Position in chronology
RIAA 041
About this tablet
An Early Dynastic land-survey record from Girsu, the administrative heart of the Sumerian state of Lagash, roughly 2500–2350 BCE. It tallies large tracts of arable land — 50 bur, on the order of 300 hectares — belonging to the 'en' (the lord/ruler) and attached to the estate of the god Šul-šagana, a son of Girsu's city-god Ningirsu. Texts like this show how temple households in Presargonic Lagash functioned as the great landholders and accounting centers of the earliest states.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
A land ledger: 35 bur of land (about 220 hectares) counted as the ruler's property in the field called Huburum, plus another 15 bur of field carved out of the ŠA-zi land. The bottom line: 50 bur in total, the ruler's holdings within the estate of the god Šul-šagana. The record closes with the name of an official — Ur-something, the rest of the name broken away — a damaged line, and a final note mentioning Lagash and what appears to be a year number, 'year 2'. The tablet's reverse is mostly blank apart from this closing summary.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine35 bur of land: property of the en (lord), (in) the field Huburum; 15 bur of field, taken out from the ŠA-zi (land); Total: 50 bur — property of the en, of (the god) Šul-šagana. Ur-[...] ... [...] [...] Lagash. 2(nd year?).
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
3(bur'u@c) 5(bur3@c) nig2 en-na GAN2 hu-bu7-rum2 1(bur'u@c) 5(bur3@c) GAN2 sza3-zi-ta e3#-a szu-nigin2 5(bur'u@c) nig2 en-na szul-sza3-ga-na-ka ur-[x (x)] x [...] [...] lagasz# 2(|ASZxDISZ@t|)!
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — RIAA 041. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Musées royaux d’Art et d’Histoire, Brussels, Belgium (P222276) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-fable-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.