Position in chronology
DP 027
About this tablet
An administrative fish-account tablet from Girsu (modern Tello, southern Iraq), dating to around 2350 BCE during the reign of Uruinimgina — the Early Dynastic king of Lagash celebrated in ancient records for pioneering social reforms. The document logs a consignment of fish: one batch earmarked for a carrying basket, another for the royal presentation table, both delivered by fishermen working under the authority of the elders. The finest-quality fish are recorded as held by a custodian named A-du10-ga, and the whole transaction is attributed to the wife of Uruinimgina himself — a prominent figure in Lagash palace administration whose role as institutional recipient appears across dozens of tablets from the same archive. This is everyday palace housekeeping in cuneiform: food provisioning for the royal household, carefully tracked by a temple scribe.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a tablet-basket summary — a record of fish deliveries. Two grades of fish are listed: one lot for the storage basket, another for the serving table. Both were brought in by the fishermen attached to the council of elders. A separate quantity of fish, described as of the finest quality, is noted as being in the keeping of someone called A-du10-ga. The whole consignment is credited to the wife of Uruinimgina, king of Lagash, and totals 3 measures by the notation used.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineTablet-basket [record]: Fish (for) the dusu-basket; fish for the banszur-table — the fishermen of the elders who brought (them) — fish of A-du10-ga, which is with him/her: finest quality. Wife of Uruinimgina, king of Lagash — 3 [measures].
Our translation engine — Sonnet 4.6. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
pisan-dub ku6 dusu ku6 banszur-ra szu-ku6 ab-ba-ke4-ne mu-de6-a ku6-a-du10-ga e-da-gal2 sa6-sa6 dam URU-KA-gi-na lugal lagasz-ka 3(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — DP 027. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P220683) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-4-6 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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.