Kress 224

~2027 BCE·Ur III · Neo-Sumerian·P464342

About this tablet

A small Ur III livestock receipt from Umma in southern Iraq, written about 2027 BCE — the second year of Ibbi-Suen, the last king of the Ur III dynasty. It records sheep and a goat delivered as gun-tribute, entered under a woman's or lady's name and a man named Ku-li, then dated by month and year in the standard bookkeeping formula. The middle of the tablet is broken away, so several entries are lost. It is an utterly ordinary piece of state accounting — the kind of document produced by the thousands in the great herding bureaucracy of Umma.

Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.

Written in modern English

Ten sheep received as tribute, charged to Nin-ga's account; three more sheep and one goat from Ku-li. A few further entries followed, but that part of the tablet is broken and cannot be read. The record is dated to the brick-making month of the year after Ibbi-Suen became king.

A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.

Translation — our engine

Our engine

Medium confidence

10 sheep, gun-tribute, from (the account of) Nin-ga; 3 sheep, 1 goat — Ku-li(?); […] … […] […] […] Month: "Bricks-placed-in-the-mould"(?), Year after: "Ibbi-Suen (became) king."

Indicative reading — translated without a photograph. Generated from the transliteration alone, without examining the original. Read it as an accessible first taste, not as a verified catalogue entry.

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(u) udu gu2-na
sza3 nin-ga2
3(disz) udu# 1(disz) masz2# ku-li?
[x] x x x [x]
[...]
[...]
iti sig4-u3-szub-ba-gar?-ra?
mu us2-sa i-bi2-suen lugal

Scholarly note

Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — Kress 224. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format). [year-name] Dated to Ibbi-Suen y2 — Year after: Ibbi-Suen became king based on canonical year-name formula in the transliteration.

Attribution

Image: Kress 224 (private: anonymous, Germany) — from Umma (mod. Tell Jokha) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P464342). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).

Related tablets

Related sources

~3200 BCE

Proto-Cuneiform Account Tablet

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.

~2050 BCE

Drehem Cattle-Distribution Tablet

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.

~3300 BCE

AoF 30, 238,1