Position in chronology
HSS 03, 04
About this tablet
This is a grain-ration account from the household of the goddess Baba at Girsu (ancient Tello), one of the great temple estates administered under the ruler Uru-KA-gina of Lagash in the mid-third millennium BCE. It tallies barley disbursed to different classes of dependents — porters, blind workers, female laborers and their children — along with monthly bread allotments, before totaling everything and recording that it was issued from Baba's granary by order of the king in his fifth (regnal) year. Tablets like this survive by the hundreds from the Baba archive and are our best evidence for how a major Sumerian temple household fed and organized its dependent workforce.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This record tallies out barley from the Baba temple's storehouse at Girsu: 40 gur 3 ban2 went out as rations for porters and blind workers, tracked across several separate tablets; another 34 gur 2 barig (plus a damaged amount) fed female laborers and their children; roughly 43 gur less 2 ban2 covered the monthly bread allowance; and 15 gur more covered a further portion. Adding it all up comes to 132 gur 2 barig 1 ban2 of barley — rations and bread for the people attached to the Baba household. The tablet closes by naming the authority behind the disbursement: Uru-KA-gina, king of Lagash, released this grain from Baba's granary and had it given out to the workers, dated to year 5.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine40 gur (and) 3 ban2 barley, gur-saggal (measure) — barley rations of the porters (and) the blind, (recorded) on various tablets. 34 gur 2 barig ... barley rations of the female workers (and) children. [10] 30 3 gur less 2 ban2 barley (for) bread, regular offering, monthly. 15 gur barley, its bar-bi-gal2 (portion). Total: 132 gur 2 barig 1 ban2(?) barley, gur-saggal (measure) — barley rations, barley for bread, of the people of (the household of) Baba. Uru-KA-gina, king of Lagash, from the granary of Baba he gave to them; (year) 5.
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
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-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.