Position in chronology
DP 350
About this tablet
A small clay receipt from Girsu (modern Tello) in southern Iraq, written around 2350 BCE for the great temple household of the goddess Bau. Two work-gang foremen, Ur-Šerda and Inim-du, hand over more than nineteen hundred bundles of cut reed — fuel for ovens, kilns and hearths — and En-iggal, the household's chief administrator, signs them into a storehouse on the edge of town. The tablet is dated simply by the regnal year, '2'. En-iggal appears in hundreds of such receipts: this is one page of the best-documented estate archive of the early Sumerian world, and it shows the sheer volume of marsh reed a city consumed just to keep its fires burning.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Received: 810 bundles of reed for fuel from Ur-Šerda, and 1,104 bundles (1,224 less 120) from Inim-du. Both men are gang foremen. The reed was carried in from Zulum. En-iggal, the estate overseer, took delivery and put it into the storehouse at the edge of the city. Year 2.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine810 bundles of reed (for) fuel — Ur-Šerda; 1,224 minus 120 (= 1,104) bundles of reed — Inim-du. They are the foremen. From Zulum they brought (them). En-iggal, the overseer, into the storehouse at the edge of the city brought (them) in. (Year) 2.
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(gesz'u@c) 3(gesz2@c) 3(u@c) sa gi u2-bil ur-szer7-da 2(gesz'u@c) 2(u@c) 4(asz@c) la2 2(gesz2@c) sa gi inim-du11 ugula-me zu2-lum-ta mu-de6 en-ig-gal nu-banda3 e2 za3 iri-ka-ka i3-kux(DU) 2(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — DP 350. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P221000) — 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.