Position in chronology
Nik 1, 139
About this tablet
This is a small clay administrative tablet from Girsu (ancient Tello) in southern Iraq, dating to the Early Dynastic IIIb period (roughly 2400 BCE), part of a large archive of institutional accounts kept by the temple household of the goddess Baba. It records a quantity of onions or garlic — over five large gur-measures — harvested from a named field and passed from one official, the manager Enigal, to another, the foreman U2-U2. Tablets like this were everyday bookkeeping: tracking exactly who grew, who dug up, and who received produce owed to (or by) the temple estate, and the final numeral likely ties the entry to a batch or tally of similar records.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Five and a bit large-measure units of good onions or garlic were dug up from the field belonging to Abu'uka. The manager Enigal oversaw the harvesting, and the foreman U2-U2 took delivery of the produce on his behalf. This is entry number four (in a series of such records).
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine5 (gur) 1 barig pure onions/garlic, the large gur-measure (gur-saggal), from the delivery-place, the field of Abu'uka, Enigal, the manager, had it dug out (harvested); U2-U2, the foreman, delivered it to him. 4.
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
5(asz@c) 1(barig@c) szum2 sikil* gur saggal ki szum2-ma GAN2 ab-u2-ka-ta en-ig-gal nu-banda3 mu-ba-al U2-U2 ugula e-na-ag2 4(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — Nik 1, 139. 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 (P221908) — 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.