Position in chronology
Nik 1, 129
About this tablet
This small round tablet is a 'basket-of-tablets' label — a docket that was attached to (or summarized the contents of) a storage basket holding a group of barley-ration records from the household of Sasa, wife of Uru-KA-gina (Urukagina), the last king of the city-state of Lagash in southern Iraq, around 2350 BCE. Sasa ran a substantial economic household in her own right, with scribes tracking grain issued to workers tied to specific cultivated and marsh fields. The round, bun-like shape (visible in the photo, with radial columns of signs) is typical of these container labels rather than flat administrative tablets, and the closing numeral likely records how many individual tablets the basket contained.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a filing tag for a basket of records. It reads: 'Container of tablets — barley rations tied to this year's grown crop, from fields measured out by the plow-line, in the year the marsh field was plowed. Recorded under Sasa, wife of King Uru-KA-gina of Lagash.' The basket held four tablets.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineBasket of tablets: Barley rations of the grown (crop) — (fields) measured by drawing out the plow-line, year: "the marsh field was plowed." It is inscribed. Sasa, wife of Uru-KA-gina (Urukagina), king of Lagash. 4.
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 szuku sze mu2-a apin-la2 gid2-da mu asza5 ambar uru4-a sar-ru-am6 sa6-sa6 dam URU-KA-gi-na lugal lagasz-ka 4(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — Nik 1, 129. 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 (P221898) — 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.