Position in chronology
Nik 1, 239
About this tablet
This is a small clay tablet from the palace archive of Girsu (Tello), recording deliveries of goat hides — the leather by-product of animals slaughtered or culled from the herds. Two herdsmen, Ur-Baba and Lugal-inimgina, hand over a specified count of hides of large male goats and of young 'chest' goats, tallied by month and entered as returned or received. The final lines identify the account as belonging to Bara-namtara, the well-documented wife of Lugalanda, ruler (ensi2) of Lagash around 2400 BCE — one of the best-attested queens of the ancient world, whose household archive of thousands of such tablets tracks the day-to-day economy of the temple and palace.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This record logs a batch of goat hides turned in to the palace stores. Ur-Baba delivered 27 hides from large male goats. Lugal-inimgina, the goatherd, delivered 4 more hides from large male goats and 6 hides from young 'chest' goats. The transaction was closed out and the goods entered as received in the month of the Festival of Baba. The hides came from pasture-raised goats, and the whole account was kept under the authority of Bara-namtara, wife of Lugalanda, ruler of Lagash, in her second year of record-keeping.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine30 (minus) 3 [= 27] hides of large male goats: Ur-Baba. 4 hides of large male goats, 6 hides of "chest" (young/breast) goats: Lugal-inimgina, herdsman of the goats. Month: "Festival of Baba." Returned into hand (i.e., delivered/received back). Hides of grass-fed (pastured) goats — (account of) Bara-namtara, wife of Lugalanda, ruler of Lagash. Year 2.
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
3(u@c) la2 3(asz@c) kusz masz gal-gal ur-ba-ba6 4(asz@c) kusz masz gal-gal 6(asz@c) kusz masz gaba lugal-inim-gi-na sipa masz-me* iti ezem-ba-ba6-ka szu-a bi2-gi4 kusz masz u2-rum bara2-nam-tar-ra dam lugal-an-da ensi2 lagasz-ka 2(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — Nik 1, 239. 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 (P222008) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
Related tablets
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.