Anonymous 429769

~2050 BCE·Ur III · Neo-Sumerian·P429769

About this tablet

This is a small Ur III administrative record from Umma, one of the many everyday loan or receipt tablets that document the movement of barley without interest between individuals — a routine feature of the state-run economy of southern Iraq around 2100–2000 BCE. A person named Ur-Suana is the source of the grain, and someone else 'received' it, though the tablet is badly broken and several names and the closing date formula are lost. Thousands of texts like this survive from Umma's archives, offering a granular picture of grain circulation, credit, and household economics in this period.

Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.

Written in modern English

This tablet records a grain transaction: 5 gur and 1 barig of barley, given as an interest-free loan, from a man named Ur-Suana. Another person — whose name is only partly preserved — received it. The tablet then names a year (the date formula), but the text is too damaged to read clearly, and it ends with a fragmentary reference to 'son of ...' before breaking off entirely.

A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.

Translation — our engine

Our engine

Low confidence

5(aš) 1(barig) barley — interest-free (loan), from Ur-Suana, ...gani(?), received. [Year: ...] ... ... ... ... ... ... ... son of ... ...

Indicative reading — translated without a photograph. Generated from the transliteration alone, without examining the original. Read it as an accessible first taste, not as a verified catalogue entry.

Our translation engine — Sonnet 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

5(asz) 1(barig) sze masz2 nu-tuku
ki ur-su4-an-na-ta
x-ga-ni?
szu ba-ti
[mu ...] x [...] ba gu2? [...] x x mu-x
x x x
dumu x x

Scholarly note

Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — Anonymous 429769. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).

Attribution

Image: Anonymous 429769 (private: anonymous, uncertain) — from Umma (mod. Tell Jokha) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P429769). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).

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