Position in chronology
Nik 1, 291
About this tablet
This small pillow-shaped clay tablet is a routine harvest/produce account from the Presargonic (Early Dynastic IIIb) administration at Girsu, part of the great archive kept for the ruling household of Lagash. It tallies bundles of tied branches and brushwood — probably firewood or kindling gathered from two named garden plots — under the authority of En-iggal, a well-known overseer (nu-banda3) who appears repeatedly in this archive managing the estate's agricultural output. Tablets like this one, some of the oldest systematic bookkeeping in human history, show how a Sumerian city-state tracked the smallest units of orchard and garden produce centuries before writing was used for anything but accounts.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This record logs garden produce: seventy bundles of tied branches, twenty large bundles of brushwood, and fifty-seven small bundles of brushwood, all from the garden by the gatehouse. A further forty-seven bundles of tied branches came from the garden called 'the Ascent.' The overseer En-iggal is named as responsible for the accounting, and the entry is marked as the second in a series of tallies.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine70 tied bundles of fronds (pa-sa), 20 large bundles of brushwood (u2-bil), 57 (60 less 3) small bundles of brushwood — of the garden of the gate-house (e2-ku4); 47 (50 less 3) tied bundles of fronds (pa-sa) — of the garden of e-ta-e11 ("the Ascent"); En-iggal, the overseer (nu-banda3). Tally: 2nd.
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(gesz2@c) 1(u@c) pa sa la2-a 2(u@c) u2-bil3 gal-gal 1(gesz2@c) la2 3(asz@c) u2-bil2 tur-tur kiri6 e2-ku4-ka-kam 5(u@c) la2 3(asz@c) pa sa la2-a kiri6 e-ta-e11-ka-kam en-ig-gal nu-banda3 mu-szid 2(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — Nik 1, 291. 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 (P222060) — 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.