Position in chronology
FTP 035
About this tablet
A small bun-shaped clay tablet from Šuruppak (modern Fara) in southern Iraq, written around 2500 BCE. It is a barley allotment list: five named men and women each receive a measure of grain — the shepherd Šeš-nu-kuš and the maltster Ur-sag get the larger share of 2 barig (roughly 120 litres), the others half that. The last line gives the name Lu₂-ma₂, most likely the boatman or official who handled or delivered the grain. Documents like this are the ordinary bookkeeping of one of the world's oldest bureaucracies, recording who fed whom in a Sumerian city a thousand years before Hammurabi.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Grain issue: Šeš-nu-kuš, herdsman of LAK020 — 2 barig. Di-Utu, attached to the É×KASKAL establishment — 1 barig. Ur-sag the maltster — 2 barig (the figures here are damaged). Munus-ma — 1 barig. Pa₄-nu-kuš — 1 barig. Handled by Lu₂-ma₂, the boatman. In modern terms, roughly 120 litres of barley each for the herdsman and the brewer's maltster, and about 60 litres for the other three.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine2 barig (of barley): Šeš-nu-kuš, shepherd of LAK020. 1 barig: Di-Utu, (of) the É×KASKAL ("house-of-the-road" institution). 2 barig(?): Ur-sag(?), the maltster. 1 barig: Munus-ma. 1 barig: Pa₄-nu-kuš. Lu₂-ma₂ (boatman / responsible party).
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
2(barig@c) szesz-nu-kusz2 sipa LAK020 1(barig@c) di-utu |E2xKASKAL| 2(barig@c)#? ur-sag#? munu4-mu2 1(barig@c) munus-ma 1(barig@c) pa4-nu-kusz2 lu2-ma2
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIa (ca. 2600-2500 BC)) — FTP 035. 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 (P222110) — 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.