Position in chronology
FTP 072
About this tablet
A small, cushion-shaped clay tablet from Šuruppak (modern Fara) in southern Iraq, written about 2500 BCE. It is a short beer-accounting note: three or four entries of beer measured in sila (roughly liters), booked out from a source called za₃-nin-ga₂ and charged to a man named Ur-ni. Beer was a staple food and a standard wage in Sumerian city administration, so tablets like this one are the everyday bookkeeping of a temple or palace storeroom. The tablet is chipped and its reverse is badly eroded, so part of the account is lost.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Beer issued, measured in sila: 13 sila, then 3 sila, drawn from the za₃-nin-ga₂ account; a further entry of [x]2 sila, followed by a line too damaged to read; and 17 sila. The whole account is booked to Ur-ni. The reverse of the tablet is worn smooth and nothing further can be recovered from it.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine13 sila of beer; 3 sila of beer — from za₃-nin-ga₂; [x] 2 sila of beer; […] AN; 17 sila of beer — Ur-ni.
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
1(u@c) 3(asz@c) kasz sila3 3(asz@c) kasz sila3 za3-nin-ga2-ta [x] 2(asz@c) kasz sila3 [x x] AN# 1(u@c) 7(asz@c) kasz sila3# ur2-ni
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIa (ca. 2600-2500 BC)) — FTP 072. 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 (P222148) — 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.