Position in chronology
Nik 1, 082
About this tablet
This is a barley account tablet from Girsu, part of the vast Early Dynastic administrative archive of the Lagash state (mid-3rd millennium BCE). It records a substantial quantity of barley — measured in the large 'gur-saggal' capacity unit — harvested from a designated field and processed through the state 'market-house' (e₂-ganba), under the responsibility of an overseer and a manager named Šubur. Tablets like this are the routine bookkeeping of a temple or palace economy that tracked grain from field to storehouse with remarkable precision.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The account records 391 gur and 3 barig of barley (in the standard gur-saggal measure), harvested from the small, good-quality field. The next lines are broken and illegible. What survives afterward notes that an overseer was involved, and that the grain was 'returned' or delivered by hand — processed under Šubur, the manager, at the market-house. The tablet breaks off before any further detail is preserved.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine6(geš₂) 30 1(aš) 3(barig) barley, gur-saggal (measure) — barley of the fine [small] field. [...] (break) overseer. Returned/delivered by hand: Šubur, the manager (nu-banda₃), (at/in) the market-house (e₂-ganba). [......]
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
6(gesz2@c) 3(u@c) 1(asz@c) 3(barig@c) sze gur saggal sze GAN2 sa6-ga [tur-ra-kam] [...] ugula szu-a bi2-gi4 szubur nu-banda3 e2-ganba-ka-[ka] [i3-si n]
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — Nik 1, 082. 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 (P221851) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.