Position in chronology
DP 576
About this tablet
A field survey from Girsu in southern Iraq, written about 2350 BCE, in the last generation of Sumer's independent city-states. It lists parcels of temple or estate land measured in bur and iku, each tagged with the cereal growing on it: barley, white emmer, the emmer variety called gu-nida, and wheat. At the end the scribe signs his own name — Šubur — which is how much of the bookkeeping of Lagash comes down to us: as the personal work of named officials. Tablets like this are the raw data behind our knowledge of how a Sumerian temple estate planned its harvest.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Land register: roughly ten bur less four iku planted in barley; two bur in white emmer. (A section is broken away here.) Then one bur, one eše and four and a half iku of white emmer; one eše of gu-nida emmer; three iku of something no longer legible; two bur and three iku of white emmer; about three bur and half an iku sown with wheat and emmer — all of it recorded under the heading of cultivated barley land. Drawn up by the scribe Šubur.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 bur'u less 4 iku of field — barley grown (i.e. sown/cultivated with barley); 2 bur of field — white emmer; [...] 1 bur, 1 eše, 4 1/2 iku of field — white emmer; 1 eše of field — gu-nida (emmer variety); 3 iku of field — [...]; 2 bur, 3 iku of field — white emmer; 3 bur(?), 1/2 iku of field — wheat (and) emmer; field of grown barley. Šubur, the scribe.
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(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-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.