Position in chronology
FTP 073
About this tablet
A small round clay tablet from Šuruppak (modern Fara) in southern Iraq, written about 2500 BCE. It is a beer-distribution account: a scribe listed measured amounts of beer against the names of the people or households who received them — Ur-ni, E-kaš, Enlil-amah, the woman Ma, and others, with one entry booked as coming "from Zag-sud." Beer was a staple food and a standard form of wages in early Sumerian institutions, so lists like this are the routine bookkeeping of a temple or estate kitchen. The tablet is cracked through and much of the text 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: seven measures to Ur-ni; four to E-kaš; four to Enlil-amah; one to Munus-ma; two barig of beer to someone whose name ends in -si; a further amount charged to the account of Zag-sud; and two barig more, for a recipient whose name is broken off. The tablet snaps off there — the remaining lines and the reverse are too damaged to read.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine7 (measures of) beer, (in) sila — Ur-ni; [x] 4(?) — E-kaš ("House-of-the-Runner"); 4 — Enlil-amah; 1 — Munus-ma; [x] 2 barig (of) beer, [(in) sila] — [...]-si; [x] — from Zag-sud; 2 barig [...]; [...] (The remainder of the tablet is broken away; the reverse and edges preserve only scattered wedges.)
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
7(asz@c) kasz sila3 ur2-ni [x] 4(asz@c)#? e2-kasz4# 4(asz@c) en-lil2-a2-mah 1(asz@c) munus-ma [x] 2(barig@c) kasz# [sila3] [...]-si [x] za3#-sud3-ta 2(barig@c) [...] [...]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIa (ca. 2600-2500 BC)) — FTP 073. 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 (P222149) — 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.