Position in chronology
CUSAS 03, 0166
About this tablet
A short labor-assignment receipt from Garšana, a private estate town in southern Iraq, written under king Šu-Suen of Ur about 2035 BCE. It records a work gang — ten men plus an unspecified number of women, under the overseer Me-Ea — detailed to grind malt for brewing, with a supervisor named Adallal accepting responsibility for them. The Garšana archive belonged to the household of the general Šu-Kabta and his wife Simat-Ištaran, and it is unusually rich in documentation of women workers and of everyday industrial tasks like malting, milling, and construction.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Work detail: ten men and a number of women, supervised by Me-Ea, assigned to grinding malt. Adallal signed for the crew. Dated to the month of the Šulgi festival, in the year King Šu-Suen sacked the land of Zabšali. The number of women is broken away on the tablet.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine10 male workers, [n] female workers, overseer: Me-[E]a, to grind malt. Adallal took (them) in charge. Month: "Festival of Šulgi." Year: Šu-Suen, the king, destroyed the [la]nd of Zabšali.
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) gurusz [n] geme2 ugula me-[e2]-a munu4 nag4-ga2#-de3 a-da-lal3 i3-dab5 iti ezem-szul-gi mu szu-suen lugal-e [ma]-da za-ab-sza-li mu#-hul
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — CUSAS 03, 0166. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format). [year-name] Dated to Šu-Suen y6 — Land of Zabšali destroyed based on canonical year-name formula in the transliteration.
Attribution
Image: CUNES 48-04-048 (Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA) — from Garšana (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P322561). 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.