Position in chronology
DP 621
About this tablet
This is a small clay account tablet from the Presargonic (Early Dynastic IIIb) archive of the Lagash temple administration at Girsu, dating to the era of the ruler Lugalanda/Irikagina in the mid-24th century BCE. It records quantities of flax cord — one of the most common raw materials in this archive — harvested from two named fields and put in the hands of fowlers or net-makers for producing bird-catching nets, under the authority of the well-known official En-iggal, 'the overseer' (nu-banda3), who appears in dozens of surviving Lagash administrative texts. Tablets like this one are the bureaucratic paperwork of a temple household economy that tracked raw materials down to the last bundle.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This record tallies 146 bundles of flax cord taken from the field belonging to a man named Alimu, and 210 bundles minus an unspecified amount from the field belonging to Duluh — all of it flax harvested this year. The overseer En-iggal has issued or holds this cord on behalf of the bird-net makers, so that they have material on hand for their bird-nets. A final number, 4, closes out the entry, though its exact meaning — perhaps a count of workers, containers, or a case number — isn't clear from the text alone.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine146 bundles of flax-cord (gu-sa) — (of) the field of Alimu. 210 minus [n] bundles of flax-cord — (of) the field of Duluh. It is this year's flax. En-iggal, the overseer: for their bird-nets (lit. "their flying birds") — it is with them. 4.
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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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-sonnet-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.