Position in chronology
DP 648
About this tablet
A works record from Girsu in southern Iraq, written about 2350 BCE for the great household of the goddess Baba. It measures out three stretches of irrigation channel — 60 rods of the straight canal, 10 rods of a branch beside it, and 140½ rods of the ditch running along the city wall — all serving a field called Uri-ru'a. The job was carried out under En-iggal, the chief administrator of the estate, whose name appears on hundreds of tablets from this archive, and it is dated simply to the fourth year of the ruler. Documents like this are the bookkeeping of the canal system that made farming in Sumer possible at all.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Ditch-clearing report: 60 rods on the straight canal, 10 rods on the side channel — together these make up the Great Ditch. A further 140½ rods cover the ditch running along the city wall. All of it belongs to the ditch serving the Uri-ru'a field. The work was done by hoe under the supervision of En-iggal, the estate overseer. Year 4.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine60 ninda — the canal (that runs) straight; 10 ninda — the canal at its side: it is the Great Ditch. 140 1/2 (ninda by) the measuring-rope, in ninda — it is the ditch that lies alongside the city wall. It is the ditch of the field Uri-ru'a. En-iggal, the overseer, had it hoed out. (Year) 4.
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
1(gesz2@c) nindax(DU) i7 si-sa2 1(u@c) nindax(DU) i7 da-ba pa5 gu-la-am6 2(gesz2@c) 2(u@c) 1/2(asz@c) esz2 nindax(DU) pa5 da-bad3-ka-gal2-la-am6 pa5 GAN2 uri3-ru2-a-kam en-ig-gal nu-banda3 al bi2-du3 4(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — DP 648. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P221298) — 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.