Position in chronology
DP 360
About this tablet
This is a small administrative tablet from the temple archive at Girsu (ancient Tello) in southern Iraq, dating to the Early Dynastic IIIb period, roughly the mid-third millennium BCE. It records deliveries of reed bundles — used for offerings and for construction or matting — handled by fishermen working under the temple's elders, checked and stored under the supervision of En-iggal, a well-known overseer (nubanda) attested on many contemporary Lagash tablets managing the temple estate of the goddess Bau. It is routine bookkeeping, but it captures the everyday machinery of a Sumerian temple economy: workers, quantities, officials, and storage.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet logs two batches of reed bundles handled by temple staff at Girsu. Fifty bundles were set aside as a first-fruits offering, and another fifty bundles came in from Lugal-ša and the fishermen who worked for the temple elders, taken from the A'uš field/tract. The overseer En-iggal checked the count and had the reeds stored in the orchard granary. A further ninety bundles are recorded for a man named Dam-dingir-mu, covering two days of labor. In short: a routine receipt-and-storage record from a Sumerian temple's reed supply, naming who delivered what, who verified it, and where it was put away.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine50 bundles of reed — first-fruits offering (ne-sag). 50 bundles of reed — (for) Lugal-ša, the fishermen of the elders. From the field of A'uš — carried/received. En-iggal, the overseer (nubanda), counted it. Into the granary of the orchard it was delivered. 90 bundles of reed (1(geš2) 3(u) sa gi) — (for) Dam-dingir-mu, labor of day 2.
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
5(u@c) gi sa ne-sag 5(u@c) sa gi lugal-sza3 szu-ku6 ab-ba-ke4-ne GAN2 a-us2-ta mu-il2 en-ig-gal nu-banda3 i3-szid ganun kiri6-ka i3-kux(DU) 1(gesz2@c) 3(u@c) sa gi dam-dingir-mu a2 u4 2(disz@t)-kam
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — DP 360. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P221010) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-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.