Position in chronology
DP 572
About this tablet
A small clay account from Girsu in southern Iraq, written about 2350 BCE for the great household of the goddess Baba. It records sixty-two hoes handed out, a few at a time, to seven named men — Ur-sag, Ur-šerda, Inim-du and the others — for work on a canal named after the god Enlil. The official who signed off is En-iggal, chief overseer of the estate and one of the best-attested administrators of the last kings of Lagash. Tablets like this are the routine tool-issue paperwork behind Sumeria's canal system: the state supplied the diggers' equipment and kept count of every blade.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Hoes issued: Ur-sag, 8; Ur-šerda, 5 (figure damaged); Inim-du, 7; E-nam, 6; Šeš-lu-du, 11; E-me, 4; Inim-mani-zi, 11. The rest of the list is broken off. The total comes to 62 hoes, all assigned to work on the Enlil canal. En-iggal, the overseer, made the distribution. Year 3.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine8 hoes (gag-al) — Ur-sag; 5(?) — Ur-šerda; 7 — Inim-du; 6 — E-nam; 11 — Šeš-lu-du; 4 — E-me; 11 — Inim-mani-[zi]; [... (remainder of the list broken away)] Total: 62 hoes (gag-al), (for) the canal Enlil-le-šu-mu-gia ("Enlil restored it"). En-iggal, the overseer, allotted them to them. 3rd (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
8(asz@c) gag al ur-sag 5(asz@c)#? ur-szer7-da 7(asz@c) inim-du11 6(asz@c) e2-nam 1(u@c) 1(asz@c) szesz-lu2-du10 4(asz@c) e2-me 1(u@c) 1(asz@c) inim-ma-ni-[zi] [...] szu-nigin2 1(gesz2@c) 2(asz@c) gag al i7 en-lil2-le szu mu-gi4-a en-ig-gal nu-banda3 e-ne-ba 3(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — DP 572. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P221222) — 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.