Position in chronology
CUSAS 03, 1234
About this tablet
A small grain receipt from Garšana, a private-estate settlement in southern Mesopotamia, dated to the third year of Ibbi-Suen, the last king of the Ur III dynasty (c. 2025 BCE). It records 10 gur — roughly 3,000 liters — of emmer wheat handled at a storage depot, with a man named Ea-šar named as the official through whose hands the grain passed. The tablet closes with the name of Puzur-abi, son of Zia, most likely the sealing officer who took responsibility for the transaction. Documents like this are the routine bookkeeping of a large estate, and the year-name preserves the memory of a military campaign against Simurrum in the Zagros foothills.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Ten gur of emmer wheat — about three thousand liters — entered at the storage depot, handled by Ea-šar. Dated to the month of u₅-bi₂-gu₇ in the year that Ibbi-Suen, king of Ur, destroyed Simurrum. Certified by Puzur-abi, son of Zia.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine10 gur of emmer, (from/into) the depot, via Ea-šar. Month: u₅-bi₂-gu₇. Year: Ibbi-Suen, king of Ur, destroyed Simurrum. (seal / attribution:) Puzur-abi(?), son of Zia.
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
1(u) ziz2 gur i3-dub giri3 e2-a-szar iti u5-bi2-gu7 mu i-bi2-suen lugal uri5-ma-ke4 si-mu-ru-um mu-hul puzur4-a-bi? dumu zi-a
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — CUSAS 03, 1234. 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 49-12-024 (Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA) — from Garšana (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P323779). 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.