Sumerian·Book

Position in chronology

DP 380

~2400 BCE·Early Dynastic·P221030

About this tablet

This is an estate record from Girsu in southern Iraq, from about 2360 BCE. It belongs to the household of Baranamtara, wife of Lugalanda, ruler of the city-state of Lagash. The tablet logs a flax harvest: 145 bundles pulled from a named field and counted by an estate overseer. It is part of a large archive that shows how a queen's household ran its own farming. Flax grew here for linen, and each bundle harvested from a field was counted and written down.

Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.

Written in modern English

145 bundles of flax, harvested from 8 furrows of the onion plot in the Gir2-ka field. Enigal, the overseer, had the flax pulled, and it was counted out for Ennaumu. The record belongs to the household of Baranamtara, wife of Lugalanda, ruler of Lagash, and is dated to his sixth year.

A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.

Translation — our engine

Our engine
Medium confidence
Obverse 2(×60) 20 + 5 = 145 bundles of flax; its furrows: 8. From the onion plot (?), from the field Gir2-ka. Enigal, the overseer, pulled it up (?); for Ennaumu he counted it out. Reverse Baranamtara, wife of Lugalanda, ruler (ensi) of Lagash. Year 6.

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

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-opus-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).

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