Position in chronology
DP 090
About this tablet
A small palace receipt from Girsu (modern Tello) in southern Iraq, written around 2350 BCE. A woman named Nin-bur, married to a land-surveyor, brings a single plucked ram as a mašdaria — a customary gift presented to the ruling family at festival time — to Bara-namtara, the powerful wife of the city-ruler Lugalanda, who managed her own great estate known as the 'women's house.' A staff fattener named En-ku then takes the animal into the herds. Tablets like this one document how the ruler's wife, not just the ruler, stood at the center of an economy of obligation and gift-giving in early Sumerian city-states.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Received: one plucked ram, presented as the customary festival gift by Nin-bur, wife of the surveyor. It was delivered to Lady Bara-namtara at the women's household during the month of the Malt-Eating Festival of Lugal-URU11. En-ku, the livestock fattener, collected the animal. Year 2.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 plucked ram — the mašdaria-gift of Nin-bur, wife of the man of the long measuring-rope (the surveyor); to Bara-namtara in the month of the Festival of Malt-Eating of Lugal-URU11 she delivered it into the women's house. En-ku, the fattener, carried it off. 2nd (year).
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-nita ur4-ra masz-da-re-a nin-bur dam lu2 esz2-gid2 bara2-nam-tar-ra iti ezem munu4 gu7 lugal-uru11-ka-ka e2-munus-a mu-na-kux(DU) en-ku3 kuruszda-e ba-de6 2(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — DP 090. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P220740) — 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.