Position in chronology
CUSAS 03, 0863
About this tablet
This is a small Ur III administrative receipt from Garšana, a provincial estate in southern Mesopotamia known for its detailed bookkeeping of textiles, leather, and labor. It records the transfer of a single sheep hide — noted as a booked/debited item — from an official named Iškur-illat to a man named Anah-ili. The year name it carries, referring to the destruction of the land of Zabšali, dates it precisely to the reign of king Šu-Suen, giving historians a fixed point in the Ur III chronology.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
One hide from a grain-fed sheep — logged as an expenditure — was handed over by Iškur-illat and received by Anah-ili. The transaction is dated to the month called u5-bi2-gu7, in the year when the land of Zabšali was destroyed (a year-name of King Šu-Suen). It's a brief, routine inventory entry: a single hide moving from one person's account to another's custody.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 hide of a grain-fed sheep, hide of a sheep, booked expenditure — from Iškur-illat, Anah-ili received. Month: u5-bi2-gu7, year: "the land of Zabšali was destroyed."
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
1(disz) kusz udu niga kusz udu zi-ga ki iszkur-illat-ta a-na-ah-i3-li2 szu ba-an-ti iti u5-bi2-gu7 mu ma-da za-ab-sza-li mu-hul
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — CUSAS 03, 0863. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CUNES 48-04-035 (Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA) — from Garšana (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P322548). 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.