Position in chronology
WF 088
About this tablet
A barley distribution record from the ancient Sumerian city of Šuruppak (modern Fara, southern Iraq), dating to around 2500 BCE, at the height of the Early Dynastic period. Five separate allocations of barley — measured in large institutional capacity units called gur-mah — are assigned to named individuals and titled officials, among them a granary supervisor (ka-guru7), a senior administrative secretary (sukkal), and a woman connected to viticulture. Thousands of tablets like this were unearthed at Fara, forming the administrative archive of one of ancient Sumer's best-documented cities; this small clay document is a fragment of that city's everyday grain economy, preserved for four and a half millennia.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Two large measures of barley go to Sa12-du5. Two more measures — drawn from the DUMUxNUN-šita allocation — go to PA-sud3. Two measures of lamma provision are assigned to the granary supervisor. One measure is entered against a-LAK358-si under IB, and one measure goes to the woman of the vine, recorded under the sukkal official. Eight large gur of barley in total, distributed across five recipients.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine2 large gur of barley — Sa12-du5; 2 large gur, |DUMUxNUN|-šita — PA-sud3; 2 large gur, lamma — ka-guru7; 1 large gur, a-LAK358-si — IB; 1 large gur, munus-geštin — sukkal.
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
2(asz@c) sze gur-mah sa12-du5 2(asz@c) |DUMUxNUN|-szita PA-sud3 2(asz@c) lam-ma ka-guru7 1(asz@c) a-LAK358-si IB 1(asz@c) munus-gesztin sukkal
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIa (ca. 2600-2500 BC)) — WF 088. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin, Germany (P011045) — 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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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.