Position in chronology
RTC 043
About this tablet
A small receipt from the temple household of Lagash at Girsu, roughly 2350 BCE. The wife of the chief administrator of the god Nindara has sent a single scrawny goat as a ceremonial gift (masdaria) to Baranamtara, the queen — wife of the ruler Lugalanda — during Nanše's malt-eating festival, and the palace fattener Enku takes the animal into his care. Records like this come from the celebrated Baba-temple archive, one of the earliest bodies of documents anywhere that lets us watch a royal woman running her own estate and receiving gifts in her own name.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Received: one undersized goat, presented as a festival gift by the wife of the chief administrator of the Nindara temple. It was handed over to Queen Baranamtara during the month of Nanše's malt-eating festival. Enku, the livestock fattener, collected the animal. Filed in year 2.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 stunted goat, as a masdaria-offering of the wife of the temple-administrator (sanga) of the god Nindara — to Baranamtara, in the month of the festival of malt-eating of (the goddess) Nanše, she delivered it. Enku, the animal-fattener, carried it off. (Year) 2.
Our translation engine — Opus 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
1(asz@c) masz lugud2-da masz-da-re-a dam sanga nin-dar-ka bara2-nam-tar-ra iti ezem munu4 gu7 nansze-ka mu-na-kux(DU) en-ku3 kuruszda-e ba-de6 2(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — RTC 043. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P221440) — 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.