Position in chronology
FTP 032
About this tablet
A small, badly chipped clay tablet from Šuruppak (modern Fara) in southern Iraq, written around 2500 BCE. It is a work-and-rations account: a scribe listed several commodities or work-units, noted a day's labor, then recorded barley allotments of 2 ban (about 20 liters) for a man named Ur-sud and 3 ban (about 30 liters) for Adda-tur, closing with a total of two days. The right side and the beginnings of the first four lines are broken away, so the goods being counted at the top can no longer be identified with certainty. Documents like this are the routine bookkeeping of an Early Dynastic institutional household — the paperwork that kept work gangs fed.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The top of the tablet lists four entries whose quantities are lost — something pressed or processed (sur), a name or item ending in -sud, the House-of-the-Foundation, and cedar oil. Then comes the labor entry: one day's work. Below that, the payouts: Ur-sud gets 2 ban of barley, Adda-tur gets 3 ban. The account closes with the note "2 days." The right-hand side of the tablet is broken off, so the figures for the first four lines are gone.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) [...] sur[ra] [...] [x]-sud [...] E-ur (the "house of the foundation") [...] a-eren (cedar-oil/resin) labor(-allotment) of 1 day 2 ban — Ur-sud 3 ban — Adda-tur 2 days
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
[...] sur#-[ra] [...] [x]-sud3 [...] e2-ur2 [...] a-eren2 a2 u4 1(disz@t) 2(ban2@c) ur-sud3 3(ban2@c) ad#-da-tur# u4 2(disz@t)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIa (ca. 2600-2500 BC)) — FTP 032. 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 (P222106) — 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.