Position in chronology
WF 142
About this tablet
A small square account tablet from Šuruppak (modern Fara) in southern Iraq, written around 2500 BCE, in the last generations before the city burned. A scribe has ruled the clay into boxes and entered three allocations of a commodity — 1,200, 1,200, 60 and 90 units — each followed by the men or offices receiving them: a governor's official, a temple administrator, a barber, a man called Gal-Dilmun ('chief of Dilmun') and his son. The reverse was left blank, so this is a single-sided working record rather than a summary. Texts like this are the raw bookkeeping of one of Sumer's oldest city administrations, and the name Gal-Dilmun hints at the city's connections with the Gulf trade route to Dilmun (Bahrain).
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Two allocations of 1,200 units each — one of si-NUxU, one of a second commodity — go to the governor's officer and to a man named En-zi-u-di. Sixty units of si-NUxU go to Gal-Dilmun, Šubur, the barber, and the temple administrator. Ninety more go to Gal-Dilmun's son, to GAR-ḪU-DUR-BU, and to the kinda-barber. The back of the tablet was never written on.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine2 gešʾu (= 1,200) si-|NUxU|; 2 gešʾu (= 1,200) |(TIR&TIR)xU₂|: (for) the ensi-GAR, En-zi-u-di. 1 geš (= 60) si-|NUxU|: (for) Gal-Dilmun, Šubur, the barber (šu-i), the sanga-GAR. 1 geš 3 u (= 90) si-|NUxU|: (for) the son of Gal-Dilmun, GAR-ḪU-DUR₂-BU, the kinda-barber. (Reverse: uninscribed.)
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
2(gesz'u@c) si-|NUxU| 2(gesz'u@c) |(TIR&TIR)xU2| ensi2-GAR en zi-u4-di 1(gesz2@c) si-|NUxU| gal-dilmun szubur szu-i sanga-GAR 1(gesz2@c) 3(u@c) si-|NUxU| dumu gal-dilmun GAR-HU-DUR2-BU kinda2
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIa (ca. 2600-2500 BC)) — WF 142. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin, Germany (P011100) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.