Position in chronology
Nik 1, 258
About this tablet
This is a small Early Dynastic administrative tablet from Girsu (modern Tello), part of the vast archive of economic records kept by the temple/palace institutions of that city. It logs the disbursement of a single jar of pig fat, naming the person Nin-asu, the recipient or overseeing official Ur-igi-ama, and dating the transaction to a specific month in the Lagash calendar. Texts like this one — one of thousands from the Girsu archives now held in museums worldwide, including the Hermitage — are the bureaucratic backbone that let historians reconstruct the daily economic life, personnel, and institutional structure of a Sumerian city-state around 2400 BCE.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
A record of one jar of pig fat, tracked under the name Nin-asu, issued during the month called "Oxen-are-led-forth." It went to Ur-igi-ama, the overseer, delivered to (or poured out at) the household of the man in charge of land-surveying. The total is confirmed as one jar.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 jar of pig fat (lard) — Nin-asu. Month: "Oxen-are-led-forth" (iti gu4-ra2-bi2-mu2-a). To Ur-igi-ama, the overseer (nu-banda3), in the house of the man of the surveying-rope (e2 lu2 esz2-gid2-ka-ka) — poured. 1 (jar).
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(asz@c) dug i3 szah2 nin-a-su iti gu4-ra2-bi2-mu2-a ur-igi-ama-sze3 nu-banda3 e2 lu2 esz2-gid2-ka-ka i3-de2 1(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — Nik 1, 258. 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 (P222027) — 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.