Position in chronology
WF 136
About this tablet
A small clay account from Šuruppak (modern Fara) in southern Iraq, written around 2500 BCE, listing garments issued to named men at a household or temple. The recipients include a man with a Semitic name, Šumu-Aštar, a vizier, a cupbearer, and a barber named Utu-ursag, and the scribe closes with a grand total of fourteen garments booked under É-šud-du. Ordinary institutional bookkeeping — but it shows an Early Dynastic administration clothing its staff by name and office, and it preserves the mixed Sumerian-Semitic makeup of the city's personnel. A large chip has carried away part of the middle of the list.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Ten garments went to Šumu-Aštar, described as the man of (something now broken away). The next couple of entries are lost, but one of them belonged to the vizier. Then: one garment to Nanna the cupbearer, one to Šeš-gu, and one garment plus three barig (of grain) to Utu-ursag the barber; a temple administrator is named next. The account closes with the total — fourteen garments — charged to É-šud-du, the Dilmun-chief. The back of the tablet was left blank.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine10 garments: Šumu-Aštar, the man of …; […] […] … the vizier (sukkal); 1: Nanna, the cupbearer; 1: Šeš-gu; 1 (and) 3 barig: Utu-ursag, the barber; sanga-GAR (the temple administrator …); (Total:) 14 garments — É-šud-du, the gal-dilmun (Dilmun-chief). (Reverse: uninscribed; bears only the modern museum numbers 12451 and 195 in ink.)
Our translation engine — Opus 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
1(u@c) tug2 su-mu-asz-tar2# lu2 x x x [...] [...] x x sukkal# 1(asz@c) nanna sagi 1(asz@c)# szesz#-gu10 1(asz@c) 3(barig@c) utu-ur-sag szu-i sanga-GAR 1(u@c)# 4(asz@c) tug2 e2-szud3-du10 gal-dilmun
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIa (ca. 2600-2500 BC)) — WF 136. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin, Germany (P011094) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-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.