Position in chronology
DP 576
About this tablet
This is a Presargonic (Early Dynastic IIIb) field-survey tablet from Girsu, part of the large corpus known as 'Documents Présargoniques' (DP). It records a series of land plots measured in the archaic Sumerian area units bur3, eše3, and iku, each parcel identified by the crop sown in it — barley, white emmer wheat, a grain called gu-nida, and wheat. The list closes with a name, Šubur, and the title 'scribe,' suggesting the account was drawn up by or attributed to a scribe overseeing the fields for an institutional household (very likely the temple estate of the goddess Bau at Girsu, the source of most DP texts). Tablets like this are the bookkeeping backbone of the earliest known bureaucratic states — mundane in content, but foundational evidence for how Sumerian temple economies tracked land and crops nearly 4,500 years ago.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This record lists several fields by size and by the crop growing in them: one plot of just under 10 bur3 planted with barley; a 2 bur3 plot of white emmer wheat; then a gap in the tablet where more entries have been lost. The text resumes with a plot of about 1 bur3 and change sown in white emmer, a smaller eše3-sized plot of a grain called gu-nida, a 3-iku plot whose crop isn't preserved, another emmer field of just over 2 bur3, and a field of roughly 3 bur3 sown with wheat and emmer together. A final line repeats 'field of barley, grown' as a summary. The account is closed out with the name Šubur, apparently the scribe responsible for the record.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 bur'u (10 bur3) less 4 iku — field of barley, grown. 2 bur3 — field of white emmer. [...] (break) 1 bur3, 1 eše3, 4 1/2 iku — field of white emmer. 1 eše3 — field of gu-nida (a grain/flax-emmer). 3 iku — field of [...]. 2 bur3, 3 iku — field of white emmer. 3(?) bur3, 1/2 iku — field of wheat (and) emmer. Field of barley, grown. Šubur — of/by the scribe.
Our translation engine — Sonnet 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(bur'u@c) la2 4(iku@c) GAN2 sze mu2-a 2(bur3@c) GAN2 ziz2 babbar2 [...] 1(bur3@c) 1(esze3@c) 4(iku@c) 1/2(iku@c) GAN2 ziz2 babbar2 1(esze3@c) GAN2 gu2-nida 3(iku@c) GAN2 [...] 2(bur3@c) 3(iku@c) GAN2 ziz2 babbar2 3(bur3@c)? 1/2(iku@c) GAN2 gig ziz2 GAN2 sze mu2-a szubur dub-sar-re2
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — DP 576. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P221226) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
Related tablets
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.