Position in chronology
CUSAS 35, 232
About this tablet
A small, much-battered clay tablet from Adab in southern Iraq, written roughly 2400 BCE. It is a routine piece of estate bookkeeping: a couple of measured units of some commodity, a short list of men — one of them a farmer, another apparently a boatman, plus Ur-gu — and a note that the goods were handed over to a man named Puta-pada. The last two lines are the date: the month of sheep-shearing, in the year when bricks were laid for a building at Karkar. Most of the obverse has flaked away, so the commodity itself is lost; what survives is the human scaffolding of the transaction — names, a job title, a delivery, and a date.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Two measured units of goods — the commodity is broken away — are booked against a field. The men named are Lu-[...], a farmer, someone whose name begins KA-, a boatman, and Ur-gu; two further names are lost in the damaged middle of the tablet. The goods were handed over to Puta-pada. Dated: the sheep-shearing month, in the year the bricks were laid at Karkar.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 (unit) [...] 1 (unit) [...] [...] — it is of the field. Lu-[...] the farmer, [...] KA-x-[x] [...] [...] mu-laḫ (the boatman/Mu-laḫ) Ur-gu for Puta-pada [he gave it to him]. Month: ĝa'udu-ur (the sheep-shearing month); year: the bricks at Karkar were laid down and set in place.
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
1(asz@c) [...] 1(asz@c) [...] [...] GAN2#-kam# lu2#-[...] engar x KA-x-[x] [...] [...] mu-lah5 ur-gu# pu2#-ta#-pa3#-da-ra [an-na]-szum2 iti# ga2-udu-ur4# mu szeg12 karkara szub-ba-gar
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — CUSAS 35, 232. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P252790) — 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.