Position in chronology
CUSAS 03, 1180
About this tablet
This is a small Ur III administrative voucher from the estate of Garšana, a rural production and supply center that fed and equipped royal officials and workers under the Third Dynasty of Ur. It records issues of beer and bread — a common type of ration or offering docket — received by a person from an official named Iškur-illat, dated by month and by a year-name commemorating the destruction of the temple of the goddess Šara at Umma. The final lines, mentioning 'daughter of the king' and 'your servant,' look like a seal caption naming the sealing official or a member of the royal family connected with the Garšana estate, a detail typical of texts from this well-documented archive.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This receipt records a disbursement of beer: 30 units of one type, plus 2 portions of fine beer and beer-bread at 5 liters each, and 4 more portions of beer-bread at 2 liters each. The goods came from Iškur-illat and were received by a man whose name is partly lost (ending in '-ili'). The transaction is dated to the month called 'U5-bi2-gu7,' in the year the temple of Šara at Umma was destroyed. What follows looks like a seal inscription — mentioning a 'daughter of the king' and closing with the phrase 'your servant,' naming the person who sealed the tablet — but the names involved are too damaged to read fully.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. 30 (units of) UD@g-gi beer 2. 2 (units of) fine beer, beer-bread, 5 sila3 each 3. 4 (units of) beer-[bread?], 2 sila3 each 4. from Iškur-illat 5. [...]-ili 6. received 7. month: "U5-bi2-gu7" 8. year: "the temple of Šara of Umma was destroyed" 9. its interior(?) [...] 10. daughter(?) of the king(?) 11. [...]-ili2-[...] 12. your(?) servant [PN]
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
3(u) kasz UD@g-gi 2(disz) kasz saga kasz ninda 5(disz) sila3-ta 4(disz) kasz [ninda?] 2(disz) sila3-ta [ki] iszkur-illat-ta [...]-i3-li2 szu [ba]-ti iti u5-bi2-gu7 mu e2 szara2 umma ba-hul sza3-[bi?-...] dumu[-munus?] lugal? [x]-x-i3-li2-[x] ARAD2-[zu]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — CUSAS 03, 1180. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CUNES 49-09-151 (Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA) — from Garšana (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P323676). 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.