Position in chronology
AUCT 3, 337
About this tablet
This is a small Ur III (c. 2100–2000 BCE) receipt for a quantity of silver, part of the vast bureaucratic paper trail of the Ur III state economy. Two men, Ur-šumah and Lugal-sa'e, acknowledge receiving silver disbursed by or through a person named Ur-Duku. The closing line naming 'Ur-šumah, son of Katar' is a seal caption identifying the sealholder responsible for the transaction — a standard feature of Ur III administrative tablets, which were sealed to authenticate the record.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet records that a certain amount of silver — the exact weight is broken away — was issued from Ur-Duku's account. Ur-šumah, holding some official title (now illegible), and a man named Lugal-sa'e are recorded as having received it. What the silver was for is lost in a broken line. At the bottom, the tablet is signed off with the seal identification: 'Ur-šumah, son of Katar,' confirming whose authority stood behind the transaction.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[x] mana of silver, refined-[x] [x], from Ur-Duku, [x] Ur-šumah, the PA-[...], and Lugal-sa'e received. [...] for the [...] of ... (break) Ur-šumah, son of Katar.
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
[x] ma-na ku3-[x] [x] ki ur-du6-ku3-ta# [x] ur-szu-mah PA [x] u3# lugal-sa6-e szu# ba-ti-esz2 [...]-a-ka-sze3 [...] ur-szu-mah dumu ka-tar
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — AUCT 3, 337. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: AUAM 73.0557 (Siegfried H. Horn Museum, Institute of Archaeology, Andrews University, Berrien Springs, Michigan, USA) — from uncertain (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P104549). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
Related tablets
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.