Position in chronology
DP 535
About this tablet
A grain-issue record from the temple household of the goddess Baba at Girsu, in southern Iraq, about 2350 BCE. The estate's chief administrator, En-iggal, releases ten large gur of barley from the temple storehouse to a head plowman named A'ne-kura — part of it seed for sowing, part fodder for his plow oxen — earmarked for a particular field. The closing lines date the transaction to the second year of Urukagina (Uru-inimgina), the reformer king of Lagash, and name his queen Sasa, in whose name the Baba estate was administered. Hundreds of such tablets survive from this archive, and together they give one of the most detailed pictures of an ancient institutional economy anywhere in the world.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Ten large-measure gur of barley — seed grain plus feed for the plow oxen — released in the month of Gu'rabimu'a. The recipient is A'ne-kura, head plowman, and the grain is assigned to the U-gigga field. En-iggal, the estate overseer, drew it from Baba's granary and handed it over to him. The barley belongs to the goddess Baba. Filed under Sasa, wife of Urukagina, king of Lagash. Year 2.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine10 gur (saggal-measure) of seed-barley, barley for the oxen to eat: month gu4-ra2-bi2-mu2-a; A2-ne2-kur-ra, the head plowman, for the field U3-gig-ga — En-ig-gal, the overseer, from the storehouse of Baba issued (it) to him for this purpose. The barley is the property of Baba. Sa6-sa6, wife of URU-KA-gi-na, king of Lagash. 2nd (year).
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
1(u@c) sze-numun sze gu4-re6 gu7 gur saggal iti gu4-ra2-bi2-mu2-a a2-ne2-kur-ra sag-apin-ra GAN2 u3-gig-ga-sze3 en-ig-gal nu-banda3 ganun ba-ba6-ta e-na-ta-gar sze u2-rum ba-ba6 sa6-sa6 dam URU-KA-gi-na lugal lagasz-ka 2(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — DP 535. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P221185) — 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.