Position in chronology
HSS 03, 45
About this tablet
A small delivery receipt from the city of Girsu in southern Iraq, around 2400–2350 BCE, from the archive of the E-munus — the 'Women's House,' the economic household run by the queen of the city-state of Lagash. En-iggal, the household's well-known chief overseer, issues a dozen sheepskins to a leatherworker named Amar-Ašnan, presumably as raw material for his craft. Hundreds of such tablets survive from this archive, and together they let us reconstruct, month by month, how a Sumerian institutional household managed its herds, hides, and craftsmen.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Issued from the Women's House: ten sheepskins with the wool plucked off, plus two more skins earmarked for a particular piece of work (the term is obscure to us). They went to Amar-Ašnan, the leatherworker. En-iggal, the overseer, handed them over in the month of the 'canal accounting.' Filed in year 1 of the reign.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1. 10 sheepskins with the fleece plucked (bar sar-ra), 2. 2 skins for ...-ing the UL-LAK470 (purpose obscure), 3. to Amar-Ašnan, 4. the leatherworker, 5. En-iggal, 6. the overseer, 7. in the month 'accounting(?) of the canal' (iti niĝ-ka-i-ka), 8. from the E-munus ('Women's House'), 9. gave to him. (Year) 1.
Our translation engine — Fable 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Spotted an error? Suggest a correction — confirmed corrections feed the engine's knowledge base.
Transliteration
1(u@c) kusz udu bar sar-ra kusz# 2(disz@t) UL LAK470-ri-de3 amar-asznan aszgab-ra# en-ig-gal nu-banda3 iti nig2-ka-i7-ka-ka e2-munus-ta e-na-szum2 1(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — HSS 03, 45. 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 (P221354) — 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.