Position in chronology
DP 027
About this tablet
This is a label, not a document: a lump of clay tied to a basket of accounting tablets in the temple household of Baba at Girsu, about 2350 BCE. It tells the archivist what is inside — the records of fish delivered by the sea-fishermen (dusu-fish and fish destined for the table), together with freshwater fish. The owner of the archive is named: Sasa, queen and wife of Urukagina, the last king of Lagash, and the label is dated to his third year. It is one of the oldest surviving filing tags in the world, from the household whose records give us our fullest picture of an early Sumerian estate.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Basket label: fish records. Contents — the dusu-fish and the table-fish brought in by the saltwater fishermen, plus the freshwater fish filed with them. Archive of Sasa, wife of King Urukagina of Lagash. Year 3.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineBasket of tablets: dusu-fish and table-fish which the fishermen of the sea delivered; sweet-water fish are there along with them. Sasa, wife of Urukagina, king of Lagash. 3rd (year).
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
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-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.