Position in chronology
DP 496
About this tablet
This small round tablet is a Presargonic (Early Dynastic IIIa/b) administrative receipt from Girsu, part of the Lagash state archive of roughly 2400 BCE. It records five wooden yokes and four plow-parts (shares and poles) issued to the carpenter Ur-Enki, authorized and disbursed by En-iggal, a well-documented overseer (nubanda) of the Lagash household administration, from a storehouse called the 'house of the courtyard.' Texts like this one, part of the large corpus published as Documents Présargoniques (DP), tracked the flow of agricultural tools and craft materials through the temple-and-palace economy — the everyday bookkeeping that kept Sumerian farming running.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a short supply record: five yokes and four plow parts — two plowshares and two matching plow-poles — were handed over to Ur-Enki the carpenter. Two more signs naming or describing something else are too damaged to read. The overseer En-iggal authorized the issue, and the goods came out of the storeroom known as the 'house of the courtyard.' The transaction is marked with a final tally or reference number, '4,' at the close of the entry.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine5 (units): yokes. 2 (units): plow-shares (lit. "plow-heads"). 2 (units): plow-poles ("plow-mates"). [...] ...-de3 (two signs broken/illegible). Ur-Enki, the carpenter — En-iggal, the overseer: from the house of the courtyard (storeroom) he delivered (it) to him. 4 (occasion/total-mark).
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
5(asz@c) szu4-dul5 2(asz@c) sag-apin 2(asz@c) dam apin [x x] x-de3 ur-en-ki nagar-ra en-ig-gal nu-banda3 e2 ki-sal4-la-ta e-na-ta-gar 4(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — DP 496. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P221146) — 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.