Position in chronology
CUSAS 35, 403
About this tablet
A small clay ledger from Early Dynastic Sumer — probably from Umma in southern Iraq, around 2500 BCE — recording flocks of sheep and goats. A herding official lists ewes, lambs, two-year-old sheep and prime billy-goats, marks them as animals that had died and been collected, then notes a further 27 animals and a batch of fattened sheep belonging to the "Great Storehouse," dated to the seventh month. Tablets like this are the bookkeeping backbone of a temple or palace economy: someone had to answer for every animal in the herd, living or dead.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Livestock report: 24 ewes, 13 lambs, 10 two-year-old sheep, 10 sheep of the gu-gu-u₂ class, and 2 prime billy-goats — all animals found dead and collected. Plus 27 gazelle-type sheep. And from the Great Storehouse, fattened sheep, plucked/mustered: 27 head. Recorded in the seventh month of the year.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine24 ewes; 13 lambs; 10 sheep, two years old; 10 sheep, gu-gu-u₂; 2 prime billy-goats (masz₂-sag) — the fallen (animals), gathered up. 27 gazelle-sheep (udu masz-da₃). Fattened sheep of the Great Storehouse (ganun-mah); plucked/gathered: 27. Year, month 7.
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.
Engine notes
read from photo7 uncertain terms ↓
- gu-gu-u2 — Not securely attested in standard ED lexical lists. May be a breed designation, a feeding class, a personal name, or a term for 'penned/confined' animals. Rendering here is a transliteration placeholder.
- de5-de5 — Reduplicated form of de5 ('to collect/gather'); in administrative contexts often functions as a subtotal or collection summary marker, but the precise syntactic role here is uncertain.
- masz-da3 — Standard ED Sumerian for 'gazelle'; however, in some contexts it may denote a category of small caprid rather than a true gazelle. The distinction matters for understanding the animal economy.
- ur4 — Can mean 'to shear' (wool harvest), 'to gather/collect', or possibly 'to sweep'. In a livestock context 'shearing' is the most natural reading, but 'collection' is also plausible.
- ganun-mah — 'Great storehouse/granary'; a major institutional storage facility, often associated with temple estates. Whether this is a proper name for a specific building or a generic institutional term is context-dependent.
- masz2-sag — 'Head goat' or 'lead goat'; in ED animal accounts this typically refers to the lead animal of a flock, possibly a bellwether. Some scholars read it as a premium or first-quality animal designation.
- udu# mu# 2(disz@t) — Sheep of year 2 (two-year-olds); the # marks indicate the signs are damaged or partially read in the transliteration. The age classification is standard ED practice but the exact reading here is cautious.
Reasoning ↓
Photo examined: the obverse is clearly the inscribed face (centre image). The tablet is a small, lenticular/bun-shaped clay piece, characteristic of Early Dynastic administrative documents. The surface shows a ruled column divider separating numerical signs on the left from commodity signs on the right, consistent with the transliteration's two-column layout. Individual wedge clusters are visible and, where legible, broadly confirm the transliteration: the curved numeral signs (u@c, asz@c) are recognisable as the standard ED period case-forms; the right column shows animal signs consistent with UDU (sheep), MASZ2, and what appears to be the SAG sign. The edge and reverse (bottom two photos) are blank or nearly blank, consistent with a simple obverse-only record. The top image shows the upper edge with what appears to be a single line of signs — possibly the header line — and the museum label 'Ms. 3791-5'. The left and right edge photos show some impressed marks that may be continuation signs but are too small to read confidently. The term 'gu-gu-u2' is not securely identified in standard lexical lists and may be a breed name, a personal name, or a feeding-status term; confidence on that line is low. 'de5-de5' as a subtotal marker and 'masz-da3' as gazelle are standard ED usages. 'ur4' in the final line most likely means 'to shear/shearing' or possibly 'to collect/gather', making the last line a summary of fattened sheep in the great storehouse for a shearing account spanning seven months.
Generated by Claude Sonnet 4.6 · prompt 2026-05-12/v4-interpretation · May 16, 2026 · 2289 in / 1223 out tokens
Transliteration
2(u@c) 4(asz@c) u8 1(u@c) 3(asz@c) sila4 1(u@c) udu# mu# 2(disz@t) 1(u@c) udu gu-gu-u2 2(asz@c) masz2-sag de5-de5# 3(u@c) la2 3(disz@t) udu masz-da3 udu kuruszda ganun-mah ur4 3(u) la2 3(disz@t) mu iti 7(disz@t)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC) ?) — CUSAS 35, 403. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P252799) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.