Position in chronology
FTP 021
About this tablet
A small Early Dynastic account from Šuruppak (modern Fara), in southern Iraq, roughly 2500 BCE, listing small numbers of sheep and possibly an ox. Two designations of sheep recur — udu-gaba and udu-URUDU — alongside a personal name (An-na-sum), a household or estate name (E-sud-anzu), and the god Enlil, who is probably named as the beneficiary of the animals. The tablet is broken at the top and bottom and the numbers on several entries are lost, so it survives as a fragment of a livestock ledger rather than a complete account. Documents like this are the routine bookkeeping of one of the earliest literate bureaucracies known.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
What survives is a short livestock tally. After a broken opening — which mentioned an ox — the scribe lists three sheep of the 'gaba' class and one of the 'copper' class, entered under the name An-na-sum, with Enlil named as the god concerned. Further down come more 'copper' sheep, an entry for the household of E-sud-anzu, a lot of two animals again connected with Enlil, and a final figure of twelve of something no longer readable. The top and bottom of the tablet are broken away and the reverse is worn smooth, so the totals and the closing formula are lost.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) [...] [...] ox(?) 3 udu-gaba sheep (chest/suckling sheep) 1 udu-URUDU sheep ("copper" sheep) An-na-sum Enlil [...] udu-URUDU sheep E-sud-anzu(?) 2 [...] [for(?)] En[lil] 12 [...] (reverse: surface eroded, no legible signs)
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
[...] [...] gu4? 3(asz@c) udu-gaba 1(asz@c) udu URUDU an#-na#-sum# en-lil2 [...] udu-URUDU e2-sud3#-anzu2#? 2(asz@c) [...] []en-[lil2] 1(u@c) 2(asz@c) [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIa (ca. 2600-2500 BC)) — FTP 021. This record has no stored scholarly English translation; the existence of published translations has not been checked; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA (P222095) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
Related tablets
Related sources
An early example of administrative writing from Uruk. Its fragmentary numerical entries and commodity signs document record-keeping during the formative period of writing.
A surviving administrative record of named people and livestock in the Ur III period. Together with other archives, such accounts reveal the work of managing animals, deliveries and institutional responsibility.