Position in chronology
DP 357
About this tablet
A short delivery record from the temple household (é-mí / Bau) archive at Girsu in the state of Lagash, around 2400 BCE, in the years before Sargon of Akkad. It records 420 bundles of reed cut on a named field. It names the work-group foreman, the head plowman involved, and the senior administrator En-iggal, who took the reed in. Reed was a basic material in southern Iraq, used for building, fuel, mats and boats, and tablets like this show how closely the temple tracked labor and raw materials.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
420 bundles of cut reed. The work crew was supervised by Inim-du11. The reed came from the A-us2 field, where Inimanizi was head plowman for the estate at the edge of the city. En-iggal, the estate's chief administrator, took delivery of it in the third year. The entry counts ten days' worth of labor.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse: 7×60 (= 420) bundles of reed, cut reed. Inim-du11, he is the overseer. From the field A-us2: Inimanizi, the head plowman, (of) the house at the edge of the city. Reverse: En-iggal, the overseer (nu-banda), brought (it) in. Year 3. Labor of 10 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
7(gesz2@c) sa gi gi ku5-ra2 inim-du11 ugula-kam GAN2 a-us2-ta inim-ma-ni-zi sag-apin-ke4 e2 za3 iri-ka-ka en-ig-gal nu-banda3 i3-kux(DU) 3(|ASZxDISZ@t|) a2 u4 1(u@c)-kam
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — DP 357. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P221007) — 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.