Position in chronology
Nik 1, 098
About this tablet
This is a small Early Dynastic administrative tablet from Girsu (ancient Tello), part of the large corpus of economic records from the temple/palace household known from the Nik 1 (Nikolski) collection. It records two installments of barley — 74 gur and roughly 251 gur — handed over as part of a 'bala' rotation or exchange, under the responsibility of the overseer Inim-du, sourced from a field called 'Good, Small,' and passed through the manager Šubur. Texts like this are the bookkeeping backbone of the Lagash state economy around 2400 BCE, tracking grain moving between officials and institutional fields.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
The record logs two shipments of barley measured in the standard 'saggal' gur-unit: a first delivery of 74 gur, and a second of about 251 gur minus 2 ban2 — both described as installments of a 'bala' rotation or exchange. The overseer Inim-du is named as responsible, the grain came from a field called 'Good, Small,' and the transaction passed through Šubur, the manager, who is recorded as having handed over one (unit/entry) to him. It reads like a routine grain-accounting entry from a temple or estate office keeping track of barley moving through its rotation system.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1(gešʼu) 1(u) 4(aš) [i.e. 74] gur saggal barley: it is the first bala(-installment). 4(geš2) 1(u) 1(aš) la2 2(ban2) [i.e. 251 gur minus 2 ban2] — it is the second bala(-installment). Inim-du, the overseer, from the field 'Good, Small' (GAN2 sa6-ga tur), (via) Šubur, the manager (nu-banda3), transferred to him: 1.
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
1(gesz2@c) 1(u@c) 4(asz@c) sze gur saggal 1(disz@t) bala-a-am6 4(gesz2@c) 1(u@c) 1(asz@c) la2 2(ban2@c) 2(disz@t)-kam-ma bala-a-am6 inim-du11 ugula GAN2 sa6-ga tur-ta szubur nu-banda3 mu-na-bala 1(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — Nik 1, 098. 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 (P221867) — 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.