Position in chronology
URU-KA-gina 25add (FAOS 05/1, Ukg 25)
Translation — scholar edition
ETCSRI(1) Guards of the city wall: Zagmu, the captain. Iri-kagina, king of Lagaš.
Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Royal Inscriptions — scholar edition (Vienna).
Why it matters
Names Iri-kagina (Urukagina) as king of Lagaš alongside a named wall-guard captain, attesting the military-administrative personnel of the city during the reign famous for history's earliest recorded social reforms.
Scholarly note
Sumerian royal inscription, published in the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Royal Inscriptions (ETCSRI) by Gábor Zólyomi and collaborators. Translation reproduced from the ETCSRI edition. ORACC text Q001141.
Attribution
Image: CBL CT 001 (Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, Ireland) — from Girsu (mod. Tello) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P222627). source
Translation excerpted from Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Royal Inscriptions (ETCSRI), University of Vienna, edited by Gábor Zólyomi et al. https://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/etcsri/Q001141/.
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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.
Marks the boundary between proto-writing and writing. We can see signs being used systematically — but not yet phonetically. The leap to recording speech itself comes a few centuries later.
The earliest historical document in human history. Before this, we have lists, accounts, and dedications. Here, for the first time, a ruler tells us what happened — with names, places, and consequences.