Position in chronology
DP 435
About this tablet
This is a short receipt from the archive of the Lady's House, the household of the goddess Baba's temple at Girsu in southern Iraq. It dates to about 2350 BCE, in the first year of Urukagina (also read Uru-inimgina) as ruler of Lagash. A boatman loaded a large batch of timber items from a wooded marsh belonging to the goddess, and the estate's overseer, En-iggal, counted them. En-iggal was the main administrator of this archive. The tablet shows how carefully the temple kept track of wood, a scarce resource in lowland Mesopotamia.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Gu-dugga the boatman loaded 141 roof beams onto his boat. They came from the goddess Baba's wooded marshland. En-iggal, the estate overseer, counted the load and recorded it for him. The record is dated to the first year of Urukagina, ruler of Lagash.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse: 141 roof beams (ur3): Gu-dugga, the boatman, from the forest of the marsh of Baba loaded (them) into the boat. En-iggal, the overseer, counted (them) for him. Reverse: Urukagina, ruler of Lagash. Year 1.
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(gesz2@c) 2(u@c) 1(asz@c) ur3 gu3-du10-ga lu2 ma2-lah5-da-ke4 tir ambar ba-ba6-ta ma2-a e-me-gar en-ig-gal nu-banda3 mu-na-szid URU-KA-gi-na ensi2 lagasz 1(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — DP 435. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P221085) — 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.