Position in chronology
CUSAS 03, 0928
About this tablet
This is a small Ur III administrative receipt from Garšana, a provincial estate/depot that supplied the Ur III state economy around 2000 BCE. It records that a leatherworker named Anah-ili, son of Saba, received twenty sheep hides — his raw material — from an official or supplier named Iškur-illat. The dating formula at the end anchors the transaction to a specific month and to a royal year-name commemorating the caulking (waterproofing) of a great ceremonial barge, a formula used across the kingdom to date documents in place of a numbered calendar year.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Twenty sheep hides were issued from Iškur-illat's stock and received by Anah-ili. The transaction is dated to the month of the festival of An, in the year when the great magur-boat was caulked. A note at the bottom identifies the recipient again: Anah-ili the leatherworker, son of Saba.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine20 sheep hides, from Iškur-illat, Anah-ili received. Month: "festival of An" (ezem-Ana), year: "the great magur-boat was caulked." 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.
Spotted an error? Suggest a correction — confirmed corrections feed the engine's knowledge base.
Transliteration
2(u) kusz udu ki iszkur-[illat-ta] a-na-ah-i3-[li2] [szu ba-ti] iti ezem#-[an]-na# mu ma2-gur8-mah ba-du8 an-na-ah-i3-li2 aszgab dumu sa2-ba
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — CUSAS 03, 0928. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CUNES 49-04-024 (Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA) — from Garšana (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P323364). 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.