Position in chronology
HSS 03, 44
About this tablet
A small administrative receipt from the temple economy of Girsu in southern Iraq, around 2400 BCE. The fishermen attached to the household of the goddess Baba have turned in a modest catch — seven split, preserved fish and the hide of a wild boar taken in the reed marshes — and a foreman named E-ur has brought the delivery in, with the year noted. Thousands of such dockets survive from Girsu, and together they reconstruct the day-to-day workings of one of history's earliest documented institutional economies.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Delivery slip: seven dried split fish and one hide from a marsh boar, handed in by the fishermen who work for the goddess Baba's estate. Their supervisor, E-ur, brought the goods in with them. Filed in year 6. The back of the tablet was left blank — the whole transaction fit on the front.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineObverse, col. i 1. 7 split (dried) fish, 2. 1 hide of a pig of the canebrake (wild boar), 3. (from) the fishermen of Baba — 4. (their) delivery. Obverse, col. ii 5. E-ur, 6. the overseer, 7. brought (it) in with them. 6th (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
7(asz@c) ku6 dar-ra 1(asz@c) kusz szah2 gesz-gi-ka szu-ku6 ba-ba6-ke4-ne mu-DU e2-ur2 ugula e-da-kux(DU) 6(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — HSS 03, 44. 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 (P221353) — 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.