Position in chronology
DP 536
About this tablet
This is a delivery record from the household of the goddess Baba at Girsu, in southern Iraq, around 2350 BCE. In the second year of King Urukagina of Lagash, a soldier named Di-Utu took a large load of barley out to a plough-team leader working a field. Part of the grain was seed for sowing and part was feed for the plough oxen. The queen, Sasa, ran this great temple estate, and her name on the tablet shows how much economic power a royal wife could hold in Early Dynastic Sumer.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Twelve large gur of barley went to Saga-tuku-a, the head of a plough team. Some of it was seed grain for sowing and the rest was feed for the oxen. Di-Utu, a soldier, took the grain out to him at the field called 'Beside the Thornbush'. The barley belonged to the goddess Baba and came from the estate run by Sasa, wife of Urukagina, king of Lagash. The record is dated to the king's second year.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse: 12 gur-saggal of barley: seed barley, and barley for the oxen to eat, for Saga-tuku-a, the plough-leader. Di-Utu, the soldier, brought it to him at the field 'Beside the Thornbush'. Reverse: Barley, the property of Baba. Sasa, wife of Urukagina, king of [Lagash]. Year 2.
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
1(u@c) 2(asz@c) sze gur saggal sze-numun sze gu4-re6 gu7-de3 sag-ga2-tuku-a sag-apin-ra di-utu aga3-us2-e GAN2 da kiszi17-ga-sze3 e-na-de6 sze u2-rum ba-ba6 sa6-sa6 dam URU-KA-gi-na lugal [lagasz] 2(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — DP 536. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P221186) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-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.