Position in chronology
HSS 03, 04
About this tablet
A payroll summary from the city of Girsu in southern Iraq, around 2350 BCE, drawn up under Urukagina, king of Lagash — the ruler famous for the earliest known social reforms. It totals up monthly barley rations for the workforce of the temple of the goddess Baba: porters, blind laborers (a recognized class of dependent workers), women and their children, plus barley for baking bread. The final lines record that the king himself authorized the distribution from Baba's storehouse, and number this as the fifth such payout — the accounting backbone of one of history's first welfare-style institutions.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a grain ledger. It lists roughly 40 gur of barley as rations for the porters and the blind workers itemized on file; about 34 gur for the women workers and their children; 43 gur (less a small deduction) as the regular monthly allowance of barley for bread; and 15 gur of barley carrying its supplement. The grand total comes to 132 gur, 2 barig, and 1 ban of barley in the large standard measure. All of it, the record states, is the ration barley and bread barley of the personnel of the goddess Baba, and Urukagina, king of Lagash, distributed it to them out of Baba's storehouse. This was the fifth such distribution.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse 1. 40 gur 3 ban of barley (in) the gur-saggal measure: 2. barley rations of the porters (and) the blind workers, the various ones (registered) on the tablet; 3. 34 (gur) 2 barig ...: barley rations of the female workers (and their) children; 4. [4]3 (gur) less 2 ban: barley for bread, the regular monthly provisions; 5. 15 (gur): barley with its supplement (bar-bi-gal₂). 6. Total: 132 (gur) 2 barig 1 ban(?) of barley (in) the gur-saggal measure. 7. It is the barley for rations (and) barley for bread of the people of Baba. 8. Urukagina, 9. king 10. of Lagash, 11. from the storehouse of Baba 12. distributed it to them. 5th (distribution / year).
Our translation engine — Fable 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
4(u@c) 3(ban2@c) sze gur saggal sze-ba il2 igi-nu-du8 sza3-dub didli 3(u@c) 4(asz@c) 2(barig@c) x sze-ba geme2# dumu [1(u@c)] 3(u@c) 3(asz@c) la2 2(ban2@c) sze ninda sa2-du11 iti-da 1(u@c) 5(asz@c) sze bar-bi-gal2 szu-nigin2 2(gesz2@c) 1(u@c) 2(asz@c) 2(barig@c) 1(ban2@c)? sze gur saggal sze-ba# sze# ninda lu2# ba-ba6-ke4-ne-kam URU-KA-gi-na lugal lagasz-ke4 ganun ba-ba6-ta e-ne-ba 5(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — HSS 03, 04. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA (P221313) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-5 (2026-09-20/v8-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.