Position in chronology
DP 366
About this tablet
This is a receipt from the temple household of the goddess Baba at Girsu in southern Iraq, written around 2350 BCE, shortly before Sargon of Akkad. It records that a work team felled 1,160 bundles of manu-wood, probably willow, and that officials delivered them to a storehouse called Mes-andu. The scribe wrote the number the way Sumerians often did, as 1,200 minus 40. It shows how the temple kept track of fuel and building timber, down to the team leader who did the cutting.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Delivery note, year 2: 1,160 bundles of manu-wood (written as 1,200 minus 40). E-melamsu, who works on Mude's team, cut the wood. Lu-kurrebigi and En-iggal, the overseer, brought it into the Mes-andu storehouse.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse: 1,160 (= 1,200 minus 40) bundles of manu-wood. E-melamsu, foreman: Mude, cut (them). Lu-kurrebigi (and) En-iggal, the overseer, brought (them) into the Mes-andu storehouse. 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
2(gesz'u@c) la2 4(u@c) sa ma-nu e2-me-lam2-su3 ugula mu-de6 u2 ku5-ra2 lu2-kur-re2-bi2-gi en-ig-gal nu-banda3 ganun mes-an-du i3-kux(DU) 2(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — DP 366. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P221016) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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Related sources
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.