Position in chronology
CUSAS 03, 1399
About this tablet
This is a small fragment of an Ur III administrative record from Garšana, the estate-and-workshop complex run for the general Šu-Kabta and his wife Simat-Ištaran. What survives is a string of measured quantities — grain by the standard gur/barig/ban2 capacity units and a separate item weighed or bundled by the gu2 ('talent' or 'bale') — followed by the name of the responsible party, Šu-Erra son of Ili-ani, explicitly identified as a servant (subordinate official or dependent) of Šu-Kabta. Texts like this are the everyday bookkeeping of a large Ur III household economy, tracking who was accountable for what quantities of goods, but the commodities themselves are lost to breaks in the tablet.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The tablet records several quantities — 3 ban2 of something, 1 gur 2 barig 2 ban2 of something else, 150 units of a third item, and 4 talents (or bales) of a fourth — but in every case the description of what was measured has broken off. The record closes by naming the person responsible: Šu-Erra, son of Ili-ani, who worked under (as a subordinate of) Šu-Kabta, the well-known official at Garšana. Essentially this is an accounting entry whose totals survive but whose specific goods are lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine3 ban2 [of ... (broken)] 1 gur 2 barig 2 ban2 [of ... (broken)] 150 [... (broken)] 4 talents (gu2) [of ... (broken)] Šu-Erra, son of Ili-ani, servant of Šu-Kabta.
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(ban2) [...] 1(asz) 2(barig) 2(ban2) [...] 2(gesz2) 3(u) [...] 4(asz) gu2 [...] szu-er3-ra dumu i3-li2-a-ni ARAD2 szu#-kab#-[ta]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — CUSAS 03, 1399. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: CUNES 49-04-025 (Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA) — from Garšana (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P323365). 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.