Position in chronology
DP 369
About this tablet
This is a small Early Dynastic administrative tablet from Girsu (ancient Tello), part of the enormous archive of daily economic records kept by the temple institutions of that city around 2400 BCE. It logs a delivery of over a thousand bundles of hay or fodder — the kind of green forage set aside for penned livestock — brought in by a work crew and stored in a granary or storehouse named for an official called Mes-sa-du. Tablets like this one, one of hundreds of thousands from Girsu, let historians reconstruct in astonishing detail how a Sumerian city-state managed its grain, herds, and labor five thousand years ago.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
A crew of workers delivered 1,090 bundles of hay — fresh, green fodder meant for penned livestock — to the storehouse belonging to (or named after) Mes-sa-du. The shipment is recorded as received and entered into stock, with a final notation of '2,' likely an account or tally mark closing out the entry.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1,090 (i.e. 2×600 + 10 − 2×60) bundles of hay/fodder for penned (livestock), green (fresh) hay — it is (the) U₂-U₂(-plant/fodder), (brought by) the men of U₂-U₂; (one) brought (it). Into the storehouse of Mes-sa-du it was delivered/brought in. 2.
Our translation engine — Sonnet 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) 1(u@c) la2 2(gesz2@c) sa u2 durunx(|KU.KU|)-na u2 sig7-a U2-U2-kam lu2 U2-U2-ke4-ne mu-de6 ganun mes-sa-du-ka ba-kux(DU) 2(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — DP 369. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P221019) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-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.