Position in chronology
FTP 030
About this tablet
A broken accounting tablet from Šuruppak (modern Fara) in southern Iraq, written roughly 2600–2500 BCE. It records fixed allotments of barley — one gur and two barig apiece — issued to a short list of named men, measured by the lidga, a large capacity unit of the period. Documents like this are the ordinary bookkeeping of a Sumerian city's grain administration, and they preserve some of the earliest personal names known from human records.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Grain issue, reckoned in lidga-measures. Ur-BAD-DAB: 1 gur 2 barig. Sud-ursag: 1 gur 2 barig. Lugal-GAR-NI: 1 gur 2 barig. Na-diri: 1 barig (the figure is damaged). Ur-mes: 1 gur 2 barig. Ur-ni follows, but his amount and the rest of the list are lost where the tablet is broken.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...] barley, (in) lidga-measure. 1 (gur) 2 barig — Ur-BAD₃-DAB₅ 1 (gur) 2 barig — Sud₃-ursag 1 (gur) 2 barig — Lugal-GAR-NI [x] 1 barig(?) — Na-diri(?) 1 (gur) 2 barig — Ur-mes Ur₂-[ni] (remainder broken)
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
[...] sze lid2#-ga 1(asz@c) 2(barig@c) ur-BAD3-DAB5 1(asz@c) 2(barig@c) sud3-ur-sag 1(asz@c) 2(barig@c) lugal-GAR-NI [x] 1(barig@c)#? na-diri#? 1(asz@c) 2(barig@c) ur#-mes ur2#-[ni] [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIa (ca. 2600-2500 BC)) — FTP 030. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA (P222104) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
Related tablets
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.