Position in chronology
CUSAS 03, 0762
About this tablet
A small Ur III accounting docket from Garšana, the estate town in southern Iraq run by the general Šu-Kabta and his wife Simat-Ištaran, dated to the first year of Ibbi-Sîn (c. 2028 BCE). It records the handover of bardul-garments belonging to (or made for) Šu-Kabta, of a variety called ašium, to a man named Nuruš-eli, debited against the account of the official Šu-Ninisina. Texts like this are the routine bookkeeping of a large textile operation: every garment leaving the storeroom was named, assigned a recipient, and charged to a responsible officer.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Issue of textiles: a quantity of bardul-garments belonging to Šu-Kabta, ašium quality. Received by Nuruš-eli. Charged out against the account of Šu-Ninisina. Dated to the month of the Festival of Ninazu, in the year Ibbi-Sîn became king. The number of garments at the start of the record is broken away.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[n textile(s)], bardul-garment(s) of Šu-Kabta, of the ašium type — Nuruš-eli received (them). From (the account of) Šu-Ninisina it was expended. Month: "Festival of Ninazu." Year: Ibbi-Sîn (became) king.
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
[n tug2] bar-dul5 szu-kab-ta2 a-szi-um nu-ru-usz-e-li szu ba-ti ki szu-nin-isin2-ta ba-zi iti ezem-nin-a-zu mu# i-bi2-[]suen# lugal
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — CUSAS 03, 0762. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format). [year-name] Dated to Ibbi-Suen y1 — Ibbi-Suen became king based on canonical year-name formula in the transliteration.
Attribution
Image: CUNES 49-11-046 (Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA) — from Garšana (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P323732). 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.