Position in chronology
CUSAS 03, 0418
About this tablet
A tiny beer-ration receipt from Garšana, a settlement in southern Iraq run in the late 2000s BCE by the general Šu-Kabta and his wife Simat-Ištaran. Five liters of ordinary beer were handed out to the construction crew working on the site, drawn from the stores of an official named Iškur-illat and booked by the scribe Puzur-Ninkar. It is dated to the seventh year of King Šu-Suen of Ur, the year he sacked the highland land of Zabšali — and the scribe notes at the end that this tablet is a duplicate, a filing copy of the original account.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Five sila (roughly five liters) of standard-issue beer went to the building crew, who drank it on the job. The beer came out of Iškur-illat's stores and was charged against his account; Puzur-Ninkar, the scribe, handled the transfer. Dated to the month of ki-siki-Ninazu in the year King Šu-Suen destroyed the land of Zabšali. This tablet is a copy of the original record.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine5 sila of ordinary beer — the builders drank it. From Iškur-illat it was expended. Via Puzur-Ninkar, the scribe. Month: ki-siki-Ninazu. Year: Šu-Suen the king destroyed the land of Zabšali. (This is) a copy.
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
5(disz) sila3 kasz du szitim-[e]-ne# ib2-nag ki iszkur-illat-ta ba#-zi giri3# puzur4-[nin]-kar#-ke3 dub-sar iti ki-siki nin-a-zu mu szu-suen lugal-e ma-da za-ab-sza-li mu-hul gaba-ri#
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)) — CUSAS 03, 0418. 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 48-06-021 (Department of Near Eastern Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA) — from Garšana (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P322610). 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.