Position in chronology
LB 0003
About this tablet
This is a wool-accounting tablet from the palace administration of Lagash, drawn up in the third year of the ensi (ruler) Lugalanda, a well-documented Presargonic ruler of the mid-24th century BCE. It records several batches of wool by grade and quantity — large-grade, second-grade, a named individual's allotment, and a sheep-fleece type called bar-dul5 — totaling over a thousand units, all passing through the hands of a palace steward named Šulme. Tablets like this come from the famous Girsu/Lagash administrative archive that gives us our best window into how a Sumerian city-state managed textile production, one of its most important economic sectors.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet is a wool inventory from the Lagash palace. It lists 60 units of one grade of wool, 283 units of a large/premium grade, 590 units of a second-quality grade, and 84 units credited to a man named Ur-[...]-HA-NI-a. A damaged line records a further quantity measured in sila (a liquid/dry capacity unit) with a subtotal that is now lost. One more unit of fleece-wool of the 'bar-dul5' type is noted, and the whole account is then totaled at 1,025 units of bar-udu (fleece) wool. The steward Šulme processed this wool through the palace — the tablet reads as though it were weighed out or issued under his supervision. A short broken passage follows, and the text closes with its date: the third year of Lugalanda, ruler of Lagash.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1(geš2) HU-wool [i.e. 60 units of HU-grade wool]; 283 wool-rations, large (grade); 590 (= 600 minus 10) wool-rations, second (us2) grade; 84 wool (belonging to) Ur-[x]-HA-NI-a; 1 [...] [6? ...] sila3, total [...]; 1 (unit of) bar-udu, wool of bar-dul5-type. Grand total: 1,025 (units) bar-udu wool. (Under authority of) Šulme, the steward (agrig), in the palace, was weighed out (disbursed). [...] (Year:) Lugalanda, ensi2 (ruler) of Lagash, year 3.
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(gesz2@c) siki-HU 4(gesz2@c) 4(u@c) 3(asz@c) siki-ba gal-gal 1(gesz'u@c) la2 1(u@c) siki-ba us2 1(gesz2@c) 2(u@c) 4(asz@c) siki ur-[x]-HA-NI-a 1(asz@c) [6(disz@t) x x] sila3 PAP [x x] 1(asz@c) bar-udu siki bar-dul5 szu-nigin2 1(gesz'u@c) 7(gesz2@c) 5(asz@c) siki bar-udu szul-me agrig-e e2-gal-la mu-la2# [...] lugal-an-da ensi2 lagasz 3(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — LB 0003. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: de Liagre Böhl Collection, Netherlands Institute for the Near East, Leiden, Holland (P247600) — 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.