Position in chronology
DP 361
About this tablet
This is a delivery receipt from the temple household of Girsu, in the city-state of Lagash in southern Iraq, from about 2400 BCE. It records 420 bundles of freshly cut reeds from a field worked by a crew under a foreman. A man carried them in, and Eniggal took charge of them for a storehouse at the city's edge. Eniggal is well known from hundreds of these tablets as the overseer of the household of the ruler's wife. Reeds were a basic building material and fuel in Sumer, so short records like this one kept track of the stocks.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
A batch of 420 bundles of cut reeds came in from the field called A-us, supplied by the work team of the foreman Inimdu. Inimanizi carried the load in. Eniggal, the overseer, received the reeds and put them in the storehouse at the edge of the city. The note closes by marking this as the work of the 11th day.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse 420 bundles of reeds, cut reeds, from Inimdu, the foreman, from the field A-us: Inimanizi carried them. Eniggal, the overseer, brought them into the house at the city's edge. [Reverse / final line] Work of the 11th day.
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
7(gesz2@c) sa gi gi ku5-ra2 inim-du11 ugula-kam GAN2 a-us2-ta inim-ma-ni-zi mu-la2 en-ig-gal nu-banda3 e2 za3 iri-ka-ka i3-kux(DU) a2 u4 1(u@c) 1(disz@t)-kam
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — DP 361. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P221011) — 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.