Position in chronology
CUSAS 03, 0911
About this tablet
This is a small Ur III administrative receipt from Garšana, a provincial estate center in southern Mesopotamia that supplied the royal court and military with goods and labor. It records a delivery of animal hides — one sheep hide and roughly eleven more (of an unspecified type) — issued by an official named Iškur-illat and received by a leatherworker, Ana-ah-ili son of Saba, who would have used the hides as raw material for his craft. The dated year formula, referencing the building of a great barge for the gods Enlil and Ninlil, places the transaction in the reign of king Šulgi (c. 21st century BCE) and helps modern scholars anchor thousands of similar Ur III texts to a precise chronology.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a hide-issue receipt: one sheep hide and about eleven hides of another kind were handed over from Iškur-illat's stores. Ana-ah-ili — a leatherworker, son of Saba — received them (the verb is restored from a broken spot). The record is dated to the month of the Šulgi festival, in the year 'the great barge of Enlil and Ninlil was built.' A short line following the date confirms the recipient's identity and trade. The middle of the tablet has a small break where a line or two is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. 1 hide of [sheep], 2. 11(?) hides of [...], 3. from Iškur-illat, 4. Ana-ah-ili 5. [received]. 6. [...] (break) 7. Month: festival of Šulgi. 8. Year: 'The great barge of Enlil (and) Ninlil was fashioned for them.' 9. Ana-ah-ili, the leatherworker, 10. 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(disz) kusz# [udu] 1(u) 1(disz)? [kusz-x] ki iszkur-illat#-[ta] a-na-ah-i3-li2 [szu ba]-an-[ti] [...] iti ezem-szul-[gi] mu ma2-gur8-mah#-[]en#-lil2-la2 [nin-lil2]-ra# mu#-ne#-[dim2] an-na-ah-i3-li2 aszgab dumu sa2-ba
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — CUSAS 03, 0911. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CUNES 48-04-023 (Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA) — from Garšana (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P322537). 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.