Position in chronology
WF 043
About this tablet
A land-allotment record from the city of Šuruppak (modern Fara) in southern Iraq, written around 2600 BCE — among the earliest readable administrative archives in the world. It parcels out farmland to five named individuals, including a policeman-type officer (galla) and a plowman named Anzu, all apparently located at a place called An-še-gu, perhaps 'the upper bank.' The individual plots add up exactly to the total on the reverse — 26 iku, roughly 9 hectares — booked under an overseer named Lumma. It is the everyday bookkeeping of one of humanity's first bureaucracies.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Land register, upper-bank district: Me-mah-nusa gets 5 iku of field (about 1.8 hectares), Abzu-kidu gets 5 iku, the constable gets 9 iku, A-da-DUR gets 2 iku, and Anzu the plowman gets 5 iku. Grand total, written on the back: 26 iku of field — just over 9 hectares — under the responsibility of Lumma. The plots add up exactly to the total; the accountant did his arithmetic correctly.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse: 5 iku of field — Me-mah-nusa; 5 iku — Abzu-kidu; 1 eše 3 iku — the galla-officer; 2 iku — A-da-DUR; 5 iku — Anzu, the farmer; (at) An-še-gu (the "upper bank"). Reverse: (Total:) 1 bur 1 eše 2 iku of field — Lumma.
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
5(iku@c) GAN2 me-mah-nu-sa2 5(iku@c) abzu-ki-du10 1(esze3@c) 3(iku@c) gal5-la2 2(iku@c) a-da-DUR2 5(iku@c) anzu engar an-sze3-gu2 1(bur3@c) 1(esze3@c) 2(iku@c) GAN2 lum-ma
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIa (ca. 2600-2500 BC)) — WF 043. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin, Germany (P011000) — 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.