Position in chronology
LB 0259
About this tablet
This is a routine Ur III bookkeeping tablet from the city of Girsu, recording a large disbursement of barley — 76 gur, 4 barig — used to pay wages to hired laborers attached to a rotating labor levy (the 'bala' troops). It names the source of the grain, the sealing official who authorized the transaction, and the intermediary who carried it out, and it closes with a month name and a royal year-name referencing military campaigns against Simurrum and Lullubu in the Zagros mountains — likely dating the tablet to the reign of king Shulgi of Ur, around 2040 BCE. Such texts are the backbone of our knowledge of the Ur III state's centralized redistribution economy.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet records a payment of 76 gur and 4 barig of barley — a substantial quantity of grain — issued as wages for hired laborers serving among the rotating conscript workforce ('bala' duty) who were stationed there. The grain came from an account or person named Bazi. A following line, naming a place called Kunzida and some further detail, is too damaged to read fully. The transaction was formally sealed by a man named Atu, son of Lala, and carried out through an agent named Erra-nu-id. It is dated to the month of Mušudu, in the year that Simurrum and Lullubu were destroyed for the ninth time — a year-name tied to Shulgi's Zagros campaigns.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine76 gur 4 barig of barley (gur-measure) — wages for hired men, (among) the troops on rotation (bala) duty who are stationed (there), from Bazi, Kunzida ... [x x] ... from LUM, sealed by Atu, son of Lala, via Erra-nu-id. Month: Mušudu. Year: Simurrum (and) Lullubu were destroyed for the 9th time.
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
1(gesz2) 1(u) 6(asz) 4(barig) sze gur a2 lu2 hun-ga2 erin2 bala tusz-a ki ba-zi-ta kun-zi-da x x LUM-ta kiszib3 a-tu dumu la-la giri3 er3-ra-nu-id iti mu-szu-du7 mu si-mu-ru-um lu-lu-bu a-ra2 1(u) la2 1(disz)-kam ba-hul
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — LB 0259. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: LB 0259 (de Liagre Böhl Collection, Netherlands Institute for the Near East, Leiden, Holland) — from Girsu (mod. Tello) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P388793). 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.