Position in chronology
RTC 057
About this tablet
A grain account from Girsu, the administrative capital of the city-state of Lagaš, written a few decades before Sargon of Akkad. It records two large stocks of cereal — 168 gur of barley and 98 gur of white emmer, 266 gur in all, well over thirty tonnes — booked as the personal property of En-entar-zi, the ruler of Lagaš (c. 2370s BCE), with the temple administrator Lugal-pirig-tur named as the official responsible for the threshing. Tablets like this are the working paperwork of one of the best-documented estate economies of the third millennium, and they show how sharply the ruler's own holdings were distinguished from those of the temples he governed.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Barley: 168 gur, standard (gur-saggal) measure. White emmer: 98 gur. Total: 266 gur, standard measure. This grain belongs to En-entar-zi, ruler of Lagaš. Lugal-pirig-tur, the temple administrator, was in charge of the threshing. Year 3.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine168 gur (measured by) the gur-saggal standard of barley, 98 (gur) of white emmer: total: 266 gur (by) the gur-saggal standard. Barley, the property of En-entar-zi, ruler (ensi) of Lagaš. Lugal-pirig-tur, the temple administrator (sanga), had (it) threshed. (Year) 3.
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
2(gesz2@c) 5(u@c) la2 2(asz@c) sze gur saggal 1(gesz2@c) 4(u@c) la2 2(asz@c) ziz2 babbar2 szu-nigin2 4(gesz2@c) 2(u@c) 6(asz@c) gur saggal sze u2-rum en-en3-tar-zi ensi2 lagasz-ka lugal-pirig-tur sanga gesz be2-ra 3(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — RTC 057. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P221454) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-opus-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.