Position in chronology
DP 621
About this tablet
A small clay account from Girsu in southern Iraq, written about 2350 BCE for the household administration of the rulers of Lagash. It records the year's flax harvest brought in from two named fields — 146 bundles from one, a little over 200 from the other — and states that En-iggal, the chief overseer of the estate, had the crop stored on the drying racks. En-iggal is one of the best-documented administrators of the ancient world: his name appears on hundreds of tablets from this archive, and here he signs off on a routine piece of estate bookkeeping. The last sign dates the account to the fourth year of the reigning ruler.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Flax delivered this season: 146 bundles from the A-limmu field, and just under 210 bundles from the Duḫ field (the exact shortfall figure is broken away). That is the whole of this year's flax crop. En-iggal, the estate overseer, had it laid up on the drying racks. Recorded in the fourth year.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine146 bundles of flax — it is of the field A-limmu. 180 + 30 minus [n] bundles of flax — it is of the field Duḫ. It is the flax of the year. En-iggal, the overseer, on their bird-perches (dal-mušen) has placed it (for them). 4th (year).
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
2(gesz2@c) 2(u@c) 6(asz@c) gu sa GAN2 a-limmu2-ka-kam 3(gesz2@c) 3(u@c) la2 [n(asz@c)] gu sa GAN2 du5-uh2-ka-kam gu mu-a-kam en-ig-gal nu-banda3 dal-muszen-be2-ne e-neda-gal2 4(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — DP 621. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P221271) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-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.