsible intermediary, and the tablet is dated by month and by the year in which the en-priest of Inanna was installed at Uruk. It is a small piece of the vast, obsessively precise bookkeeping that kept the Ur III state running.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Feed account: 185 grain-fed sheep, allotted one liter of barley per head per day. These are the sheep supplied under the bala levy. Total barley issued: 18 gur 2 barig 3 ban2 — about 5,550 liters, exactly one month's ration for the flock. Handled by Lugal-azida. Dated to the month of Dal, in the year the en-priest En-unugal was installed for the goddess Inanna.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine185 grain-fed sheep, at 1 sila (of barley) each (per day), sheep of the bala-obligation; their barley: 18 gur 2 barig 3 ban2; via Lugal-azida. Month: Dal. Year: En-unugal was installed (as en-priest) of Inanna. (= Amar-Sin year 5)
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
3(gesz2) 5(disz) udu niga 1(disz) sila3-ta udu bala-a sze-bi 1(u) 8(asz) 2(barig) 3(ban2) gur giri3 lugal-a2-zi-da iti dal mu en-unu6-gal inanna ba-hun
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — Orient 55, 157 no. 2. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format). [year-name] Dated to Amar-Suen y4 — En-unugal of Inanna installed based on canonical year-name formula in the transliteration.
Attribution
Image: WCMA 20.1.21 (Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, USA) — from Umma (mod. Tell Jokha) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P424388). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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Related sources
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.