Position in chronology
DP 052
About this tablet
A temple-offering account from Girsu in the state of Lagash, around 2350 BCE. Baranamtara, wife of the ruler Lugalanda, sends bread and jars of milk to the goddess Nanshe and to her divine husband Nindara — the great deities of the Lagash marshlands. Tablets like this come from the archive of the ruler's wife, who ran her own large household and estate, and they are among the earliest documents anywhere that show a named woman acting as an economic and religious authority in her own right. The final line dates the delivery to the fourth year of Lugalanda's reign.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Delivery of offerings: ten fine gu-loaves as food provisions, fifty sur-containers, ten small jars of milk and forty mud-jars of milk for the goddess Nanshe; thirty sur-containers and twenty mud-jars of milk for the god Nindara. In all, bread and pure milk. Sent by Baranamtara, wife of Lugalanda, ruler of Lagash, in his fourth year.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine10 fine gu-breads, provisions (food to be consumed); 50 sur-(vessels); 10 small (jars) of milk; 40 mud-vessels of milk — (for) Nanshe. 30 sur-(vessels); 20 mud-vessels of milk — (for) Nindar(a). [Bread] (and) pure milk. Baranamtara, wife of Lugalanda, ruler of Lagash. (Year) 4.
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
1(u@c) ninda gu sig15 nig2-gu7-da 5(u@c) sur 1(u@c) nig2-banda3 ga 4(u@c) mudx(LAK449) ga nansze 3(u@c) sur 2(u@c) mudx(LAK449) ga nin-dar [ninda] ga ku3-ga bara2-nam-tar-ra dam lugal-an-da ensi2 lagasz-ka 4(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — DP 052. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P220702) — 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.