Position in chronology
DP 380
About this tablet
This small clay tablet is a flax-harvest account from the city of Girsu (modern Tello) in southern Iraq, dated to around 2350 BCE, one of the many surviving records from the household administration of Baranamtara, wife of King Lugalanda of Lagash. It logs 145 bundles of flax harvested from eight furrow-rows of a named field, brought in under the supervision of the overseer En-iggal and tallied by the scribe/official Enna-Umu for the queen's estate. Baranamtara ran an unusually well-documented economic household — hundreds of such tablets survive — giving historians a rare, granular look at how a royal wife's textile and agricultural resources were tracked, harvest by harvest, field by field.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Here's the account: 145 bundles of flax were brought in, harvested from a field with eight furrow-rows. This came from the field called Gir-ka, handled under the overseer En-iggal, with Mu-sig also named alongside him. The official Enna-Umu tallied the amount on behalf of Baranamtara, wife of King Lugalanda, ruler of Lagash. The transaction is dated to year 6 (of Lugalanda's reign).
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine145 bundles of flax — its furrow-rows are 8 — from the place of delivery, from the field of Gir-ka, (under) En-iggal, the overseer; Mu-sig(7); Enna-Umu counted (it) for her. Baranamtara, wife of King Lugalanda, ruler of Lagash: year 6.
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
2(gesz2@c) 2(u@c) 5(asz@c) sa gu absin3-bi 8(asz@c)-am6 ki szum2-ma GAN2 gir2-ka-ta en-ig-gal nu-banda3 mu-SIG7 en-na-u4-mu e-na-szid bara2-nam-tar-ra dam lugal-an-da ensi2 lagasz-ka 6(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — DP 380. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P221030) — 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.