Position in chronology
SF 003
About this tablet
A fragment of a personnel roster from Šuruppak (modern Fara) in southern Iraq, written around 2600 BCE in the Early Dynastic period. A scribe was counting people by name — one or two individuals per line — the kind of headcount an early city administration used to track workers, dependents, or ration recipients. The names themselves are a window into the era: Nin-zadim ('Lady stone-cutter'), A-lam-i (built on the word for 'statue'), Nin-iri-ša ('Lady in the heart of the city'). Fara tablets like this are among the oldest substantial administrative archives in the world.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a head-count list, badly broken at the top. After two unreadable entries it reads: one person named Nin-zadim; one named A-lam-i; two counted under Nin-iri-ša; one named Lugal-something (the rest of the name is lost); one whose name is mostly broken away; one named A-la-something; and one whose name ends in 'buru.' The back of the tablet is blank or worn smooth — the totals or continuation, if there were any, are gone.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) [...] ... [...] ... [1] Nin-zadim 1 A-lam-i 2 Nin-iri-ša [1] Lugal-[...] 1 [...]-GAL-[...] 1 A-la-[...] 1 ...-buru (reverse: uninscribed/effaced)
Our translation engine — Fable 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
[...]-x [...]-x [1(asz@c)] nin-zadim 1(asz@c) a-lam-i 2(asz@c) nin-iri-sza3 [1(asz@c)] lugal-[...] 1(asz@c) [x-(x)]-GAL-[x-(x)] 1(asz@c) a2#-la2?-[x] 1(asz@c) x-buru5
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIa (ca. 2600-2500 BC)) — SF 003. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin, Germany (P010568) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.