Position in chronology
AuOr 31, 233 04
About this tablet
This is a small livestock disbursement receipt from the great Ur III administrative center at Puzriš-Dagan (Drehem), where herds belonging to the crown were processed, redistributed, and accounted for with extraordinary bureaucratic precision. On this day, three grain-fattened sheep passed from the custody of the official Abba-saga to a man named Nalu, and a scribe recorded the transaction, the month, and the year for the royal archives. Thousands of such tablets survive from Drehem, together forming one of the most detailed administrative datasets from the ancient world, roughly 2020 BCE.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
On the 23rd day of the month, three sheep that had been fattened on grain were handed over from Abba-saga's custody to a man named Nalu, who took receipt of them. The transaction is dated to the month called "gazelle-consumption" and to the year remembered as "Huhnuri was destroyed" — a reference to a military campaign under the Ur III king Šu-Suen. The tally at the bottom confirms the total: three sheep.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine3 grain-fed sheep, day 23, from Abba-saga, Nalu received (took in charge). Month: "Mašdagu" (gazelle-consumption), year: "Huhnuri was destroyed." 3 (total)
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
3(disz) udu niga u4 2(u) 3(disz)-kam ki ab-ba-sa6#-ga-ta na-lu5 i3-dab5 iti masz-da3-gu7 mu hu-uh2#-nu#-ri ba-hul 3(disz)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — AuOr 31, 233 04. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Anonymous 464284 (private: anonymous, Barcelona, Spain) — from Puzriš-Dagan (mod. Drehem) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P464284). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-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.