Position in chronology
WF 085
About this tablet
An Early Dynastic administrative tablet from Fara (ancient Šuruppak, southern Iraq), dating to roughly 2600–2500 BCE, recording a series of large barley disbursements measured in two different capacity standards — the oversized 'great gur' (gur-mah) and the ordinary gur. The entries track grain allocated to named individuals and at least one institutional storehouse (e2-KA-nun), with a man named Sud-Anzu named as the responsible official overseeing the whole account. The quantities — running into the hundreds of gur — point to a sophisticated redistributive economy managing grain on a large institutional scale. Documents like this are among the earliest surviving bureaucratic records in human history, showing that scribes at Šuruppak commanded both full literacy and a fluent arithmetic notation, including a clean subtractive convention (writing '240 minus 1' rather than '239') to avoid cluttered sign sequences.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet logs several large barley allocations. The first entry assigns 177 large-gur of barley under the authority of a man named Lugal-a'mah, and breaks that down into three sub-entries: 108 large-gur for the e2-KA-nun storehouse, 87½ for an unspecified purpose, and 36½ for the si-du3 category. Separate entries then record 239 large-gur of barley; 51½ measures plus one barig in standard gur for two recipients; and finally 408 standard-gur of barley. The official accountable for all of this is named Sud-Anzu.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine177 gur-mah of barley — Lugal-a[2]-mah: 108 [gur-mah for] e2-KA-nun; 87½ [gur-mah]; 36½ [gur-mah] — si-du3; 239 gur-mah; 51½ + 1 barig of barley, [standard] gur, [for] 2; 408 of barley, [standard] gur — Sud-Anzu.
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
3(gesz2@c) la2 3(asz@c) sze gur-mah lugal-a2#?-mah! 1(gesz2@c) 5(u@c) la2 2(asz@c) e2-KA-nun 1(gesz2@c) 2(u@c) 7(asz@c) 1/2(asz@c) 3(u@c) 6(asz@c) 1/2(asz@c) si-du3 4(gesz2@c) la2 1(asz@c) gur-mah 5(u@c) 1(asz@c) 1/2(asz@c) 1(barig@c) sze# gur 2(asz@c) 6(gesz2@c) 5(u@c) la2 2(asz@c) sze gur sud3-anzux(MI)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIa (ca. 2600-2500 BC)) — WF 085. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin, Germany (P011042) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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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.