Position in chronology
MLVS 002
About this tablet
This small clay tablet from Girsu (ancient Tello) is a household administrative record from around 2400 BCE, part of the archive of Baranamtara, wife of Lugalanda, ruler of the city-state of Lagash. It tallies animal hides — from sheep, lambs, and young goats — handed over to a harbor/tax official by a livestock fattener during the month of the festival of the goddess Baba. Texts like this one belong to one of the best-documented administrative archives from the ancient world, showing how a royal household tracked raw materials such as leather down to the individual hide.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a receipt: four sheep hides, six lamb hides, three hides of an unspecified animal, roughly seven more hides of something now illegible, and about twenty hides of young goats (the details here are damaged) were handed over to the harbor official, delivered by the livestock fattener. The transaction took place in the month of the Baba festival and was recorded as 'returned into his hand' — official language for a completed handover. It was recorded under the authority of Baranamtara, wife of Lugalanda, ruler of Lagash, and dated to year 2 (of his reign).
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine4 hides, male sheep; 6 hides, male lambs; 3 hides, [......]; 7(?) [...... hides ......]; 20(?) [...... hides,] kid(s), [......]; the harbor official (en-ku3), by the fattener (kuruszda) — month: festival of Baba — returned into (his) hand. (Transaction of) Baranamtara, wife of Lugalanda, ruler of Lagash. Year 2.
Our translation engine — Sonnet 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
4(asz@c) kusz udu-nita 6(asz@c) kusz sila4 nita 3(asz@c) kusz [x x] 7(asz@c)#? [x kusz x x] 2(u@c)#? [x kusz] masz sig? en-ku3 kuruszda-e iti [ezem] [ba-ba6]-ka [szu-a bi2]-gi4 bara2-nam-tar-ra dam lugal-an-da ensi2 lagasz-ka 2(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — MLVS 002. 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 (P247599) — 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.