Position in chronology
DP 440
About this tablet
This small clay tablet from Girsu (ancient Tello), roughly 2400 BCE, is a routine shipping receipt from the great temple household of the goddess Baba — one of the best-documented archives from the dawn of writing. It records a delivery of firewood (large and small bundles) and bound poplar branches, cut from a marsh thicket, loaded onto a boat and brought to the storehouse of the carpentry workshop. The official in charge, En-iggal, was the real-life manager (nu-banda3) of the queen's household under the Lagash rulers Lugalanda and Uruinimgina, and he appears on hundreds of similar Presargonic administrative tablets — this is the everyday bookkeeping that kept a Sumerian temple economy running: tracking raw wood supply for craftsmen.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Delivery record: 132 bundles of large firewood and 368 bundles of small firewood, plus 607 bound branches of poplar, all cut from the marsh thicket. These came from the estate of the goddess Baba and were shipped by boat. The manager En-iggal received them into the storehouse of the carpentry workshop. This was the second such delivery.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine132 large firewood-bundles (u2-bil2-la, "big"), 368 small firewood-bundles (u2-bil2-la, "small") [370 minus 2], 607 bundled poplar branches (pa sa la2-a asal2), (from) the marsh thicket, from (the estate/household of) Baba, were loaded into the boat. En-iggal, the manager (nu-banda3), (delivered them to) the storehouse of the carpentry workshop (ganun gesz-kin-ti). Delivery: 2nd.
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) 1(u@c) 2(asz@c) u2-bil2-la gal-gal 6(gesz2@c) 1(u@c) la2 2(asz@c) u2-bil2-la tur-tur 1(gesz'u@c) 7(asz@c) pa sa la2-a asal2 tir ambar ba-ba6-ta ma2-a e-me-gar en-ig-gal nu-banda3 ganun gesz-kin-ti i3-kux(DU) 2(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — DP 440. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P221090) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-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.