Position in chronology
WF 145
About this tablet
A small square accounting tablet from Šuruppak (modern Fara) in southern Iraq, written around 2600–2500 BCE, now in the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin. It records four allotments of dates of the type called nigdu — 170, 350, 100 and 180 units — each assigned to a different recipient or occasion: an institution linked with Adab, a person or place whose name is broken, a festival held in the temple courtyard, and a body of people designated gal-UN. It is ordinary temple or palace bookkeeping, the kind of ledger entry that kept a Sumerian city fed, and it shows fruit being budgeted for religious festivals alongside groups of workers.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Four issues of nigdu dates: 170 to the Adab/Ha-ur account, 350 to Ti'e (the rest of the name is lost), 100 for the courtyard festival, and 180 for the senior personnel — 800 in all. The reverse of the tablet is broken away and preserves nothing readable.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine170 (2 gešʾu 50) nigdu-figs/dates — Adab (of?) Ha-ur; 350 (5 gešʾu 50) nigdu-figs/dates — Ti'e [...]; 100 (1 gešʾu 40) nigdu-figs/dates — the festival of the courtyard; 180 (3 gešʾu) nigdu-figs/dates — gal-UN (the "great people" / senior personnel). (Reverse: surface broken and eroded; no legible text preserved.)
Our translation engine — Opus 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
2(gesz2@c) 5(u@c) pesz3 nig2-du3 adab ha-ur2 5(gesz2@c) 5(u@c) pesz3 nig2-du3 ti8 [x?] 1(gesz2@c) 4(u@c) pesz3 nig2-du3 ezem kisal 3(gesz2@c) pesz3 nig2-du3 gal-UN
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIa (ca. 2600-2500 BC)) — WF 145. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Vorderasiatisches Museum, Berlin, Germany (P011103) — 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.