Position in chronology
CUSAS 35, 028
About this tablet
A very small clay tablet from Adab in southern Iraq, written in the Early Dynastic period (roughly the mid-third millennium BCE). It records two men, Ur-Ninmug and Ur-šerda, as being resident or stationed at Adab, and then lists three further individuals — two of them bearing Semitic rather than Sumerian names, Ašlum and Iritum — grouped together under a collective label whose meaning is no longer recoverable. Texts like this are the bureaucratic bookkeeping of a city-state: someone needed a note of who was where and who belonged to which group. It is also a small piece of evidence for the mixed Sumerian-Semitic population of early Mesopotamian cities.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Two men, Ur-Ninmug and Ur-šerda, are stationed at Adab. Listed after them are three more names — He-su-be'a, Ašlum and Iritum — who are recorded together as members of one group or category; the word describing that category is damaged and can no longer be read with confidence. The reverse of the tablet is essentially blank and badly pitted, so nothing further was written down, or nothing further survives.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 (person): Ur-Ninmug; 1 (person): Ur-šerda — Adab: they are resident (there). He-su-be'a, Ašlum, Iritum — they are the ...-men (šu-x-DU-NI-meš).
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
1(asz@c) ur-nin-mug 1(asz@c) ur-szer7-da adab i3-durunx(|DUR2.DUR2|)-ne2-esz2 he2-su-be2-a asz11(ASZ@z)-lum i-ri2-tum szu-x-DU-NI-mesz
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIa (ca. 2600-2500 BC) ?) — CUSAS 35, 028. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Schøyen Collection, Oslo, Norway (P254033) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-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.
Part of the earliest known body of international diplomatic correspondence. Akkadian, written in cuneiform on clay, was the lingua franca of Late Bronze Age statecraft — used between Egypt, the Hittites, Mitanni, Babylon, Assyria, and the Levantine vassals.