Position in chronology
WF 002
About this tablet
An administrative record from the city of Šuruppak (modern Fara, Iraq), written around 2600 BCE — one of the earliest bureaucratic archives in the world. It counts donkeys of a particular grade assigned to or held by three named men — Lumma, NE-lum, and Lu-numuda'e — and closes with a totaling section under an official named Šu-ama-gan. The striking feature is a huge round number (9,720 in the sexagesimal system, written with large circular impressions) alongside the 14 animals of the itemized entries, probably a cumulative figure such as fodder or work-units rather than a herd of that size. It shows a city administration already tracking livestock and labor with formal accounting techniques centuries before connected literature was written.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a donkey ledger. Four donkeys of a certain grade are booked to Lumma; five to NE-lum; five to Lu-numuda'e — fourteen animals in all. The back of the tablet carries the totals: a large figure of 9,720 units (written with the big circular number signs), together with the 14 graded donkeys, all accounted for under the responsible official Šu-ama-gan. In modern terms: an inventory sheet listing which handler holds how many animals, closed out with a grand total and the name of the supervisor who signed off on the account.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse: 4 donkeys, sig7-... (ansze sig7-LAK046-LAK046): Lumma; 5 ...-donkeys (ansze-LAK046-LAK046): NE-lum; 5: Lu-numuda'e. Reverse: 2 šar, 4 gešʾu, 2 geš (= 9,720), (and) 14 ...-donkeys (ansze-LAK046-LAK046) — sig7-donkeys, (under) Šu-ama-gan.
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
4(asz@c) ansze sig7-LAK046@v-LAK046@v lum-ma 5(asz@c) ansze-LAK046@v-LAK046@v NE-lumx(LAK218) 5(asz@c) lu2-nu-mu-da-e3 2(szar2@c) 4(gesz'u@c) 2(gesz2@c) 1(u@c) 4(asz@c) ansze-LAK046@v-LAK046@v ansze-sig7 szu-ama-gan
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIa (ca. 2600-2500 BC)) — WF 002. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin, Germany (P010959) — 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.