Position in chronology
Nik 1, 081
About this tablet
This is a small cushion-shaped administrative tablet from Girsu (ancient Tello), part of the vast Early Dynastic archive of barley accounts kept by the temple and palace administration of the city-state of Lagash. It records a very large quantity of barley — over 616 gur, plus smaller measures — moving through the hands of two officials, an overseer named Inimdu and a manager named Šubur attached to the city's market-house, with the grain identified as coming from a particular field known as the 'Small Good Field.' Texts like this one, part of the Nikolski (Nik 1) collection now in the Hermitage Museum, are the bookkeeping backbone of one of the world's earliest bureaucracies, tracking who received, returned, or was responsible for institutional grain stores around 2400 BCE.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This tablet is a grain account: 616 gur, 1 barig, and 2 ban2 of barley — measured by the standard 'head' gur — is recorded as returned or delivered into the hands of the relevant official. Inimdu, an overseer, is named as one party to the transaction, and Šubur, the manager of the market-house, as the other. A notation reading 'filled: 1' likely marks the completion or tally of the entry. The barley itself is identified as coming from a specific plot called the 'Small Good Field,' closing out the record.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine616 gur 1 barig 2 ban2 barley, by the head/standard gur — Inimdu, the overseer: returned into hand (i.e., repaid/delivered). Šubur, the manager, of the market-house (e2-ganba). Filled/complete: 1. It is barley of the Small Good Field.
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
1(gesz'u@c) 1(u@c) 6(asz@c) 1(barig@c) 2(ban2@c) sze gur saggal inim-du11 ugula szu-a bi2-gi4 szubur nu-banda3 e2-ganba-ka-ka i3-si 1(|ASZxDISZ@t|) sze GAN2 sa6-ga tur-ra-kam
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — Nik 1, 081. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russian Federation (P221850) — 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.