Position in chronology
DP 263
About this tablet
This is a small clay administrative docket from the Presargonic (Early Dynastic IIIb) archive of Girsu, part of the large corpus of household records kept for Sasa, wife of King Urukagina of Lagash (reigned c. 2350 BCE) — one of the best-documented palace/temple economies in early Mesopotamia. It tracks four wool-bearing sheep placed in the care of a named shepherd, En-DU, and dates the transaction by a festival month recalling the goddess Baba being carried into her newly built house. Thousands of tablets like this one, from the so-called é-mí ('women's household') archive, let historians reconstruct in astonishing detail how flocks, wool, and rations were managed by the queen's administration at Girsu.
Plain-language summary by the engine — meant as a doorway into the literal translation below.
Written in modern English
Four wool sheep are recorded this month — the month named for the ceremony when the goddess Baba was carried into her newly built house. The shepherd En-DU, who tends the wool sheep, took charge of (or handed over) the animals. They belong to Sasa, wife of King Urukagina of Lagash, and are assigned to the queen's household; the sheep were then placed back into the shepherd's keeping. One entry recorded in total.
A modern paraphrase of the literal translation — same content, contemporary voice.
Translation — our engine
Our engine4 wool sheep. Month: "Baba is brought into her new house." En-DU, shepherd of the wool sheep, therewith deposited (them). (For) Sasa, wife of Urukagina, king of Lagash — for the women's household (é-mí), into his hand it was returned. 1 (total).
Our translation engine — Sonnet 5. Reads the photo, translates the cuneiform, and writes a plain-language interpretation. See methodology for limits.
Spotted an error? Suggest a correction — confirmed corrections feed the engine's knowledge base.
Transliteration
4(asz@c) udu siki iti ba-ba6 e2 gibil-na lah5-a en-DU sipa udu siki-ka-da na ba-da-ri sa6-sa6 dam URU-KA-gi-na lugal lagasz-ka-ra e2-munus-a szu-na i3-ni-gi4 1(|ASZxDISZ@t|)
Scholarly note
Catalogue entry from CDLI (ED IIIb (ca. 2500-2340 BC)) — DP 263. No scholarly translation has been published; the transliteration is from the ATF (CDLI's Atf-Friendly format).
Attribution
Image: Louvre Museum, Paris, France (P220913) — Photo via Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. source
Translation excerpted from engine:claude-sonnet-5 (2026-07-12/v7-evolved).
Related tablets
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.