Position in chronology
DP 336
About this tablet
A small clay docket from Girsu (modern Tello) in southern Iraq, written about 2350 BCE for the household of the city-ruler's wife — the famous é-mí, or "Women's House," of Lagash. It lists a single delivery of foodstuffs: loaves of several kinds of bread, two sweet cakes, a rib of beef, and three fish. Tablets like this are the daily paperwork of a great estate, the ancient equivalent of a kitchen delivery slip, and thousands of them survive from this one archive.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Delivery to the Women's Household: twenty small sur-loaves, ten sur-loaves for the ox, ninety loaves of fine bread, five loaves of the NI (oil) type, one sur-cake, one finished cake, one rib of beef, and three prepared gir-fish. The reverse of the tablet was left blank — the whole account fit on one side.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine20(?) [loaves of] bread, small sur-loaves; 10 sur-loaves (for) the ox; 90 loaves of fine (sal) bread; 5 loaves of NI (oil?) bread; 1 gug-cake, sur-type; 1 gug-cake, šu-du-a ("finished by hand"); 1 ox rib; 3 gir-fish, du-a (prepared/strung); (for) the Women's Household (e₂-munus). (Reverse: uninscribed.)
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
2(u@c)#? [ninda] sur# tur-tur 1(u@c) sur gu4 1(gesz2@c) 3(u@c) ninda sal4 5(asz@c) ninda NI 1(asz@c) gug2 sur 1(asz@c) gug2 szu du7-a 1(asz@c) ti gu4 3(asz@c) ku6 gir2 du3-a e2-munus
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — DP 336. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P220986) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.