Position in chronology
Nik 1, 276
About this tablet
This is a small Early Dynastic account tablet from Girsu (ancient Lagash) recording a delivery of fish. Fishermen (szu-ku6) — a recognized professional class attached to temple households in this period — brought several categories of fish as a 'first-fruits' offering (ne-sag), a term used across the Girsu archive for the earliest or choicest portion of a harvest or catch given up to an institution. Tablets like this one belong to a large corpus of similar ED IIIa/b administrative notations (the 'DP' and 'Nik' text groups) that tracked the daily obligations of fishermen, herders, and farmers to the temple economy of the goddess Baba and related institutions at Girsu.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
A short receipt records fish handed over as a first-catch offering. There were some bundles of agargara-fish (an elder or particular variety), nine za3-ubi fish, two za3-gesztu fish, two za3-gir fish, and ten adartun-fish of mixed kinds. The whole lot is logged as a 'first-fruits' offering, and the entry notes that the fishermen themselves were the ones who brought it in.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine[x] gi (bundle-units) of agargara-fish, ab-ba(-type); 9 (lit. 10 minus 1) za3-ubi fish; 2 za3-gesztu fish; 2 za3-gir fish; 10 adartun-fish, its assorted (kinds). First-fruits offering (ne-sag). The fishermen (szu-ku6) brought (it) (mu-de6).
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
[x] gi agargara ab-ba 1(u@c) la2 1(asz@c) za3 ubi 2(asz@c) za3 gesztu 2(asz@c) za3 gir 1(u@c) a-dar-tun2 didli-bi ne-sag szu-ku6 mu-de6
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — Nik 1, 276. 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 (P222045) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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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.