Position in chronology
CUSAS 03, 1147
About this tablet
This is a small Ur III administrative receipt from the estate archive at Garšana, a provincial center that supplied labor and goods to the Ur III state around 2000 BCE. It records a delivery of emmer wheat — four barig, a standard dry-measure — overseen by a foreman named Lila'a and received by a man named Malik-bani. The year formula dates it precisely to the year the Ur III king Šu-Suen's forces destroyed the land of Zabšali, anchoring this routine bookkeeping entry within a specific, datable military campaign.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a receipt: four barig of emmer wheat were delivered under the supervision of the foreman Lila'a, and a man named Malik-bani signed for (received) the grain. The record is dated to a month whose festival name is now lost, in the year that Zabšali was destroyed — that is, the third regnal year of King Šu-Suen. The commodity description after the wheat amount is broken and cannot be recovered.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine4 barig emmer wheat — [...] delivery (booked in). Foreman: Lila'a. Malik-bani received it. Month: "Festival of [...]" Year: "The land of Zabšali was destroyed" (Šu-Suen year 3).
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
4(barig) ziz2 [...] mu-[kux(DU)] ugula li-[la-a] ma-[lik-ba-ni] szu ba-an-[ti] iti ezem-[...] mu ma-[da za]-ab-sza-[li] mu-hul
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — CUSAS 03, 1147. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CUNES 49-09-147 (Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA) — from Garšana (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P323672). 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.