Position in chronology
WF 090
About this tablet
An administrative barley account from Šuruppak (modern Fara) in southern Iraq, written around 2500 BCE — one of the world's oldest bureaucratic archives. Each line records a quantity of barley, measured in the large 'gur-mah' unit and its subdivision the barig, against a personal name; the final surviving word labels one party as a herdsman. It is a snapshot of grain distribution or delivery in a city administration a full millennium before Hammurabi, showing how early Mesopotamian institutions tracked staple foodstuffs person by person.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a grain ledger. Munus-geštin is down for one and a half great-gur of barley; A-pa'e for six barig; An-dabsi for two barig (the start of his entry is broken off). The next couple of entries are too damaged to read in full — one seems to begin with a quantity of one. Then Bil-anukuš is listed for an amount now lost, and Ad-da for one. After another broken line, the reverse notes that one of these men — probably the last named — was a herdsman. In modern terms: a barley disbursement sheet listing about half a dozen named individuals and their allotments.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) 1½ gur-mah of barley — Munus-geštin. 6 barig — A-pa'e. [...] 2 barig(?) — An-dab-[si]. ... [...] 1(?) ... [...] [n gur] — Bil-anukuš. 1(?) — Ad-[da(?)]. [...] ... (reverse) ... the herdsman (na-gada).
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(asz@c) 1/2(asz@c) sze gur-mah munus-gesztin 6(barig@c) a-pa-e3 [...] 2(barig@c)#? an-dab6-[si] x [...] 1(asz@c)? x-[...] [n(asz@c)] bilx(|GESZ.PAP.NE|)#-a2-nu-kusz2 1(asz@c)#? ad-[da?] [...] x na-gada
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIa (ca. 2600-2500 BC)) — WF 090. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin, Germany (P011047) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.