Position in chronology
Kress 203
About this tablet
This is a small Ur III administrative receipt from the city of Umma, part of the vast bureaucratic archive that documented grain movements across the Ur III state (c. 2100–2000 BCE). It records a quantity of barley, measured by the royal standard, transferred from one official (Ur-gigir) to another (Lugal-bara-e), conveyed by a third party (Silašu), and formally 'received.' The date formula at the end anchors the transaction to a specific year named for a military campaign — the destruction of the city of Karhar for the second time — a detail that helps modern historians reconstruct the chronology of Ur III kings' wars in the Zagros foothills.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
A certain amount of barley, measured in the royal gur-standard, was delivered from Ur-gigir to Lugal-bara-e. Silašu handled the transfer, and the barley was duly received. The transaction is dated to the month of Dumuzi, in the year when Karhar was destroyed for the second time.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[n] gur barley, royal (measure), [from?] Ur-gigir, Lugal-bara-e, via Silašu, received. Month: Dumuzi, Year: “Karhar was destroyed for the second time.”
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
[n] sze gur lugal [ki?] ur-gigir-ta#? lugal#-ba-ra-e3 giri3#? s,i-la-szu szu ba-ti iti dumu-zi mu# a#-ra2 [2(disz)]-kam kar2#-har ba-hul
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — Kress 203. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Kress 203 (private: anonymous, Germany) — from Umma (mod. Tell Jokha) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P429321). 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.