Position in chronology
FTP 083
About this tablet
An administrative account from Šuruppak (modern Fara) in southern Iraq, written around 2600 BCE in the Early Dynastic period — the city famous for producing some of the world's oldest bureaucratic archives. A scribe here tallies quantities of an agricultural commodity assigned to or delivered by five or six named individuals, several identified by their jobs: a livestock administrator, a 'hand-holder' (a kind of receiving or guarantor official), and a cook. It is the ordinary paperwork of a city economy already run on written records, naming real working people of the mid-third millennium.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a short ledger entry. Eight bales of fodder-plants (or pulses) are booked under Kinigi. Then come the other lines of the account: thirty units for E-ušumgal; thirty for Sud-anzu, the official in charge of the livestock; fifteen for Ur-tur, the receiving officer; fifteen for Sud; and twelve for E-zi, the cook. Nothing else was written — the back of the tablet was left blank.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine8 bales of gu-plant (fodder/pulses): Kinigi; 30: E-ušumgal; 30: Sud-anzu, the livestock administrator (šuš); 15: Ur-tur, the gu-šudu official (pledge-/delivery-holder); 15: Sud; 12: E-zi, the cook. (Reverse uninscribed.)
Our translation engine — Fable 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
8(asz@c) gu2-u2 ki-ni-gi4 3(u@c) e2-uszum-gal# 3(u@c) sud3-anzu szusz3 1(u@c) 5(asz@c) ur-tur gu2-szu-du8 1(u@c) 5(asz@c) sud3 1(u@c) 2(asz@c) e2-zi# muhaldim
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIa (ca. 2600-2500 BC)) — FTP 083. 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 (P222159) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-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.