Position in chronology
CUSAS 03, 1303
About this tablet
This is a routine Ur III administrative receipt from Garšana, a provincial estate/production center near Umma known for its extensive wood, textile, and labor records. It logs a delivery of wooden implements and boards made of poplar wood — harrows, door-boards, and a batch of thin wooden blades or paddles — handed over from one official to another, with a courier named as intermediary. The date formula ties the transaction to the year Šu-Sin, king of Ur, destroyed the land of Zabšali, anchoring the tablet firmly in the late Ur III period (early 21st century BCE).
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet records a delivery: 180 poplar-wood harrows, 180 poplar-wood door-boards, and 130 thin wooden blades or paddles, stacked in a pile. The goods came from a person or place called Suhuški-in and were received by Iškur-illat, with a man named Ikūnum handling the transfer. The transaction is dated to the month of Šueša, in the year King Šu-Sin destroyed the land of Zabšali. The tablet breaks off after this, so any further entries are lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine180 poplar-wood gešur-implements (harrows), 180 poplar-wood e2-da (door-boards/house-boards), 130 eme-sig ("thin-tongue") implements, heaped up (piled), from Suhuški-in, Iškur-illat received; via Ikūnum. Month: Šueša, Year: "the land of Zabšali was destroyed" (Šu-Sin year 7). [...] (text breaks off; remainder lost)
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
3(gesz2) gesz-ur3 asal2 3(gesz2) e2-da asal2 2(gesz2) 1(u) eme-sig al-dub2-ba [ki] suhusz#-ki-in-ta []iszkur-illat szu ba-an-ti giri3# i-ku-nu-um iti# szu-esz-sza mu ma-da za-ab-sza-li mu-hul [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — CUSAS 03, 1303. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CUNES 48-06-029 (Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA) — from Garšana (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P322618). 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.