Position in chronology
WF 020
About this tablet
An administrative census from Šuruppak (modern Fara) in southern Iraq, around 2600 BCE — one of the world's oldest cities with a substantial bureaucracy. A scribe here counts the city's plow teams: nearly two hundred draft donkeys and the thirty-four plowmen who drive them, all designated as royal laborers. It is a snapshot of state-organized agriculture centuries before the great empires, showing that the palace already tracked its animals and manpower with careful arithmetic — and even that the scribe's grand total is off by one from the sum of the entries.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Inventory of the city's plow donkeys: four batches of 90, 33, 41, and 31 animals. Personnel assigned to them: four crews of plowmen — 11, 11, 6, and 6 men — the donkey drivers. Bottom line: 196 plow donkeys belonging to the city (the entries actually add up to 195, so the scribe's total is one off), and 34 plowmen, all of them workers in the king's service.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine90 plow donkeys, 33 plow donkeys, 41 plow donkeys, 31 plow donkeys — donkeys of the city. 11 plowmen, 11 plowmen, 6 plowmen, 6 plowmen — the men who drive the donkeys. Grand total: 196(!) plow donkeys — donkeys of the city; 34 plowmen, workmen of the king.
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
1(gesz2@c) 3(u@c) ansze-apin 3(u@c) 3(asz@c) <ansze>-apin 4(u@c) 1(asz@c) <ansze>-apin 3(u@c) 1(asz@c) <ansze>-apin ansze iri 1(u@c) 1(asz@c) engar 1(u@c) 1(asz@c) engar 6(asz@c) engar 6(asz@c) engar lu2 ansze lah5 an-sze3-gu2 3(gesz2@c) 1(u@c) 6(asz@c)! ansze-apin ansze iri 3(u@c) 4(asz@c) engar gurusz lugal
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIa (ca. 2600-2500 BC)) — WF 020. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin, Germany (P010977) — 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.