Position in chronology
CUSAS 03, 0623
About this tablet
This is a routine Ur III wool-disbursement receipt from the estate archive at Garšana, a rural administrative center that supplied labor and textiles for the Ur III state in the reign of Šu-Sin. It records several batches of wool — measured by weight (talents) and by container (gurdub-vessels) — earmarked for specific cloth types, handed over by an official named Apillumma and received by Iškur-illat, with a foreman named Agua acting as intermediary. The note 'gaba-ri' ('copy') tells us this particular tablet is a duplicate of another record, a common practice in Ur III bureaucratic archiving to create redundant copies for accountability.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This record logs a wool transfer at the Garšana estate. Iškur-illat took delivery of wool from Apillumma in several allotments: 2 talents earmarked for a certain grade of finished (du8-a) cloth, 6 talents for tufted (guz-za) cloth, 20 talents of plain wool, and 28 containers of specially bound or treated wool. The foreman Agua oversaw the handover. The transaction is dated to the month called 'u5-bi2-gu7' in the year that 'the land of Zabšali was destroyed' — a known year-name from the reign of Šu-Sin. The document itself is marked as a copy of the original record.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine2 talents wool, for du8-a cloth, 4th (grade), second quality; 6 talents wool, for guz-za (tufted) cloth, standard quality; 20 talents wool, standard quality; 28 gurdub-containers of wool, ka-tab-treated (bound/sealed) wool; from Apillumma, Iškur-illat received; via Agua, the foreman (overseer of sixty); month: "u5-bi2-gu7"; year: "the land of Zabšali was destroyed." Copy.
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
2(asz) gu2 siki tug2 du8-a 4(disz)-kam us2 6(asz) gu2 siki tug2 guz-za du 2(u) gu2 siki du 2(u) 8(disz) gurdub2 siki ka-<tab> se3-ga ki a-pi-lum-ma-ta iszkur-illat szu ba-an-ti giri3 a-gu-a ugula-gesz2-da iti u5-bi2-gu7 mu ma-da za-ab-sza-li mu-hul gaba-ri
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — CUSAS 03, 0623. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CUNES 48-06-038 (Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA) — from Garšana (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P322627). 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.