Position in chronology
CUSAS 35, 399
About this tablet
A small, palm-sized clay tablet from the Umma region of southern Iraq, written in the archaic script of the Early Dynastic period. It is a ration or delivery list: loaves of good-quality bread, several kinds of beer measured in sila (roughly liters), and an aromatic commodity, booked out to a weaver and to someone or something called U₂-U₂-la. The reverse was left blank — the whole account fit on one side. Documents like this are the routine bookkeeping of a temple or estate kitchen, the sort of record that shows us what ordinary workers in a Sumerian institution were actually given to eat and drink.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Issued: 40 loaves of fine white bread. 7 units of UKKEN×GUG₂ plus beer, measured in liters, for the weaver. 3 units of an aromatic (the sign is damaged), in liters, for U₂-U₂-la. 5 units of DIN-ŠE beer, in liters. And 10 liters of sweet beer. The back of the tablet was never written on.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse, column i–ii) 40 (loaves of) *ninda-UD* bread, good (quality); 7 (units of) UKKEN×GUG₂; beer, (in) sila-measures — (for) the weaver(s); 3 (units of) aromatic …[-x]; sila-measures — (for) U₂-U₂-la; 5 (units of) DIN-ŠE; beer, (in) sila-measures; 10 (units of) sweet beer, (in) sila-measures. (reverse: uninscribed)
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
4(u@c) ninda-UD sa6-ga 7(asz@c) |UKKENxGUG2| kasz sila3 usz-bar 3(asz@c) szim-x sila3 u2-u2-la 5(asz@c) DIN-SZE kasz sila3 1(u@c) kasz sig15 sila3
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC) ?) — CUSAS 35, 399. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P252803) — 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.