Position in chronology
CUSAS 03, 0927
About this tablet
This is a routine Ur III hide-and-horn receipt from the administrative center of Garšana, a satellite estate in the Ur III state economy famous for its detailed leather and craft accounts. A leatherworker named Anah-ili, son of Saba, took delivery of a batch of raw hides — sheep, cattle calves, donkeys, and donkey foals — plus some ox horns, from an official named Iškur-illat, for processing into leather goods. Texts like this let historians reconstruct the supply chains that fed Ur III craft workshops, tracking exactly which animal skins moved from herders to tanners and when.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
A record of raw materials issued to a tannery: 10 sheep hides, 8 hides from young cattle, 2 donkey hides, 15 hides from donkey foals, an unspecified number of hides from another young animal (the line is broken), and some ox horns. Iškur-illat handed these over, and the leatherworker Anah-ili took receipt of them, dated to the month of the Festival of An in the year the great ceremonial barge was built. A closing note identifies the recipient again as Anah-ili the leatherworker, son of Saba.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine10 sheep hides, 8 hides of oxen calves, 2 donkey hides, 15 hides of donkey foals, [n hides of] young [......] (broken), [n] ox horns — from Iškur-illat, Anah-ili received. Month: "Festival of An," year: "The great magur-boat was fashioned." Anah-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.
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Transliteration
1(u) kusz udu# 8(disz) kusz amar gu4 2(disz) kusz ansze 1(u) 5(disz) kusz amar ansze [n kusz] amar#?-[x] [n] si-gu4 ki iszkur-illat-ta a-na-ah-i3-li2 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, 0927. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CUNES 48-04-031 (Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA) — from Garšana (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P322544). 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.