Position in chronology
CUSAS 03, 1253
About this tablet
This is a small administrative tablet from Garšana, an Ur III-period estate (c. 2100–2000 BCE) in southern Mesopotamia known for its detailed livestock and poultry records. It tracks fattened birds — geese and doves — issued to or accounted for by named poultry-herders (sipa muszen-na), officials responsible for the estate's bird flocks. Texts like this one belong to a large archive documenting the labor, food supply, and animal husbandry of a Ur III administrative household, giving historians a rare granular view of ancient bureaucratic bookkeeping.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The surviving lines record barley rations for the birds, followed by a note about handing something over or exchanging it — the details are broken. The tablet then lists livestock: 6 grain-fed geese and 30 grain-fed doves. Two officials, Dada'a and Šuna-zi, both poultry-herders, are named as responsible for these birds, each tied to a 'house' or household whose name is lost in the break. The rest of the text does not survive.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] barley for the bird(s) [...] (in) hand, to be transferred/exchanged [...] 6 grain-fed geese (ir7), 30 grain-fed doves (tu-gur4), Dada'a, the poultry-herder, house of [...] Šuna-zi, the poultry-herder, house of [...]
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
[...] sze muszen-[na ...] szu? bala-de3 [...] 6(disz) ir7 niga 3(u) tu-gur4 niga da-da-a sipa muszen-na e2-[a ...] szu-na-zi sipa muszen-na e2-[a ...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — CUSAS 03, 1253. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CUNES 49-11-045 (Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA) — from Garšana (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P323731). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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Related sources
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.