Position in chronology
WF 088
About this tablet
An administrative ration or allotment list from Šuruppak (modern Fara) in southern Iraq, written around 2600 BCE in the Early Dynastic period — among the oldest readable bureaucratic records anywhere. A scribe records measured quantities of barley issued to five named officials of the city administration: a land registrar, a cult official, the supervisor of the granary, a temple officer, and the vizier. Tablets like this show that centuries before any law code or literature, Mesopotamian cities were already running on paperwork: fixed measures, named officeholders, and accountable distribution of the staple grain.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a barley disbursement sheet. The land registrar receives two large gur-measures of barley; the official DUMU×NUN-šita gets two; Lamma, who runs the granary, gets two; the officer A-...-si receives one; and Munus-geštin, the vizier, receives one. Five entries, eight large measures of grain in all, each tied to a specific officeholder in the city administration of Šuruppak. The back of the tablet is blank — the account ends there.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) 2 great gur of barley — the land registrar (sa₁₂-du₅); 2 (great gur) — DUMU×NUN-šita, the PA-sud official; 2 (great gur) — Lamma, the granary supervisor (ka-guru₇); 1 (great gur) — A-LAK358-si, the IB official; 1 (great gur) — Munus-geštin, the vizier. (reverse uninscribed)
Our translation engine — Fable 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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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-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.