Position in chronology
DP 039
About this tablet
A harvest account from Girsu, in the Sumerian state of Lagaš, around 2360 BCE. It tallies four kinds of grain — barley, white emmer, the fine 'gu-nida' emmer, and wheat — brought in from a field called Kiti that belonged to the prebend (sustenance) estate of Enentarzi, the ruler of Lagaš. The grain was threshed on the spot and handed over by an official named Ur-Šerda, in the fourth year of the reign. It is a small tablet doing a very large job: recording more than six hundred gur of grain, the kind of bookkeeping that kept a Sumerian city-state's palace and temple households fed.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Grain delivery from the Kiti field, part of the ruler's own sustenance estate: 353 gur of barley, 193 gur of white emmer, 53 gur of fine gu-nida emmer, and 10 gur of wheat — 609 gur in all. The crop was threshed at Kiti, and Ur-Šerda turned it over to the account of Enentarzi, governor of Lagaš. Filed in year 4 of his reign.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine353 (6 gešʾu minus 7) gur-saggal of barley; 193 gur-saggal of white emmer; 53 gur-saggal of gu-nida (a fine emmer/wheat variety); 10 gur-saggal of wheat. Total: 609 (10 gešʾu plus 10 minus 1) gur-saggal. (From) the Kiti field, the sustenance land (šuku) of Enentarzi, ruler (ensi) of Lagaš. At Kiti it was threshed ("beaten with wood"). Ur-Šerda transferred (it) to him. (Year) 4.
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
6(gesz2@c) la2 7(asz@c) sze gur saggal 3(gesz2@c) 1(u@c) 3(asz@c) ziz2 babbar2 5(u@c) 3(asz@c) gu2-nida 1(u@c) gig szu-nigin2 1(gesz'u@c) 1(u@c) la2 1(asz@c) gur saggal GAN2 ki-ti szuku en-e-tar-zi ensi2 lagasz-ka ki-ti gesz be2-ra ur-szer7-da mu-na-bala 4(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — DP 039. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P220689) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. 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.