Position in chronology
CUSAS 35, 182
About this tablet
A small Early Dynastic livestock note from Adab (modern Bismaya) in southern Iraq, roughly the mid-third millennium BCE. It records eighteen sheep of a particular class charged to a household called the "house of the children," dated to a named month, with the men responsible listed afterwards: a farmer named Ur-ga, an overseer named Di-Utu, and a person or route called Giri-gena through whom the animals passed. It is ordinary institutional bookkeeping — the kind of one-line receipt that, multiplied by thousands, kept a Sumerian city-estate solvent.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Eighteen sheep (of the udu-HAR class), charged to the "house of the children," in the month Ab-e'e-ziga. The opening lines are broken. The officials named on the back are Ur-ga the farmer, Di-Utu the overseer, and the transfer was handled by Giri-gena. The last line is lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse 1. [ ... ] ... 2. [ ... ]-ba 3. it belongs to the [house] of the children (é-dumu) 4. 20 less 2 (= 18) udu-HAR sheep 5. month: Ab-e'e-ziga 6. [ ... ] 7. [ ... ] (Reverse / continuation) 8. Ur-[ga] 9. the farmer [ ... ] 10. Di-Utu 11. the overseer (nu-banda) 12. under the authority of Giri-gena 13. [ ... ]
Our translation engine — Opus 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
[...]-x [x]-ba [e2]-dumu-kam 2(u@c)# la2 2(asz@c) udu-HAR iti# ab#-e3#-zi#-ga# [...] [...] ur-[ga2] engar [x?] di#-utu# nu-banda3 giri3-gen-na [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — CUSAS 35, 182. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P252762) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-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.