Position in chronology
DP 259
About this tablet
This small clay tablet from Girsu, ancient capital of the city-state of Lagash in southern Iraq, is a brief administrative memo about wool-bearing sheep entrusted to two shepherds, Nigar-mud and Lugal-da, recorded in a festival month sacred to the goddess Nanshe. Its closing line names Urukagina, the reform-minded ruler of Lagash around 2350 BCE, who 'returned' the animals to the palace — a formula closely associated with his famous reforms reclaiming property, animals, and labor that local officials had improperly diverted from the palace and temple estates. Tablets like this one are the everyday bureaucratic residue of that larger political story: not a proclamation, but a single accounting entry recording that the palace's rights over these sheep were reasserted.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
This is a short bookkeeping note. Two shepherds, Nigar-mud and Lugal-da, are each credited with one wool sheep, and the record identifies them as the men responsible for the wool flocks. It's dated to the month when Lagash celebrated a malt-eating festival for the goddess Nanshe. Then comes a formal note — the matter was formally settled or registered — before the tablet states that Urukagina, ruler of Lagash, had the sheep returned to the palace. The tablet ends with a total count of one entry.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine1 wool sheep: Nigar-mud. 1 wool sheep: Lugal-da. They are the shepherds of the wool sheep. Month: 'Festival of malt-eating' of (the goddess) Nanše. Concerning this matter, it was set/imposed (upon them). Urukagina, ruler (ensi2) of Lagash, returned (them) to the palace. Total: 1.
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Transliteration
1(asz@c) udu siki nigar-mud 1(asz@c) udu siki lugal-da sipa udu siki-ka-me iti ezem munu4 gu7 nansze-ka na ba-neda-ri URU-KA-gi-na ensi2 lagasz-ke4 e2-gal-la szu-a bi2-gi4 1(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — DP 259. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P220909) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-05-28/v6-glossary-aware).
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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.