Position in chronology
CUSAS 35, 030
About this tablet
A small Early Dynastic clay tablet from Adab (modern Bismaya, in southern Iraq), roughly 2400 BCE, recording parcels of farmland assigned to named individuals. Five men each receive one eše₃ — about 2 hectares — and a sixth gets a single iku, roughly a third of a hectare; two further names follow without figures, probably because the numbers stood in the broken part of the tablet. It is a plain piece of estate bookkeeping: the sort of list a temple or palace surveyor made when dividing up arable land among dependents, and it survives as one of the earliest written records of who farmed which field.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
A land register: one eše₃ of field (about two hectares) to Ma-NI-NI; one eše₃ each to SIG-mu, to Ur-gu the stock-fattener, to Ur-peš-tur, and to Šu-Mama; one iku (about a third of a hectare) to PA-…-bala. Two more names, Ur-tu and A-ga-le, close the list, but whatever acreage stood beside them is lost with the broken edge. The back of the tablet was left blank.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 eše₃ (of) field — Ma-NI-NI; 1 eše₃ — SIG-mu; 1 eše₃ — Ur-gu, the animal-fattener(?); 1 eše₃ — Ur-peš-tur; 1 eše₃ — Šu-Mama; 1 iku — PA-[…]-bala; Ur-tu; A-ga(?)-le. (Reverse: uninscribed; the modern museum number Ms. 1052/40 is written on it in ink. Right side of the obverse broken away; a large chip is lost at the right edge.)
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
1(esz3@c) GAN2 ma-NI-NI 1(esze3@c) SIG-mu 1(esze3@c) ur-gu kuruszda? 1(esze3@c) ur-pesz3-tur 1(esze3@c) szu-ma-ma 1(iku@c) PA-x-x?-bala ur-tu a-ga#?-le
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — CUSAS 35, 030. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P250713) — 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.