Position in chronology
Erm 14330
About this tablet
A palace account from Girsu in southern Iraq, about 2350 BCE, from the household of Baranamtara — the queen, wife of the ruler Lugalanda of Lagash. It records a single young goat taken to the shrine of the goddess Liʾsina, where the queen herself performed the offering; her cupbearer Enlu carried the animal, and the meat was eaten on the spot. The animal came from the stock of Enku, the palace livestock-fattener, and the note is filed under the fifth year of the reign. Tablets like this one, from one of the best-documented archives of the third millennium, let us follow a Sumerian queen's religious expenditures almost animal by animal.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
One kid, delivered to the sanctuary of the goddess Liʾsina. Queen Baranamtara presented it as the offering; her cupbearer Enlu brought the animal along with her, and it was eaten there. The goat was drawn from the holdings of Enku, the man in charge of fattening livestock. Filed in year 5.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 kid (goat). To the place of Liʾsina, Baranamtara made the offering. Enlu, the cupbearer, brought it with her. Consumed. It is (from) Enku, the fattener. (Year) 5.
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(asz@c) masz ki li9-si4-na-sze3 bara2-nam-tar-ra gesz be2-tag en-lu2 sagi e-da-de6 gu7-a en-ku3 kuruszda-kam 5(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — Erm 14330. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russian Federation (P225738) — 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.