Position in chronology
URU-KA-gina 33add (FAOS 05/1, Ukg 33)
Translation — scholar edition
ETCSRI(1) Guards of the city wall: shepherds and cowherds. 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 and assigns city-wall guards a pastoral role — a concrete fragment of the administrative vocabulary behind his celebrated reform edicts.
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 Q001149.
Attribution
Image: Erm 14321 (State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russian Federation) — from Girsu (mod. Tello) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P222635). 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/Q001149/.
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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The earliest historical document in human history.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.