Position in chronology
CUSAS 03, 0879
About this tablet
This is a small Ur III receipt tablet from the administrative archive of Garšana, a provincial estate that supplied the royal center at Puzriš-Dagan (Drehem) with labor, craft goods, and rations. It records a modest disbursement of flour to a leatherworker named Anah-ili, identified by his father's name — the kind of routine bookkeeping entry that, multiplied by thousands, let Ur III bureaucrats track every liter of grain moving through the kingdom. The year formula dates it to the reign of King Šu-Suen, in the year his armies destroyed the land of Zabšali, giving the tablet a precise anchor in time (around 2032 BCE by conventional Ur III chronology).
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
A receipt: 1 ban2 of coarse flour was issued from Malik-bani's stores and received by Anah-ili. The transaction is dated to the month of the Šu-Suen festival, in the year King Šu-Suen's forces destroyed the land of Zabšali. A closing note identifies the recipient more fully as An-ah-ili the leatherworker, son of Saba — likely the same person named earlier, with his profession and parentage added for the record.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 ban2 (of) dabin-flour (semolina-grade barley flour), from Malik-bani, Anah-ili received. Month: "Festival of Šu-Suen," year: "The land of Zabšali was destroyed." An-ah-ili, the leatherworker (aszgab), son of Saba.
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
1(ban2) dabin ki ma-lik-ba-ni-ta a-na-ah-i3-li2 [szu] ba#-an-ti iti ezem-szu-suen# mu ma-da za-ab-sza-li mu-hul an-na-ah-i3-li2 aszgab dumu sa2-ba
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — CUSAS 03, 0879. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CUNES 48-04-020 (Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA) — from Garšana (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P322534). 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.