Position in chronology
DP 349
About this tablet
A reed-delivery receipt from the temple household of Lagash at Girsu, about 2350 BCE. En-iggal, the well-known chief inspector of the household of the ruler's wife, hauls in a very large consignment of cut reed — nearly four thousand bundles — from a field, and books it into a storehouse on the city's edge, along with a note of the labor expended on the second day of the job. Reed was the plastic of ancient Sumer: matting, baskets, boat-caulking, roofing and fuel, and it was counted and filed as carefully as barley or silver.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Receipt: 3,690 bundles of reed. En-iggal, the overseer, made this his second delivery, bringing the reed in from the I-us field and depositing it in the storehouse at the edge of town. Work credited for day two: 2 units.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine3,690 bundles of reed — En-iggal, the overseer, for the second time, from the field I-us he brought (them); into the storehouse at the edge of the city he delivered (them). Labor of the 2nd day: 2 (units).
Our translation engine — Opus 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(szar2@c) 1(gesz2@c) 3(u@c) sa gi en-ig-gal nu-banda3 2(disz@t)-kam-ma-ka GAN2 i3-us2-ta mu-de6 e2 za3 iri-ka-ka i3-kux(DU) a2 u4 2(disz@t)-kam 2(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — DP 349. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P220999) — 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.