Position in chronology
MVN 03, 016
About this tablet
This is a small, badly broken administrative tablet from Girsu (ancient Lagash), part of the large pre-Sargonic Lagash palace and temple archive from the late Early Dynastic period. It names En-iggal, a well-known chief administrator (nu-banda3) who managed grain and ration disbursements for the ruling family of Lagash, and Geme-Baba, a woman recipient typical of the female-staffed households recorded in these archives. The tablet records a disbursement — apparently of grain or a similar commodity — issued from a storehouse located at the edge of the city, possibly to or via the settlement of Guabba, one of the towns belonging to the Lagash state.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The surviving text is a fragment of an accounting record. It mentions a commodity or shipment connected with the town of Guabba, credited to the account of a woman named Geme-Baba. Several lines here are too damaged to read. Then the record names En-iggal, the overseer, who issued 3 units of goods from a storehouse located at the edge of the city and gave them to an unnamed recipient. The beginning and middle of the tablet are lost, so the full transaction — what exactly was given and to whom — cannot be fully reconstructed.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[...]-ke4 (subject/commodity, broken — ergative marker) [Gu]abba (place name, partly broken) for/under the account of Geme-Baba — [...] NU DISZ (signs broken, function unclear) [...] ...-ra (broken) En-iggal, the overseer (nu-banda3), from the storehouse at the edge of the city, gave to him/her: 3 (units).
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
[...]-ke4 [gu2]-ab#-ba igi# geme2-ba#-ba6-ka-sze3 [...] NU DISZ [...] x-ra en#-ig#-gal nu-banda3 e2 za3 iri-ka-ta e-na-szum2 3(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — MVN 03, 016. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Free Library of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA (P222198) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
Related tablets
Related sources
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.