Position in chronology
MVN 15, 359
About this tablet
A receipt from the city of Umma in southern Iraq, dated to the second regnal year of King Amar-Suen of the Third Dynasty of Ur (c. 2045 BCE). A scribe named Lugal-ebansa acknowledges taking delivery of 4,200 bundles of reeds from a man named Dada, and rolls his personal seal over the tablet to certify it. Reeds were a staple industrial material in Mesopotamia — used for baskets, mats, boats, fuel, and construction — and receipts like this one show the meticulous paper trail behind the state economy of Ur.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Received: 4,200 bundles of reeds, handed over by Dada. Signed for by Lugal-ebansa. Dated to the month of the first-fruits festival, in the year after Amar-Suen became king. The receipt is stamped with the recipient's official seal, which identifies him as Lugal-ebansa, scribe, son of Ur-Ištaran.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse: 3,600 + 600 (= 4,200) bundles of reed, from Dada, Lugal-ebansa received. Month: Nesag (the first-fruits festival). Year after: "Amar-Suen (became) king." Seal: Lugal-ebansa, scribe, son of Ur-Ištaran.
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(szar2) 1(gesz'u) sa gi ki da-da-ta lugal-e-ba-an-sa6 szu ba-an-ti iti nesag mu us2-sa amar-suen lugal lugal-e-ba-an-sa6 dub-sar dumu ur-isztaran
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — MVN 15, 359. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format). [year-name] Dated to Amar-Suen y2 — Year after: Amar-Suen became king based on canonical year-name formula in the transliteration.
Attribution
Image: SI 344991m (Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, USA) — from Umma (mod. Tell Jokha) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P118624). 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.