Position in chronology
CUSAS 03, 0854
About this tablet
This is a small Ur III administrative receipt from the estate archive at Garšana, a provincial center that supplied the royal court and army under the Third Dynasty of Ur (c. 2100–2000 BCE). It records hides from grain-fed sheep that had been slaughtered, handed over by one official (Iškur-illat) and received by another (Anah-ili), dated by month and by a year-name commemorating the erection of a great royal stele — a formula associated with the reign of Šu-Suen. Thousands of such texts survive from Garšana's meticulous bookkeeping of livestock, hides, and labor.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
A batch of hides — from sheep that had been fattened on grain before being slaughtered — was handed over by an official named Iškur-illat. Anah-ili signed for and received them. The transaction was recorded in a month whose festival name is now broken away, dated to the year when 'the great stele was erected' (a year-name from the reign of King Šu-Suen). It's a routine bookkeeping entry, one line in a much larger ledger of livestock and hide accounts kept at the Garšana estate.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[n] hides of grain-fed sheep, slaughtered (ba-usz2), from Iškur-illat, Anah-i[li] received. [Month]: “Festival of [...]”, Year: “The great stele was erected” (for them).
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] kusz udu niga ba-usz2 ki iszkur-illat-ta a-na-ah-i3-[li2] szu ba-an-[ti] [iti] ezem#-[...] mu na-ru2-a-mah mu-ne-du3
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — CUSAS 03, 0854. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CUNES 48-04-047 (Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA) — from Garšana (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P322560). 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.