Position in chronology
LB 0257
About this tablet
This is a small Ur III administrative tablet recording an allotment of barley — four royal gur — issued as rations to porters (ug3-íl), a common laboring occupation in the Ur III bureaucratic economy. It is dated by a year-name commemorating a military campaign in which the town or region of Karahar was destroyed for the second time, a formula typical of the retrospective dating system used across the Ur III state. The tablet is broken in several places, so the full list of recipients and quantities cannot be recovered, but it belongs to the vast corpus of everyday bookkeeping — grain disbursements to laborers — that sustained the Ur III state's centralized economy.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
A record of four gur of barley, measured by the royal standard, issued as rations to a group of porters. One entry names a porter, Ur-[...], though the line before it is too damaged to read. Another line mentions barley from a field bordering a street or lane, but the details are unclear. The document is dated to the year following the destruction of Karahar for the second time — a standard way Ur III scribes dated documents by referring back to a notable military event. A second personal name, also beginning with Ur-, appears afterward, followed by a broken line mentioning the sign AN, but the tablet breaks off before more can be read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1) 4 gur (royal measure) of barley 2) barley rations: the porters 3) [...] x [...] x [...] (broken, illegible) 4) Ur-[...], porter 5) barley of the field bordering the street(?) 6) Year following: "Karahar was destroyed for the second time" 7) Ur-[...] 8) [...] AN [...] (broken)
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
4(asz) sze gur lugal sze-ba ug3-IL2 [x] x [...] x [...] ur#-[...] ug3#-IL2 sze a-sza3 da SILA3? mu us2-sa kar2-har a-ra2 2(disz)-kam-asz ba-hul ur-[...] [...] AN [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — LB 0257. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: LB 0257 (de Liagre Böhl Collection, Netherlands Institute for the Near East, Leiden, Holland) — from uncertain (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P388791). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
Related tablets
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.