Position in chronology
DP 367
About this tablet
This is a delivery note from the temple household of Girsu, in southern Iraq, around 2350 BCE. It is part of the archive of the 'house of the woman', the estate run by the wife of the city's ruler. It records two loads of bundled manu-wood (probably willow), cut in an orchard and moved into the orchard's storehouse. The man in charge was Eniggal, the estate's chief overseer, who appears on hundreds of tablets from this archive. The note shows how closely even firewood and brushwood were tracked in this early temple economy.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Two loads of manu-wood (probably willow) were delivered in bundles: 96 bundles the first time and 40 the second. Eniggal, the estate's overseer, had them taken out of the E-ku orchard and brought to the orchard's storehouse. The note is dated to year 2 of the ruler's reign.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse 96 bundles of manu-wood: [the 1st time] they were brought. 40 bundles of manu-wood: the 2nd time they were brought. Reverse Eniggal, the overseer, took them out of the orchard of the E-ku (and) brought them to the storehouse of the orchard. Year 2.
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) 3(u@c) 6(asz@c) sa ma-nu <1(disz@t)> de6-a-am6 4(u@c) sa ma-nu 2(disz@t)-kam-ma de6-a-am6 en-ig-gal nu-banda3 kiri6 e2-ku4-ta e-ta-gar ganun kiri6-sze3 e-ma-de6 2(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — DP 367. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P221017) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
Related tablets
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.