Position in chronology
CUSAS 03, 0214
About this tablet
This is a fragment of an Ur III administrative roster from Garšana, one of the great estate-and-labor archives of the Ur III state (c. 21st century BCE) that tracked construction crews, rations, and personnel for the royal household of Šu-Suen's daughter Simat-Ištaran. The surviving lines list gangs of male builders (šitim) grouped under named foremen or place-of-origin designations, followed by a broken tally section naming an overseer and a subordinate. Texts like this let historians reconstruct the labor organization behind Garšana's intense building program, though this particular tablet is too damaged to recover the full accounting.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This broken tablet records crews of construction workers at the Garšana estate. It lists three male builders assigned to a man named Niĝ-Baba, two more assigned to a place or person called Dimat-kalbum, and what was probably another group under Ur-Šulpa'e — though that line is now lost except for the number pattern. After this, a series of smaller numeric entries (3, 15, 2, 1, and more) once itemized further groups or totals, but the identifying labels have broken away. The tablet ends with a supervisor's name and a note naming someone as servant or subordinate of an official called Ea-meš (or similar), followed by two more lines too damaged to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine3 male laborers, builders (šitim), men of Niĝ-Baba; 2 male laborers, builders, men of Dimat-kalbum; [n] male laborers, builders, [men of Ur-Šulpa'e]; 3 [...] 15 [...] 2 [...] 1 [...] [...] [...] 1 [...] overseer: [...] servant of [Ea-meš]; [...] [...]
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
3(disz) gurusz szitim lu2# [nig2-ba-ba6] 2(disz) gurusz szitim lu2 [di3-ma-at kal2-bu-um] [n] gurusz szitim# [lu2 ur-szul-pa-e3] 3(disz) [...] 1(u) 5(disz) [...] 2(disz) [...] 1(disz) [...] [...] [...] 1(disz) [...] ugula [...] ARAD2 [e2-A-me-esz2] [...] [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — CUSAS 03, 0214. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CUNES 48-04-059 (Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA) — from Garšana (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P322572). 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.