Position in chronology
MLVS 012
About this tablet
This is a clay label (pisan-dub, 'basket-of-tablets tag') that was once tied or attached to a wicker basket holding a group of administrative tablets in an archive at Girsu, ancient Lagash, around 2400 BCE. It identifies the contents as records of barley — dues from fields and transfers into storage — belonging to the household of Bara-namtara, the wife of Lugalanda, ruler (ensi) of Lagash. Bara-namtara ran an extensive economic household of her own, and dozens of such basket-labels and the tablets they once tagged survive, giving historians one of the richest windows into a queen's administration anywhere in the ancient world. The tablet's pillow-like shape and multi-sided inscription, visible in the photo, is itself typical of these archival tags rather than of ordinary transaction records.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a tag from a filing basket: 'Basket of tablets — records of barley dues from the fields and of grain moved into the storehouse. [The basket] is on hand, [belonging to Bara-namtara], wife of Lugalanda, governor of Lagash — [so many tablets in it].' In other words, someone in Bara-namtara's household office wrote this label to mark a basket of grain-account tablets so it could be found again in the archive room. The final line, giving the tablet count, is broken away.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineBasket of tablets: Barley of the nig₂-en-na (obligatory/lordly dues), of the field, (concerning) the transfer(s); (concerning) transfer(s) to the storehouse (ganuna) — [it is on hand / in her custody]. [Bara-namtara], wife of Lugal-anda, ensi₂ (governor) [of Lagash — n (tablets)].
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
pisan-dub sze nig2-en-na asza5-ga bala-a ganun-na bala-a [e-da-gal2] [bara2-nam-tar-ra] dam lugal-an-da ensi2 [lagasz-ka n(|ASZxDISZ@t|)]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — MLVS 012. 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 (P247609) — 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.