Position in chronology
CUSAS 03, 0062
About this tablet
This is a labor-accounting tablet from Garšana, an Ur III–period estate administered on behalf of the military official Šu-Kabta, husband of the princess Simat-Ištaran. Such texts tally gangs of male and female workers (gurusz and geme2) assigned to specific tasks — construction, weaving, craft work, and baking — under named foremen, and note individual circumstances like illness or reassignment. It is one of hundreds of everyday labor rosters that let historians reconstruct the workforce management of a large Ur III household estate around 2000 BCE.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet totals up work crews: 10 men working as builders, 43 men overall, and 49 women. A further small group of 2 and then 3 workers is listed but the text is broken here. Some workers came from a person or place called Abba-ama and were assigned duties, apparently connected to the weaving house and to a workshop of skilled craftsmen — but the details are lost in gaps. Ten more men are listed doing a specific kind of clay- or plaster-related work (again fragmentary). Individual entries follow: a worker named Lugatum was assigned to bake bread; a worker named Šeš-kalla is noted as sick; the crew's foreman is Irib; and finally the builder Mašum is recorded as having gone to (the estate of) Šu-Kabta. In short, this is a routine daily or periodic labor roster tracking who worked where, under whom, and why some men were absent.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineTotal: 10 male workers, builders (šitim). Total: 43 male workers. Total: 49 (lit. 50 minus 1) female workers. 2 male workers, [...]. 3 [...]. From Abba-ama [...] stationed [...]. The weaving-house [...], the craftsmen's workshop (e2-gaszam) [...]. 10 male workers, im-sumur(-workers) [...]. 1: Lugatum, stationed to bake bread. 1: Šeš-kalla, sick. Foreman: Irib. 1: Mašum, the builder, went to (the place of) Šu-Kabta.
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
szunigin 1(u) gurusz szitim# szunigin 4(u) 3(disz) gurusz szunigin 5(u) la2 1(disz) geme2 2(disz) gurusz#-[...] 3(disz) [...] ab-ba-ama-[ta ...]-de3 [gub-ba] e2-usz-bar [...] e2-gaszam# [...] 1(u) gurusz im#-sumur# [...] 1(disz) lu-ga-tum ninda du8-de3 gub-ba 1(disz) szesz-kal-la tu-ra ugula# i-ri-ib [1(disz)] ma-szum szitim [ki] szu#-kab-ta-sze3 gen-na
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — CUSAS 03, 0062. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CUNES 48-00-008 (Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA) — from Garšana (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P332470). 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.