Position in chronology
DP 288
About this tablet
An administrative fish-account from the city of Girsu in southern Iraq, around 2400 BCE, from the archive of the great institutional household run by the ruler's family. Fishermen attached to the household have delivered a large consignment of split (that is, gutted and dried) fish — 1,380 of one variety alone — which the ruler's scribe counted and which was handed over to En-iggal, the well-known overseer who appears throughout this archive. It is a snapshot of how a Sumerian state household tracked its food supply, fisherman by fisherman, down to the last dried fish.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a delivery receipt for dried fish. The opening line, partly broken, listed an assortment of split fish; then comes the main entry: 1,380 split adar-tun fish. A damaged line seems to credit the consignment to a woman whose name is only partly readable. The ruler's own scribe did the counting, and the fishermen who brought the catch turned it all over into the hands of En-iggal, the household overseer. The docket is dated to year 2 of the reign. The first line is too damaged to recover in full; the rest is intact.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine(obverse) [...] split [...], its various (items); 1,380 (2 geš'u 3 geš) split adar-tun fish — it is (the delivery?) of the woman Lika(?) [...]; the scribe of the ruler counted (them). (reverse) The fishermen return them into the hand of En-iggal, the overseer. (Year) 2.
Our translation engine — Fable 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
[x x] dar-ra [didli]-bi 2(gesz'u@c) 3(gesz2@c) a-dar-tun2 dar-ra x x munus li-ka-kam dub-sar ensi2-ka-ke4 mu-szid szu-ku6-be2-ne en-ig-gal nu-banda3 szu-na mu-ni-gi4-gi4-ne 2(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — DP 288. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P220938) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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