Position in chronology
DP 080
About this tablet
A small livestock account from Girsu (modern Tello) in southern Iraq, written about 2350 BCE for one of the great temple households. It records which sheep, lambs and kids were eaten on particular occasions — some slaughtered "on the bank" (of the canal or river), others at a banquet held at the ki-a-nag, the spot where cool water was poured out for the dead. The animals are itemized by donor: the city-ruler himself, the chief temple administrators of the goddesses Nanše and Nin-MAR.KI, and the chief scribe. It is a rare glimpse of the accounting behind a Sumerian funerary feast, where offerings to ancestors were also a meal for the living.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Animals consumed: one sheep from the governor, one kid from the chief administrator of Nanše's temple, and one lamb plus one kid from the chief administrator of Nin-MAR.KI's temple — all eaten down on the bank. Then one sheep belonging to the governor and one from the head scribe, eaten on the day of the banquet at the ancestral libation place. A further sheep is listed, but the next line is broken. The account closes with the grand total, noting that the animals were brought in to be eaten: these are the sheep consumed.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 sheep — the ruler (ensi); 1 kid — the sanga-administrator of Nanše; 1 lamb, 1 kid — the sanga-administrator of Nin-MAR.KI: on the bank they were consumed. 1 sheep of the ruler; 1 sheep — the chief scribe: on the day of his banquet, at the place of the funerary libation (ki-a-nag) they were consumed. 1 sheep ... [broken] total of the [grand] sum: they were brought to be consumed. These are the sheep (that were) consumed.
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
1(asz@c) udu ensi2 1(asz@c) masz sanga nansze 1(asz@c) sila4 1(disz@t) masz sanga nin-mar gu2-a ba-gu7 1(asz@c) udu ensi2-ka 1(asz@c) udu dub-sar-mah u4 gesz-bu10-na-ka ki-a-nag-ga2 ba-gu7 1(asz@c) udu x [...] gu2 [szu]-nigin2-[na] gu7-de3 ba-de6 udu gu7-a-am6
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — DP 080. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P220730) — 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.