Position in chronology
PSE 1, 1
About this tablet
An accounting tablet from the great estate archive of Girsu (in the city-state of Lagash, southern Iraq), written around 2370 BCE in the second year of the ruler Lugalanda. It records the harvest from a specific field — the ruler's own subsistence plot in the contested border territory called the Gu-edina — totaling hundreds of gur of barley and white emmer. Two named officials handle the grain: En-iggal, the estate overseer who appears constantly in this archive, supervises the threshing, and the foreman Inim-du formally transfers it. Tablets like this let us reconstruct, harvest by harvest, how one of the world's earliest bureaucratic institutions actually ran.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Harvest report: 676 standard gur of barley and just under 197 gur (plus 1 barig, 3 ban, and 10 sila) of white emmer wheat — grain belonging to the lord's estate — came in from the small field in the Gu-edina district, the plot set aside to support the governor himself. En-iggal, the overseer, oversaw the threshing, and Inim-du, the foreman, signed the grain over. Filed in the second year of Lugalanda, ruler of Lagash.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine676 gur-saggal of barley, 197 gur 1 barig 3 ban 10 (sila) of white emmer, — barley of the nig-ena (the lord's estate produce) — (from) the small field, the field of the Gu-edina, the subsistence plot of the ruler. En-iggal, the overseer, threshed it (lit. 'beat it with the flail'). Inim-du, the foreman, transferred it to him. Lugalanda(-nuhunga), ruler of Lagash. Year 2.
Our translation engine — Fable 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
1(gesz'u@c) 1(gesz2@c) 1(u@c) 6(asz@c) sze gur saggal 3(gesz2@c) 2(u@c) la2 3(asz@c) 1(barig@c) 3(ban2@c) 1(u@c) ziz2 babbar2 sze nig2-en-na GAN2 tur GAN2 gu2-edin-na-ka szuku ensi2-ka en-ig-gal nu-banda3 gesz be2-ra inim-du11 ugula e-na-bala lugal-an-da-nu-hun-ga2 ensi2 lagasz 2(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — PSE 1, 1. 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 (P247621) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-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.