Position in chronology
HSS 03, 47
About this tablet
This is a small pillow-shaped administrative tablet from the temple estate of the goddess Baba at Girsu (ancient Lagash), dating to the reign of Uruinimgina (also read Irikagina), the last king of the pre-Sargonic Lagash dynasty. It records nanny-goats — some fattened, some from the open steppe — passing through the hands of named officials: Ur-Baba the goat-fattener and En-iggal the overseer, whose activities were tied to the estate of queen Sasa, Uruinimgina's wife, who managed the Baba temple household. Tablets like this belong to the famous 'e2-mi2' (later e2-Ba-ba6) archive, among the richest surviving records of a Sumerian institutional economy from around 2350 BCE.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet logs a small livestock account: ten fattened nanny-goats and two nanny-goats from the open steppe, plus some goats that were driven or led in. Ur-Baba is named as the goat-fattener responsible for them. The overseer En-iggal made the formal announcement of the transaction at the orchard storehouse. The goats are recorded as produce belonging to the estate of the goddess Baba. The account is filed under Sasa, wife of King Uruinimgina of Lagash, and closes with a numeral notation (rendered here as '7') whose exact accounting meaning is unclear.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine10 fattened nanny-goats, 2 steppe (open-country) nanny-goats, nanny-goats led/driven, (under) Ur-Baba, is the fattener. En-iggal, the overseer — (at) the storehouse of the orchard/garden it was proclaimed (called out). Nanny-goats, produce, of (the estate/goddess) Baba. Sasa, wife of Uru-KA-gina (Uruinimgina), king of Lagash. 7 (numeral notation ASZxDISZ).
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
1(u@c) ud5 kuruszda 2(asz@c) ud5 edin-na ud5 dun-a ur-ba-ba6 kuruszda-kam en-ig-gal nu-banda3# ganun kiri6#-ka gu3# be2#-ra ud5 u2-rum ba-ba6 sa6-sa6# dam URU-KA-gi-na lugal lagasz-ka 7(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — HSS 03, 47. 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 (P221356) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-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.