Position in chronology
RIME 3/1.01.07.042, ex. add16
About this tablet
This is a short royal dedicatory inscription of Gudea, ruler (ensi) of the city-state of Lagash in southern Mesopotamia, around 2100 BCE. It commemorates his construction of the Eninnu, the great temple of the warrior-god Ningirsu, whose emblem was the mythical lion-headed eagle Anzu. Gudea is famous for a large corpus of building inscriptions on statues, cylinders, bricks, and door sockets recording his temple-building program, and this example follows the standard formula used across many surviving copies (hence 'ex. add16', i.e. one exemplar among several duplicates of the same royal text).
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Gudea, ruler of Lagash, dedicates this inscription to the god Ningirsu — Enlil's mighty champion and his own divine lord. Gudea declares that he built the Eninnu, Ningirsu's temple named for the great White Anzu-bird, in the god's honor.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engineFor Ningirsu, the mighty warrior of Enlil, his master: Gudea, ruler of Lagash, built for him his Eninnu, (the temple) of the White Anzu-bird.
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
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Transliteration
nin-gir2-su ur#-sag kal-ga en-lil2-la2 lugal#-a-ni gu3#-de2-a ensi2# lagasz#-ke4 e2#-ninnu anzu2-babbar2-ra-ni mu#-na-du3
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (Lagash II (ca. 2200-2100 BC)) — RIME 3/1.01.07.042, ex. add16. This record has no stored scholarly English translation; the existence of published translations has not been checked; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Pounder 001 (private: Pounder, Colin, Derbyshire, UK) — from uncertain (mod. uncertain) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (cdli.earth/artifacts, P481011). source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
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