Position in chronology
CUSAS 03, 0074
About this tablet
This is a fragment of an Ur III labor-allocation roster from Garšana, one of the administrative estates that supplied and managed large gangs of male and female workers (guruš and geme2) for the crown-linked household in the late 21st century BCE. The surviving lines tally groups of workers by task — masons building, laborers hauling clay, others fetching fresh reeds to the mill-house, and some simply stationed at a granary or a craftsman's workshop gate. Texts like this, from the CUSAS 3 Garšana archive, let historians reconstruct the daily choreography of a Mesopotamian institutional workforce: who worked where, under whom, and for what task, on a single ordinary day.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet is a work-crew ledger, badly broken at the start and end. It records: some number of workers doing unspecified work; four more men working as builders; a group of workers assigned to clay work under a man named Ili-de'a; another crew — men and twenty-five women — put to carrying clay and piling it up somewhere; a group sent off with fresh reeds to the mill-house; a crew logged simply as a 'booked expenditure'; workers stationed in the storehouse; and workers posted at the gate of the craftsman's workshop. The opening and closing sections of the tablet are lost, so we don't know the full headcount, the overseer's name, or the date formula that would normally close out such a roster.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] [n] workers ... [...] [n+]4 workers: builders (šitim) [n] workers: (assigned to) clay, stationed under Ili-de'a [n] workers, 25 female workers: (assigned) to carry clay [...] to deposit/pile it, stationed (for this task) [n] workers: (with) fresh reeds ..., went to the mill-house (e2-ar3-ra) [n] workers: booked expenditure, stationed [n] workers: sitting/residing in the storehouse (ga2-nun-na) [n] workers: sitting at the gate of the craftsman's house (e2-gaszam) [...]
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
[...] [n] gurusz# [...] [n] 4(disz) gurusz szitim [n] gurusz im i3-li-de9 gub-ba [n] gurusz 2(u) 5(disz) geme2 im ga6-[ga2 ...]-a ga2-ga2-[de3] gub-ba [n] gurusz gi-zi x e2#-ar3-ra-sze3 gen-na-me [n] gurusz zi-ga gub-ba [n] gurusz ga2-nun-na tusz-a [n] gurusz ka2 e2-gaszam tusz-a [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — CUSAS 03, 0074. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CUNES 49-02-026 (Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA) — from Garšana (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P323249). 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.