Position in chronology
CUSAS 35, 144
About this tablet
A small clay account from Adab in southern Iraq, written roughly 2400 BCE, recording four standard brewing and baking ingredients — fine flour, beer-bread, malt and groats — issued in equal one-gur measures. The goods pass from an official titled nu-banda (overseer) to a man named Šeš-bad who serves as cupbearer, with the transaction booked to an establishment called the "House of the Child(ren)" and dated by month. It is the ordinary bookkeeping of a temple or palace kitchen: the exact shopping list for making bread and beer, logged so that someone could be held accountable for it.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Four items, one gur of each: fine flour, beer-bread, malt and groats. Issued to Šeš-bad the cupbearer; the overseer released them to him. Charged to the House of the Child(ren). Recorded in the month of še-sag-sig-ga.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 gur of fine flour, 1 gur of beer-bread (bappir), 1 gur of malt, 1 gur of groats — Šeš-bad, the cupbearer; from the overseer (nu-banda) it was given to him. The House of the Child(ren) (E-dumu). Month: še-sag-sig-ga.
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(asz@c) zi3 sig15 gur 1(asz@c) bappir gur 1(asz@c) munu4 gur 1(asz@c) nig2-ar3-ra gur szesz#-bad3 sagi# ki nu-banda3 an-na-szum2 e2#-dumu iti sze-sag-sig15-ga
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — CUSAS 35, 144. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P252767) — 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.