Position in chronology
DP 260
About this tablet
A one-line piece of livestock paperwork from the city of Girsu, in the Sumerian state of Lagash, around 2350 BCE. A shepherd named En-DU, who tended the wool-flocks, hands a single sheep — its wool already plucked — back to Sasa, the queen: the wife of Urukagina, the famous reformer-king of Lagash. It comes from the household archive that the queen personally administered, and it shows how tightly even a single animal was tracked in one of history's earliest bureaucracies.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Receipt, wool-allotment month, year 1: one sheep from the wool-flock, already plucked of its fleece. En-DU, the shepherd in charge of the wool-sheep, delivered it back at the palace, directly into the hands of Sasa, wife of Urukagina, king of Lagash. In other words, the queen's estate signed the animal back in — one sheep, accounted for, filed.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 wool-sheep, plucked of its wool (?), in the month of the wool allotment: En-DU, the shepherd of the wool-sheep, returned it into the hand of Sasa, the wife of Urukagina, the king of Lagash, at the palace. 1st (year).
Our translation engine — Fable 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(asz@c) udu siki na e-ma-ri iti siki-ba-a en-DU sipa udu siki-ka-ke4 sa6-sa6 dam URU-KA-gi-na lugal lagasz-ka-ra e2-gal-la szu-na i3-ni-gi4 1(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — DP 260. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P220910) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-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.