Position in chronology
CUSAS 03, 0769
About this tablet
A small Ur III accounting tablet from Garšana, a private estate town in southern Iraq, dated to the first year of King Ibbi-Sîn (c. 2028 BCE). It records wool and textile goods — forty minas of something, plus a talent of wool — received by a man named Aštaqar, who is identified further down as the overseer of the weavers. A woman, Geme-Meištaran, is also named, and one line notes that the tablet is a copy of another sealed record. Garšana's archive is famous for documenting large textile workshops staffed largely by women, and this is one of the ordinary receipts that kept that industry running.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Forty minas of [material, description lost], and one talent of wool along with textiles of a type no longer legible, were received by Aštaqar. Several lines in the middle are broken away. The transaction is dated to the month of the Mekigal festival, in the year Ibbi-Sîn became king. A second note follows: this is a copy of the original record; Aštaqar is the overseer of the weavers, and a woman named Geme-Meištaran is listed as well.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine40 minas [of ...] [...]-de3 [...] 1 talent of wool, textile(s) ...-[...] [...]-x-e2-[...] [...] [...] Aštaqar has received. Month: "Festival of Mekigal(?)" Year: Ibbi-Sîn (became) king. (further section) ... copy [of the document] Aštaqar, overseer of the weavers. Geme-Meištaran (Geme-Ištaran).
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
4(u) ma-na [...] [x]-de3 [...] 1(asz) gu2 siki tug2 x-[...] [x]-x-e2-[...] [...] [...] asz-ta2-qar szu ba-ti iti ezem-me-ki-gal2? mu i-bi2-suen lugal x gaba-[ri] asz-ta2-qar ugula usz-bar geme2 me-isztaran
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — CUSAS 03, 0769. 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 49-11-027 (Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA) — from Garšana (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P323713). 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.