Position in chronology
DP 355
About this tablet
This is a delivery record from the palace and temple household of the state of Lagash at Girsu (modern Tello, southern Iraq), from about 2400 BCE. It records 60 bundles of reeds cut under a foreman, carried from a named field, and brought into a storehouse called the 'House at the Edge of the City' by the estate manager Eniggal. It notes the year and ends with a count of work-days. Reeds were a key building and fuel material in Sumer, and tablets like this show how closely the Girsu administration tracked even ordinary materials and the labor behind them.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Sixty bundles of reeds, linked to Urni the maltster. The reeds were cut by a crew under the foreman Inimdu, who was responsible for them. U2-U2 (whose job title, u2-du, is unclear) hauled them from the A-us field to the storehouse known as the House at the Edge of the City. There the estate manager Eniggal took them in. Recorded in year 3, the work came to seven days of labor.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse 60 bundles of reeds: Urni, the maltster; reeds cut (under) Inimdu, it is the overseer's (responsibility). From the A-us field U2-U2, the u2-du, transported (them) to the House at the Edge of the City. Eniggal, the nu-banda, brought (them) in. Year 3. Reverse Labor of 7 days.
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
1(gesz2@c) sa gi ur2-ni munu4-mu2 gi ku5-ra2 inim-du11 ugula-kam GAN2 a-us2-ta U2-U2 u2-du mu-la2 e2 za3 iri-ka-ka en-ig-gal nu-banda3 i3-kux(DU) 3(|ASZxDISZ@t|) a2 u4 7(disz@t)-kam
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — DP 355. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P221005) — 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.