Position in chronology
MVN 05, 004
About this tablet
This is a short Ur III administrative receipt from Umma, part of the vast bureaucratic apparatus that tracked raw materials moving through the state economy around 2000 BCE. It records two batches of reed bundles — over 4,000 bundles combined — transferred from a man named Šeš-kalla to a recipient named An-gugu, dated by month and by a year-name referencing the construction of the temple/storehouse complex at Puzriš-Dagan (Drehem), the royal livestock and redistribution center founded under King Šulgi. Reed was a essential raw material in Mesopotamia — used for construction, matting, baskets, and fuel — and tablets like this one, however terse, are the fossil trace of a highly organized command economy.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Two lots of reed bundles were handed over: 2,736 bundles of one type and 1,560 bundles of another. The reeds came from Šeš-kalla, and a man named An-gugu received them. The transaction is dated to the sixth month, in the year that the temple complex at Puzriš-Dagan was built — a standard way Ur III scribes dated documents, by naming a major event of that year, here Šulgi's founding of the Puzriš-Dagan institution.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine2(gesz'u) ... total: 2736 bundles of reed, ŠID (a qualifier — "counted" or a type-designation); 1560 bundles of reed, NE (a qualifier — possibly "fired/burned" or another type-designation); from Šeš-kalla, An-gugu received. Month: "E-iti-6" (the 6th month), year: "the house of Puzur-Dagan was built."
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(gesz'u) 5(gesz2) 3(u) 6(disz) sa gi SZID 2(gesz'u) 6(gesz2) sa gi NE ki szesz-kal-la-ta an-gu-gu szu ba-ti iti e2-iti-6(disz) mu e2 puzur4-da-gan ba-du3
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — MVN 05, 004. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Anonymous 114224 (private: anonymous, unlocated) — from Umma (mod. Tell Jokha) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P114224). 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.