Position in chronology
CBS 07280
About this tablet
A small, broken clay tablet from Nippur in southern Iraq, written roughly 2500 BCE, during the Early Dynastic period. It is an ordinary accounting note: a scribe listed measures of grain set against the names of five or six men — Ur-Abu, Lugal-šeš, someone whose name begins with the god Enlil, and others. Nothing in it is dramatic, but records like this are the bedrock of Mesopotamian economic history: they show a temple or estate household distributing rations in fixed, graded amounts, and they preserve the names of otherwise unknown people from one of the world's first cities.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The top of the list is broken away. What survives reads like a ledger column: two measures of grain to Maš-da, the attendant; one measure and two barig to a man whose name begins 'Sag-'; two measures to Ur-Abu; two barig to Lugal-šeš; two barig to a man named for the god Enlil; and a final, damaged entry for someone called Nesag. The back of the tablet carries no writing.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) [n] ... [...] 2 (measures): Maš-da(5), the attendant(?) [...] 1 (measure) 2 barig: Sag-...-[...] 2 (measures): Ur-Abu 2 barig: Lugal-šeš 2 barig: Enlil-[...] [n]: Nesag(?) [...] (reverse: uninscribed / not preserved)
Our translation engine — Opus 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
[n] x [...] 2(asz@c) masz-da5 pa4? [x] 1(asz@c) 2(barig@c) sag-x-[(x)] 2(asz@c) ur-ab-u2 2(barig@c) lugal-szesz 2(barig@c)# en-lil2#-[x x] [x] ne#-sag#? [x (x)]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — CBS 07280. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA (P262305) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-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.