Position in chronology
CUSAS 03, 0926
About this tablet
This is a small receipt tablet from the Ur III administrative center at Garšana, recording a delivery of raw leatherworking materials — sheep hides, a lamb skin, and sheep sinew — issued from a man named Iškur-illat to a leatherworker. It dates to the reign of Šu-Suen (the year name refers to the construction of a great ceremonial barge). Garšana was a provincial estate whose archive, discovered largely intact, documents the day-to-day supply chains behind craft production — here, the raw materials that a tannery or leather workshop needed to make goods like harnesses, sandals, or containers.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet is a receipt: a leatherworker named Anna-hili (also written Anna-ah-ili, son of Saba) took delivery of 4 sheep hides, 1 lambskin, and 6 shekels' weight of sheep sinew from a supplier named Iškur-illat. The transaction is dated to the month of the Festival of An, in the year the great ceremonial barge was built (a Šu-Suen regnal year). It's a routine bookkeeping entry tracking raw materials moving into a leather workshop at the Garšana estate.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine4 sheep hides, 1 lamb skin, 6 shekels of sheep sinew (sa) — from Iškur-illat, Anna-hili, the leatherworker, [received] (šu ba-ti). Month: "Festival of An" (iti ezem-Ana), year: "The great barge was built" (mu ma-gur-mah ba-dim). Anna-ah-ili, the leatherworker, son of Saba.
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
4(disz) kusz udu# 1(disz) kusz sila4 6(disz) gin2 sa udu ki iszkur-illat-ta an-na-hi-li! aszgab [szu] ba-ti iti ezem-an-na mu ma2-gur8-mah ba-dim2 an-na-ah-i3-li2 aszgab dumu sa2-ba
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — CUSAS 03, 0926. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CUNES 48-04-024 (Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA) — from Garšana (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P329367). 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.