Position in chronology
Erm 14333
About this tablet
This is a small round administrative tablet from Girsu (Tello), one of the great cities of ancient Sumer, dating to the Early Dynastic IIIb period (roughly 2400 BCE). It records a large delivery of barley — nearly 400 gur, a substantial institutional quantity — drawn from a specific field that formed part of the ruler's (ensi2's) prebend land, handled through the overseer Inimanizi and the well-known manager En-iggal, an official who appears repeatedly in the archive of the Lagash temple household under the rulers Lugalanda and Urukagina. Tablets like this are the everyday bookkeeping of a temple-and-palace economy: grain moving from farmland into central storage, tracked by named officials so that accountability was never in doubt.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
A shipment of barley — 392 gur, 2 barig, and 2 ban2 (measured by the standard "gur-saggal" bushel) — was recorded as grain belonging to the nig2-en-na fund. It came from the small field known as Girgir('s), land that was set aside as the ruling governor's own prebend allotment. Inimanizi, acting as overseer, personally handed over and delivered this grain. The transaction was processed under En-iggal, the manager, at the institution's exchange/market house. A final notation, possibly a date or short note reading 'Isi, (unit) 6,' closes out the record — though this last line is hard to read with certainty.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine392 gur 2 barig 2 ban2 barley, by the gur-saggal measure — barley of the nig2-en-na (fund/category), (from) the field of Girgir-tur (the "small" field of Girgir), the szuku-prebend land of the ensi2 (ruler) — Inimanizi, the overseer, delivered (it) by hand (šu...gi4). En-iggal, the nu-banda3 (manager/inspector), at/of the e2-ganba (the "market/exchange-rate house"). Isi(?), day/month 6.
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
6(gesz2@c)? 3(u@c) 2(asz@c)#? 2(barig@c) 2(ban2@c)? sze# gur saggal sze nig2-en-na GAN2 GIR2@g-GIR2@g tur szuku# ensi2#-ka inim-ma-ni-zi ugula szu-a bi2-gi4 en-ig-gal nu-banda3 e2-ganba-ka-ka i3#?-si#? 6(|ASZxDISZ@t|)?
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — Erm 14333. 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 (P225741) — 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.