Position in chronology
RTC 065
About this tablet
A grain-accounting note from Girsu (modern Tello) in southern Iraq, written around 2350 BCE for the household administration of the rulers of Lagash. It records two lots of threshed barley — a little over one gur from one field, a smaller amount from another — issued by En-iggal, the overseer who managed the estate's stores and appears in hundreds of tablets from this archive. The barley is booked out of the "courtyard storehouse" during the ninth month of the Lagash calendar, in the third regnal year of the ruler. These little round tablets are the day-to-day bookkeeping behind one of the best-documented economies of the third millennium.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Barley receipt: 1 gur 2 barig 4 ban (large standard measure) of sledge-threshed grain from the Dur-re-gar-ra field, plus 1 barig 2 ban of sledge-threshed grain from the U-du-ku field. En-iggal, the overseer, released the grain from the courtyard storehouse and handed it over during the month called "Sheep-for-barley of Ningirsu." Year 3.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 gur 2 barig 4 ban₂ of barley (by the gur-saggal measure), barley threshed with the sledge, of the field Dur-re-gar-ra; 1 barig 2 ban₂ of barley threshed with the sledge — it is of the field U-du-ku. En-iggal, the overseer, in the month "Sheep-for-barley of Ningirsu," from the courtyard storehouse delivered it to him. 3rd (year).
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) 2(barig@c) 4(ban2@c) sze gur saggal sze gesz ur3 GAN2 dur9-re2 gar-ra 1(barig@c) 2(ban2@c) sze gesz ur3 GAN2 u3-du10-ku4-kam en-ig-gal nu-banda3 iti udu-sze3 sze a nin-gir2-su-ka-ka e2 ki-sal4-la-ta e-na-ta-gar 3(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — RTC 065. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P221462) — 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.