Position in chronology
FTP 078
About this tablet
A small Early Dynastic account from Šuruppak (modern Fara), in southern Iraq, roughly 2600–2500 BCE. It lists jars of a grain-drink — beer — issued to or received from four men, each identified by his home town or connection: a man of Iri-saĝrig, a man called UR-UR, a man of Adab, and a man of Umma. Tablets like this are the routine bookkeeping of a temple or palace storehouse, and they are also our earliest evidence for how Sumerian cities kept track of who owed and who got what.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Beer issue list: Lu-irisaĝrig — one dug-TAR jar of beer. UR-UR — one [dug-TAR] jar of beer. Lu-adab — one ban-AŠ measure of beer. Lu-umma. Three or four men, each named for the town he came from — Iri-saĝrig, Adab, Umma — each set down against a single jar of the grain-drink. No date, no official's seal survives on the readable face; the rest of the tablet's surface is too worn to add anything.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineLu-irisaĝrig; 1 dug-TAR jar of ŠE+TIN (beer); UR-UR; 1 dug-[TAR] jar of ŠE+TIN (beer); Lu-adab; 1 ban-AŠ measure of ŠE+TIN (beer); Lu-umma.
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
lu2#-iri-sa12-rig7# 1(asz@c) dug-TAR |SZE+TIN| UR-UR 1(asz@c) dug-[TAR] |SZE+TIN|# lu2-adab 1(asz@c) ba-an-ASZ |SZE+TIN| lu2-umma
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIa (ca. 2600-2500 BC)) — FTP 078. 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 (P222154) — 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.