Position in chronology
FTP 025
About this tablet
A small clay tablet from Šuruppak (modern Fara) in southern Iraq, written around 2500 BCE. It is a barley ration list: a scribe recorded fixed measures of grain — one or two ban (roughly 10 or 20 liters) — issued to named men such as Ur-sud, Lugal-ana, Adda-tur and Ur-abzu. Several further entries survive only as numbers with the names broken away. Documents like this are the routine bookkeeping of an early city's institutional household, and they preserve ordinary people's names centuries before any narrative history was written.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
A grain issue list. Ur-sud gets one ban of barley (about 10 liters); Lugal-ana, Adda-tur and Ur-abzu get two ban each. The list continues, but the next two entries are lost entirely, and of the three that follow only the amounts survive — one ban, then two ban, then two ban — with the names of the recipients broken away.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 ban of barley — Ur-sud; 2 ban — Lugal-ana; 2 ban — Adda-tur; 2 ban — Ur-abzu; [...] [...] 1 ban — [...]; 2 ban — ... [...]; 2 ban — [...]
Our translation engine — Opus 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
1(ban2@c) sze# ur-sud3 2(ban2@c) lugal-a2#-na 2(ban2@c) ad-da-tur 2(ban2@c)#? ur#-abzu# [...] [...] 1(ban2@c) [...] 2(ban2@c) x [x] 2(ban2@c) [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIa (ca. 2600-2500 BC)) — FTP 025. 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 (P222099) — 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.