Position in chronology
RTC 041
About this tablet
A small clay livestock docket from Girsu (modern Tello) in southern Iraq, written roughly 2400 BCE. It records a flock of fourteen sheep — seven ewes, three females of a second category, and four rams — identified as the personal property of a woman named Nin-tur, and notes that they were handed over by Lugal-nigani, a shepherd who worked as drover under a man called Ka'a. Tablets like this are the routine bookkeeping of the great households of Lagash, where even a private herd of a dozen-odd animals was tracked by name and by the herdsman responsible for it. Its interest lies in the glimpse it gives of individual property-holding — including by women — inside a temple-run economy.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Livestock account: seven ewes, three females of the second class, and four rams — fourteen head in all, belonging privately to Nin-tur. The animals were released by Lugal-nigani, a shepherd serving as drover under Ka'a. A final notation of two units closes the entry; its exact sense is unclear.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine7 ewes, 3 female nim(?)-animals, 4 rams — sheep, the private property of Nin-tur. Lugal-nigani, the shepherd, the drover of Ka'a, took (them) out: 2 (units/head marked).
Our translation engine — Opus 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
7(asz@c) u8 3(asz@c) munus nim? 4(asz@c) udu-nita udu u2-rum nin-tur-kam lugal-nig2-ga2-ni sipa gab2-ra ka5-a-ke4 ba-ra 2(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — RTC 041. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P221438) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-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.