Position in chronology
CUSAS 03, 0356
About this tablet
This is an Ur III administrative tablet from Garšana, part of a large private estate archive tied to the royal family and its officials. It records a quantity of baked brick — measured in sar (a Sumerian area/volume unit for masonry) — produced for an orchard at the town of Zabalam, along with the labor cost: the daily wage-norm per hired workman, the total number of man-days worked, and the barley rations paid to those workmen. Such texts are common in the Garšana corpus, which is unusually rich in construction and labor-management records from a Mesopotamian estate around 2020 BCE. The year-name referencing the destruction of the land of Zabšali anchors the tablet to a specific, datable military campaign of the Ur III state.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet logs a batch of baked brick — a bit over 25 sar (partly restored due to damage), plus 15 shekels and 5 grains by weight-measure — made for an orchard belonging to Zabalam. It notes the labor rate: each workman was credited with about 3 2/3 shekels 15 grains of work per day, and in total 404 man-days went into the job. The hired laborers were paid 6 liters of barley apiece as their ration. Ibni-ilum oversaw the transaction as the responsible official, the paperwork went through the scribe Puzur-Ninkar, and Iškur-illat, the estate's household manager, was also involved. The record is dated to the month of the Mekigal festival, in the year the land of Zabšali was destroyed — the rest of the tablet is broken off.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[2(u) 2(disz)] 3(disz) sar 1(u) [5(disz) gin2] 5(disz) grains of baked (fired) brick, wage-rate of the workmen: 3 2/3 gin2 15 grains each, its workmen: 6(gesz2) 44 (= 404) [workdays], barley: 6 sila3 each, was paid (to the hired men). The baked brick (is for) the [orchard] of Zabala(m). It was delivered. Ibni-ilum, the responsible official (maškim). Via Puzur-Ninkar(ak), the scribe, and Iškur-illat, the household manager (šabra). Month: '[festival of] Mekigal.' Year: 'the land of Zabšali was destroyed.' [...] (text breaks off)
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
[2(u) 2(disz)] 3(disz) sar 1(u) [5(disz) gin2] 5(disz) sze im du8#-[a] a2 gurusz 3(disz) 2/3(disz) gin2 1(u) 5(disz) sze-ta gurusz-bi 6(gesz2) 4(u) 4(disz) [u4 1(disz)-sze3] sze 6(disz) sila3-ta ba-[hun] im-du8-a [kiri6] zabala4[] mu-[kux(DU)] ib-ni-dingir maszkim# giri3 puzur4-nin#-[kar]-ke3 dub-[sar] u3 iszkur-illat szabra# [iti ezem]-me#-ki-gal2 [mu] ma#-da za-ab#-sza#-li mu-[hul] [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — CUSAS 03, 0356. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CUNES 50-03-088 (Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA) — from Garšana (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P324788). 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.